The island of Roti is small, there are no big cities on it - only villages, villages and small towns. In former times, there lived an old widow woman and her granddaughter in the same village. Their house was small, with one room. Behind the house there was a small vegetable garden where beans, sweet potatoes and other vegetables grew. But this was not enough for two, and the old woman went to the seashore every day to fish. She will leave home and leave her granddaughter to cook rice and prepare seasonings. In the evening the old woman returned home with the fish, fried it, and they sat down to eat. So they lived day after day.
One day, an old woman, getting ready to go to the sea, said to her granddaughter:
- If you cook today, take only one grain of rice - that’s enough for us.
The girl was very surprised by her grandmother’s order: “What’s the use of cooking one grain of rice! Can you feed two with one grain of rice?”
And she took several handfuls of rice to cook. She lit a fire, took out a pot, set the rice to cook and began to wait. An hour later I decided to see if the food was ready. But as soon as she lifted the lid from the pot, porridge fell over the edge. The porridge kept flowing and flowing, and the little girl got confused.
- Oh-oh, what is this? How can I stop the mess? - she exclaimed and rushed around the room, not knowing what to do.
Meanwhile, the hot porridge continued to flow from the pot. First it filled the hearth, then it spread out and finally flooded the entire house and garden. The girl burst into tears out of fear that her grandmother would be angry with her, but still rushed to look for her.
Not far from the sea, she met her grandmother returning home. Sobbing, the little girl told her grandmother everything that had happened, without hiding anything. The grandmother became very angry, grabbed a stick and began to hit her granddaughter on the head, so hard that the girl began to cry loudly and loudly. And suddenly the old woman saw with amazement that the girl had disappeared and a monkey had appeared in her place. She jumped up the tree and, jumping from branch to branch, shouted to the old woman:
- Now you no longer have a granddaughter, grandmother, you are left alone! Who will help you now? Who will cook the rice, who will boil the water for coffee?
And the monkey disappeared.
The old woman grieved and repented for a long time. Why did you beat your granddaughter? Now there is no one to talk to and no one to take care of her.
Since then, the inhabitants of the island of Roti have been trying not to hit children on the head: they are afraid that what happened in this fairy tale will happen.
Translated from Russian · original on wisdomlib.ru