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The donkey's tale

The familiar fable about Two Men and a Donkey has always bothered me. It's the story is which a man, his son and their donkey are en route from somewhere to somewhere. They pass through four villages and in each one, they are laughed at. In the first, because neither of the men is riding the donkey. In the second because the older man rides. In the third because the son rides. In the fourth because father and son both sit on the poor donkey. Finally, the pair ties the donkey up and carries the beast between them. Now the whole countryside laughs at them. They cross a bridge, the donkey struggles and all three fall into the water. The moral of the story is, don't try to please everyone, because it gets you nowhere.

Most fables are admirably self-contained. Like mathematical equations, they have just enough information to get their point across concisely. But this story leaves me with more questions than it answers. For instance, we never know who these two 'men' are or what their purpose is. Are they en route to the market to sell the donkey? Does the donkey belong to them at all? Are they on pilgrimage? And why are they called 'men' in the title when they are referred to as a boy and his elderly father in the course of the story? Are they strangers in the area? Is there some reason why they are singled out for derision? And why are they so sensitive to ridicule? Why do they respond to the ridicule only after passing out of each village? Why not while they are still in the village? Why don't the villagers notice that the two 'men' are doing their best to respond to their criticism? Why is there no sympathy between the observers and the observed so that they can arrive at an acceptable compromise? And so on.

The message, too, is highly ambiguous. It is not at all clear, for instance, who the heroes of the story are. The father and son are so meek and spineless that we can't be expected either to emulate them or to sympathise with them. The villagers, on the other hand, appear to be uncouth idlers who have nothing better to do than to taunt passing travellers. Worst of all, the story does not suggest what the best course of action for the father-son duo is. After all, if they didn't care about what people said, their story would not be written at all. But if the point of the story is that there are some people who can't get it right, whatever they do, then their fate is not of consequence any way.

A fable exists because it has some sort of message to impart. The Fox and the Stork discover that interspecies communication is difficult without the right type of crockery. The Boy Who Cried Wolf was a worthless brat -- who deserved to be eaten. The Three Little Pigs learnt a powerful lesson in alternative building materials. The Emperor's New Clothes was about the downside of the fashion industry. But Two Men and a Donkey? I don't know.

My theory is that there is something missing from the story. It's an anecdote which was on its way to becoming a fable, but before it completed its journey an over-eager young fable-writer leapt up, published it and now -- we're stuck with it, unfinished corners and all. If, for instance, we knew that the donkey was sick and dying, we would sympathise with the father-son's reasons for being unwilling to ride on it. In this scenario, they would refuse to react to the taunts of cruel, unthinking villagers until they finally reached the fourth village, their home, with the donkey safe and healthy. End of story. The moral would be that caring for a sick donkey is more important than listening to idle advice.

If, on the other hand, we can establish that the father-son are actually a pair of dim-witted mercenaries who are using the donkey to transport contraband, then we can understand why the two of them are so anxious to pass quickly through the villages, doing their best to cause as little comment as possible. Unfortunately they fail miserably. In each area they pass through, the villagers are wary of strangers and notice the odd behaviour of the itinerants. The result is that the father-son are exposed when they finally cross the bridge. Their guilty behaviour lets them down, so the moral is of the cheaters-never-prosper variety.

Another reason I don't like the story is that it implies that strangers and travellers are acceptable targets of unkind attentions. We see this rather often on Delhi's streets. Tourists, especially young women, are sometimes subjected to a type of relentless taunting against which they can do nothing to retain their dignity and because of which they sometimes lose much more than their donkey. Maybe an early episode of eve-teasing became disguised as a fable? It would be interesting to know.