One villager had a lamb. He wanted to bathe in a pond, so he tied the lamb to a tree. He had a long bath and he was very, very pleased. But when he came out of the pond, he saw that his lamb was missing. While he was bathing, he had seen those three bad fellows roaming around. He had thought that since his lamb was tied to a tree, nothing would happen. But in fact, those three had untied the lamb and taken it home. Then they cooked it and ate it.
The owner suspected those three bad people because he had seen them while he was in the water. He went to the hooligans’ place and confronted them. They told him, “We had nothing to do with your lamb.”
Naturally the owner could not find the lamb, because they had cooked it and eaten it. So the owner went to the village zamindar and made a serious complaint that these three hooligans had taken his lamb.
The zamindar asked, “Where is the proof?”
The hooligans said, “There is no proof. If we had taken the lamb, then it would have been at our place. But it is not there.”
The villager was so miserable that he had lost his lamb. The zamindar said, “This man was telling me that the lamb was near a pond, and it was tied to a tree.”
One of the hooligans said, “Can you imagine? We did not go near that pond! We did not even see a pond. Where was the pond? We did not go near a tree either.”
The zamindar pretended that he was convinced that the three hooligans had not gone near the pond. The other two hooligans were very happy that the first one had been able to convince the zamindar. Then the zamindar said, “Near the pond there was a tree. Did you see that tree?”
The second hooligan said, “We did not see a pond. We were never near a tree. How can this fellow say such things? There was no tree, there was no pond, and we definitely did not see his lamb.”
Both the first and second hooligans seemed to have convinced the zamindar. Then the zamindar asked the man who had lost his lamb, “Now tell me how many days ago this happened.”
The man said, “It happened three days ago.”
The zamindar said, “Today is Tuesday. That means it was on Saturday. At what time do you think it all happened?”
The man said, “It was in the evening. I was going to the pond to take a bath. It was Saturday evening.”
The zamindar said to the third hooligan, “Tell me, what were you doing on Saturday evening?”
The hooligan said, “Saturday evening? In our village there is no Saturday, so how could we do anything on that day?”
In this way the zamindar caught the three hooligans. He said, “If there is no Saturday, then you should have one!”
Then he asked his people to thrash the three hooligans and put them into jail. But first the zamindar fined the hooligans fifty rupees so that the poor villager who had lost his lamb could buy another one.From:Sri Chinmoy,Life’s bleeding tears and flying smiles, part 3, Agni Press, 2001
Sourced from https://srichinmoylibrary.com/lts_3