The Blind Man and the Lame Man

Khmer Tales · @khmer.tales

Long ago a blind man and a lame man worked as servants for hard masters who never spared them, though one could not see and the other could not walk. The two were friends, and one day they agreed: "We can't bear this any longer. Let's run away."

One night they took a boat from the pier. Neither had ever rowed, so they sat at opposite ends, facing each other, and paddled with all their might. All night long the boat spun in circles. At cockcrow they told each other they must be nearly free; at dawn the lame man said, "This looks just like our own pier." It was. Their masters laughed and simply called them back up to the house.

The next time they went by land. The blind man carried the lame man on his shoulders, and the lame man showed the way. After a few days they reached a village where people warned them about a fierce tiger. "I'm not afraid of tigers," the blind man boasted. "What I'm afraid of is the khle." The tiger, hiding nearby, heard this and wondered what terrible beast a khle could be.

That night the blind man felt his way into a cattle pen to take an ox for ploughing, and his hands found the tiger. Thinking it was a fat young bullock with no horns, he led it out. The tiger, sure it had been caught by the khle, followed meekly. "That's a tiger!" hissed the lame man. The blind man only tried to fit a nose rope, and the tiger yowled and ran off into the night.

At a field hut they picked up a big wooden harrow, a coil of buffalo rope, a turtle and a pot of rice, and walked on until they came to a kingdom where a giant came every night to the rest-house to carry off whoever was left there. That night it was the king's youngest daughter, waiting inside a drum.

The princess begged them to flee. Instead the blind man shut the doors and waited. When the giant thundered up and demanded to see the liver of whoever dared to lock him out, the blind man tossed out the harrow. When it asked to see one of his lice, he tossed out the turtle. When it asked for one of his leg hairs, he tossed out the buffalo rope. "Whoever is in there is far too big for me," thought the giant, and fled.

Later a she-giant came, angrier still. The blind man stood by the door with a sword the lame man had found for him, and the moment she pushed her head through, he swung. She fled howling and never came back. The princess gave the two friends the treasure that had been piled up for the giants.

Under a krasang tree they sat down to share it out. The lame man, who could see, kept putting the better things on his own side, but each time the blind man felt the piles and picked the good one, so the lame man kept saying, "Not fair, let's divide it again." Then a krasang fruit dropped on the blind man's head. Thinking his friend had hit him, he grabbed the lame man's legs and wrenched them, and the lame man punched him in the eyes.

Then something strange happened. The lame man's legs straightened, and the blind man's eyes opened and saw the light. The two friends stopped, stared at each other and laughed. Then they shared the treasure fairly, good things and plain things alike.

Meanwhile the king, overjoyed to find his daughter alive, sent criers through the land to find whoever had driven off the giants. The two friends came forward with the things from the rest-house as proof, and the princess knew them at once. The king gave her hand to the man who had been blind and made him king after him, and the man who had been lame became his deputy. As the Khmer saying goes, the eyes of the body are no match for the eyes of wisdom. Retold for Akahs Media from Khmer oral tradition.