Episode Details

The book's first part closes with its longest tale — and its sharpest. Ta Thaen is a novice who drinks in secret, and when his money runs out he invents a grander living: he will tour the country as a wonder-working forest ascetic, with three drinking companions as his pious students. At the village of Kok he prophesies a thunderbolt that will destroy the village in seven days — unless the village pays for a rite, and shuts itself out of the ceremony hall on pain of madness. Inside the hall the four feast unseen. But a buffalo-herd boy of fourteen, Chao San, hears the drunken quarrelling, and peeks through the palm-leaf wall — and when he tells the truth, the whole village agrees that the boy himself must be the mad one.

From the Gatiloke by Suttantaprija Ind (1859–1924), Cambodia's treasury of Khmer folk tales, first published in parts in Phnom Penh in 1914–1921 — public domain, and told here in a fresh in-house English rendering made from the Khmer text, in the book's own order. With this tale the book's first part ends, complete, exactly as the book ends it. One question-chapter near the collection's opening is held back under house rule — its matter is murder itself, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the collection's written register, in its place.

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