The Thief's Son

At the holy well of Gaya, three hands rise to claim one son: the man who begot him, the man who raised him, and the thief who willed him into being. Whose son is he?

A dying thief, with no son to continue him, uses his wealth to arrange a child: he marries a girl, pays a brahman to father a son on her, and the boy is left at a childless king's gate and raised as a prince. Years later, at Gaya, three hands rise to receive the son's funeral offering, the thief's, the brahman's, and the king's. Whose son is he truly? You judge first, then the king does.

The Burning Ground

The corpse had slipped back to the tree, as it always did. The king brought it down once more, shouldered it, and set off across the ash. The Vetala settled behind his ear and told a tale of three fathers and one son.

The Three Fathers

In a city ruled by a childless king named Suryaprabha, a widow named Hiranyavati fled one night with her daughter Dhanavati, and in the dark she stumbled against a thief who hung dying, impaled upon a stake, but still just alive.

The dying thief spoke to her. He had gold, he said, buried away, and no son, and a man without a son cannot perform the rites the dead depend on, so the doors of the ancestral heavens would stay shut against him. So he made her an offer. Marry your daughter to me now, and whatever son she bears by my arrangement, whoever begets him, shall be counted my son, raised up to continue me. And he gave her a thousand gold pieces.

They agreed. The marriage rite was done there in the dark, with water poured over the dying thief's hand. And by his instruction, and with his gold, a young brahman named Manahsvamin was paid to father a child upon Dhanavati. In time she bore a son, marked with every auspicious sign.

Then, bidden by a divine voice in a dream, the mother and grandmother laid the infant, with a thousand gold pieces beside him, at the gate of the childless King Suryaprabha. And the king, himself commanded in a dream, took the boy in, and raised him as his own, and named him Candraprabha; and in time the boy became king.

Many years later, after his royal foster-father had died, King Candraprabha went on pilgrimage, and at the holy city of Gaya he performed the shraddha, the offering of the sacred rice-ball to his father. But as he reached to set the offering down, three hands rose up out of the sacred well to receive it. One hand gripped an iron spike, the thief's. One held a strainer, the brahman's. And one bore a ring and the marks of royalty, the king's. Three men claimed to be his father. Into whose hand should he place the offering?