Celebrated Festival Burnt Houses
All the fools sat down again with their heads folded. As many mouths as there were words. Some said something, some said nothing. Finally, a very wise man spoke. “Listen!” Silence fell all around. Everyone seemed anxious to hear him.
The wise man cleared his throat and said, “He should be poisoned. There should be no bamboo or flute.” Chants of “Wah-wa” began to rise from all sides. Meanwhile, a man from the crowd stood up. Traces of fear and anxiety were still visible on his face. After taking a long, cold breath, he said, “You are all really foolish. Perhaps you have forgotten that this animal eats fat buffalo. It does not eat poison. How can a person who has blood on his mouth eat poison?” The next moment, a deathly silence fell over the entire crowd and the air began to blow on the faces of the people. The women began to cry. Then the children began to cry. In short, the entire village of Sari was again busy crying as before. Finally, another wise man stood up and said, “When women cry, the children also start crying. We do not see the children crying and we are forced to cry too. Therefore, the women should be sent home so that we can think of a scheme in silence.” The people were so afraid of the cat that one of them said, “How can we send the children and women home alone? If this terrible beast starts eating them instead of the fat buffalo, what harm will it do to it? Oh, how unfortunate was that hour when the traveler came here and we bought this animal. Even rats were a thousand times better than this unfortunate creature.”
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Finally, it was decided that the children and women should not be allowed to go anywhere until some reasonable plan to kill the cat was thought of. Everyone liked this idea and started thinking about it. Finally, a plan came to their mind, on which everyone agreed and they started dancing happily. The plan was to immediately set fire to the house in which the cat was at that time, so they set fire to that house without wasting a moment. When the flames started spreading and the cat felt threatened, it jumped out of the window with confidence and went to another house. When they saw the cat coming out of the flames safely, they started trembling with fear. And they immediately set fire to the second house as well. When the cat jumped into the third house from there, their anxiety and anger increased even more and they burned the third house to the ground.
So this process of setting fire to the houses continued until the entire village was burnt to ashes. Finally, the people saw that the cat was running away on the same path that its owner had taken in the morning. They were very happy to see this.
In this joy, they celebrated a festival and kept throwing the ashes of the burnt houses on each other for a long time.
