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Stories told by Śrīla Prabhupāda
<< 11 The cat in the basket >>
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| And now, here is the story called “The cat in the basket”. When it was time for a daughter’s marriage, one woman made many elaborate arrangements for a smooth wedding ceremony. However, in the middle of the proceedings a cat ran into the middle of the whole assembly. Now we should explain that in India, unlike the West, animals like cats and dogs are considered to be very filthy and inauspicious. People do not keep cats and dogs in their house, the cats and dogs stay outside and they just eat whatever scraps are thrown to them. The main reason for cats and dogs is that the dogs will bark if someone’s coming and the cat will chase away the mice and rats, but otherwise Indian people don’t make friends with these animals, they rather make friends with cows. Actually in many Indian houses the cow is the family pet, they keep the cow in the backyard and they come and pet the cow and talk to the cow, but not to cats and dogs.
| | So at this lady’s marriage ceremony, this arrangement she made for her daughter, everything was set and the ceremony was being performed and suddenly a cat came into the middle of everything – this is considered very inauspicious. The mother was afraid that people would notice this cat and start to comment that: “Oh, the whole proceedings have been polluted”. What she did was she looked around and she saw one basket that has been used for flowers, weaker baskets. She took that and put it over the cat, kept the cat under the basket. Some years later that bride was grown up and she had her own family and then her daughter came to an age and a marriage had to be arranged for her. This mother, she did everything like she had seen her mother do and after everything was arranged and a marriage was just about to begin, she was looking and she was thinking: “But there is something missing, there is one more thing my mother did – oh, yes, I know what it is.” So she found a cat and she put it under the basket.
| | The moral is that due to a poor fund of knowledge, people accept certain theories and practices as truth, but they never stop to question why those theories and practices exist. The story criticizes the tendency to follow blindly.
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