The Locust and How the King Dealt With It

 PART ONE

In the merry land of borrowers and lenders, you might catch a glimpse of a very pomp-looking king through binoculars aimed at the highest of the royal palace. The king, quite a personality as King Henry VIII in the later parts of his life, wasn’t, though, a bad person. In fact, he delighted himself by throwing gold at poor pleasers, and also at the rich (so to say), and called it charity. Considering his wealth a grand explanation of his divine self, King Lochor the 5^th was, at the least, quite proud of himself and his bird.

The bird, a limited-edition cockatoo bought from a ‘distant foreigner’, gave itself quite the freedom to act like its master. Nothing but a look could serve salvation to the measly subjects. In fact, to see the bird, observantly named Flaire, was considered to be a great honor among the normals. Of course, when you consider the gain the foreigner had made when he’d sold the bird to the king, you yourself would pledge an open testimony to the idea.

Those days, everything was seen through a scale measuring wealth.

And times never change.

One day, the king decided to follow a method of consolidation, that is, bringing all the land-holdings as one unit, under the government, in this case, a one-man-ruled-government, to obtain an optimum production of crops.

The initiative was welcomed as a serendipity bringing forth great prosperity, as remarked by the king himself. However, when you ask people how they disposed of their confidence, they’ll only say that they were delusional. And, of course, delusion is common.

So common that even the king of merry land once had been a victim of it.

The king followed the procedures with religious efforts – snatching away all land-holdings from peasants, sometimes even giving them a priced railway ticket to jail, or other times, breaching the right to information, which, fortunately, didn’t exist at that time.

Simultaneously, a locust decided to explore distant lands. Coincidentally, she entered a field crop, a paddy field, to be sure of it. She was ecstatic! Felt that if she informed the map to paradise to her queen, she would gain more respect than the grain she would should she wish otherwise.

Thus, the madam set off to her homeland, and the king was unaware of who the imposter that day was.

Following these set of events, a plague of locusts decided that humans didn’t deserve mercy. The consolidation was constructed with bouts of over-confidence, thus, no protection from insects could be guaranteed.

The locusts on the other hand, were glad of this. Of course, the she-locust who’d informed the crew of this masterland, was highly acclaimed, for about three seconds, before the entire clan thrust itself on the mightily grown paddy crops that year.

With great difficulty, the king managed to say, “Send the army” and the army, with much more difficulty, re-positioned their dignity a little below its current level, picked up some brooms and walked, rather, ran through their way to the infected paddy field, heads down.

Now, paddy is something served on a first-come-first basis. Considering the eventuality that those bloody locusts were more punctual, God decided to rip the papers of who grew the crop, and let the new imperials reap the benefits of their new found treat.

Flaire, on the other claw, was undisturbed. It didn’t eat rice, after all!

- Krisha Shastri

Part Two in progress...