A special series of NEZINE’s podcast- Voices of Northeast India- showcasing multi-lingual and multi-cultural identifies of the region through podcasting of folk tales and folk song of the communities in in the way they speak, converse, or sing.

In this second episode, Monisha Kalita tells an Assamese folk tale – Dighal Thengia. This tale has been taken from "Burhi Aair Sadhu"- a collection of Assamee folktales, collected by Sahityarathi Lakshminath Bezbaroa and published in 1911.

The tale has been translated into English from Assamese by Madan Sarma and Gautam Kumar Borah, both of them Professor in the Department of English and Foreign Languages, Tezpur University.

Episode Hosted by Abhilash Bapanasha, an alumnus of the Department of Mass Communication and Journalism, Tezpur University, is a Cultural Documentation enthusiast and loves to share stories through the microphone

Music by Priyanuj Parashar, a postgraduate student of Chemistry, is an aspiring flutist and he likes to experiment with new flavours while continuously learning for the better

Monisha Kalita is a television journalist based in Guwahati

Dighal Thengia, the Long-legged one

Once upon a time there was an old woman. She eked out a living by selling the milk from the cows she kept. Her bed-room was quite old. The roof over it used to leak because the thatch it was made of had worn out.

It was a cloudy evening. The old woman took her meal and then arranged to go to bed. “Oh, Lord, protect me from Dighal Thengia”, she prayed and got into bed.

One thief was hiding that night near the cowshed with his secret plan to lift one of the cows of the old woman. He anxiously waited for her to fall asleep. With intent to eat a cow a tiger too came there in secret, groping in the darkness. He hid amid the cows under the shed and waited eagerly for the old woman to go off. Both the tiger and the thief heard what the old woman had uttered, but unable to make out what she was saying, they began to wonder, “Dighal thengia, the long-legged one? What on earth is it?

As the old woman was falling asleep the thief entered the cowshed to lift a cow. He thought, “It’s so dark in here, how do I know which is healthy, which is not? Well, the one that will jump up when I touch its rump must be the healthiest and the best.” With this conclusion he began to stroke the rumps of the cows until his hand fell upon the rump of the tiger. The tiger jumped up. This is indeed very smart - I cannot afford to lose it, thought the thief and twisted his tail to drive it home. The tiger jumped up once again, thinking it must be what the old woman called “Dighal Thengia, the long-legged thing.”

"This is not an ordinary cow; I don’t think I can manage it without being on its back, thought the thief and jumped onto the back of the tiger." Convinced that he was now in full grip of Dighal Thengia, the tiger lost no time to leave the cowshed and began to frantically run.

On the other hand, the thief had concluded from the strange behaviour of the tiger –“It cannot be a cow; it’s rather a Dighal Thengia. Dighal Thengia seems to have got the better of me.” Thus, they mistook each other for Dighal Thengia and were terrified.

As the frantically running tiger with the thief on its back was about to enter the forest, the thief had made a desperate attempt to twist the neck of the tiger. ....

Full text of the tale in English in Transcript of this podcast