Harisvamin's Misfortunes
A grieving brahman dies of poison that reached his food by pure accident. A kite, a dead snake, a kind couple: who is the murderer? The answer is no one.
Harisvamin loses his wife to a sky-faring sorcerer and wanders in grief. Starving, he is given a bowl of rice by a charitable brahman's wife. As he sits to eat beneath a tree, venom drips unseen from a dead snake carried by a passing kite, and he dies. The Betaal asks who is guilty of his death, and the king answers that not one of them is. You judge first, then the king does.
The Burning Ground
The corpse went back to the tree, and the king climbed and brought it down again. He tied it fast, lifted it to his shoulder, and stepped back into the ash. The Vetala settled itself and began.
Harisvamin's Long Sorrow
In Varanasi there lived a wealthy brahman named Harisvamin, the son of Devasvamin, and he had a wife of such rare beauty that people said the maker of the world must have shaped her only after long practice on the nymphs of heaven. Her name was Lavanyavati.
One night, a sky-faring sorcerer, a Vidyadhara prince named Madanavega, was passing overhead and saw her sleeping. Seized by her beauty, he swooped down, gathered her up still asleep, and carried her away through the air. Harisvamin woke to an empty bed and searched everywhere and found nothing. Broken by the loss, he gave away all his wealth and set out on pilgrimage, wandering from one holy place to the next, half in the hope of finding some trace of her, half because a grief that great cannot sit still.
One day, worn thin by the sun and by hunger and by sorrow, he came to a village where a good brahman named Padmanabha was performing a sacrifice. Padmanabha's wife saw the starving traveller at their door and her heart went out to him. She filled a bowl with rice boiled in milk, sweetened with sugar and ghee, and gave it to him, and told him to go and eat in the cool by the lake.
Harisvamin carried the bowl to the shade of a banyan tree and set it down, grateful at last, and made ready to eat. He did not see what happened above him. A kite came flying with a black snake clutched dead in its claws, and settled on a branch of that same tree to eat its catch. And from the mouth of the dead snake a little venom dripped, and fell, unseen, into the bowl of rice. Harisvamin ate, and the poison took him, and he died there beneath the tree, saying only that when fate turns against a man, the whole world turns along with it.