The Curse of the Sand Grains

 

Long, long ago, in a small village by a river, there lived a girl named Malati. The tale of her beauty had spread far and wide, passed from mouth to mouth across distant lands. When she walked to the riverbank to fetch water, even the breeze seemed to pause and watch her. The moonlight itself dimmed beside her face. People would whisper, “Surely no mortal womb bore her. She must be the shadow of some goddess.”

In time, word of her beauty reached the heavens.

One evening, as the last golden light drained from the sky, a god descended to the riverbank and stood before her. One look at Malati, and his heart trembled. In all his thousands of years in paradise, he had never seen anything like her. With folded hands and a shaking voice, he said, “I am a god of the heavens. Since the moment I saw you, nothing else has held any joy for me. Will you marry me, Malati?”

Malati was silent for a long while. Fear stirred inside her. The god was immortal, and she was only human. The beauty she had today would not last until tomorrow. And a love born of beauty, could it survive when the beauty was gone? Still, she looked into his eyes, and she saw a longing that seemed true.

She raised her finger and pointed toward the riverbank, where an enormous dune of sand glittered in the fading sun.

“Do you see that dune over there? However many grains of sand it holds, my life must last that many years. If you truly love me, can you grant that?”

The god, blind with love, did not stop to think. In that moment, Malati’s smiling face was the whole world to him. He laughed and said, “Is that all? Go. Every grain of sand in that dune will be a year of your life. This is my vow.”

A god’s word is never false.

They were married. For a while, their life together was full of happiness, laughter, and long conversations. They walked hand in hand along the river at dawn. They sat side by side in the glow of a lamp at dusk. Malati thought this joy would never end.

But one day, a summons came from the heavens. The god had to return. As he prepared to leave, Malati’s eyes filled with tears. She clung to his hand and asked, “You’ll come back, won’t you?”

He rested his palm on her forehead. “I will.”

Malati comforted herself with a thought: My life has no end. Whether we meet soon or late, I have all the time in the world to wait.

She did not know that this endless time would one day become her cruelest punishment.

Days passed, then months, then years. The god never returned.

The face that once put the moon to shame began to etch itself with lines. Her dark, flowing hair turned silver. Youth slipped away, middle age came and went, and then old age arrived. The skin on her hands hung loose, and her fingers withered into thin sticks. Her back bent, and her legs could barely carry her weight. Of the beauty that had drawn a god down from heaven, nothing remained.

Then one day she noticed that the world before her eyes was growing blurry. First the faces of people faded, then the color of the river, then the light of the sky. At last, everything went dark.

Yet death did not come.

The count of the sand grains was not yet finished. How many hundreds of thousands of grains lay in that dune? Who could say?

One by one, everyone she knew was gone. The parents who had cradled her, the friends who had filled their water jars beside her, the people she had laughed with, played with, and quarreled with, none of them were left. The village changed. Their children, and their children’s children, returned to the earth. The new generations looked at the bent, blind old woman and felt afraid. They hurried past her. No one knew that this was once the most beautiful girl in the village.

She waited for the god. But to the gods, a whole human lifetime is no more than the blink of an eye. Perhaps he had simply forgotten. And if he ever did return, would he even recognize this frail, ruined old woman? Would she have recognized herself?

Every night became an endless agony. Her body was breaking down, her bones ached, and still her life would not leave her. Lying alone in the dark, she thought: The wish I once made has become my greatest curse. Why had she not understood? A long life is not just a number of years. Life means companionship, laughter, health, and the people we love. Without those things, a long life is only a long emptiness.

She would raise her trembling hands to the sky and weep. “God, please set me free. I cannot bear this anymore. Let me die.”

But there was no one to hear her cry. Only the river wind would pause for a moment, then move on.

To this day, people say that if you walk to the dune by the river in the dead of night, you can hear the muffled weeping of an old woman. It sounds like someone who has been praying the same prayer for countless ages: a little peace, and the mercy of an ending.

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Moral: What we ask for in greed or infatuation is not always a blessing. Beauty, youth, even life itself are not meant to last forever, and it is that fleeting quality that gives them their worth. What is limited is what is precious. And a wish made without wisdom can one day become the noose around our own neck.