QCEC 2025 (Bronze Winner)
By Luvya Gambhir
Q2: Senior Category
A prominent folktale from India is the tale which narrates why the sea is salty. The following retells it in a surprising manner, adapting it to the twenty-first century context.
“Chakki Chakki Namak Nikal”1
Once, there was a poor farmer named Mohan who lived in a small village in Rajasthan, India. It was the festival of lights, Diwali. Children and elderly rejoiced, savouring finger-licking traditional dishes, lighting oil lamps and bursting sparklers. Mohan’s tiny hut, on the other hand, was engulfed in darkness, and his family was suffering from endless hunger.
Mohan was the family’s sole breadwinner. However, he was left with no source of income because his tiny patch of farm land had become barren due to drought a few months back. Due to his meagre earnings, Mohan was left with not a single ray of hope. As such, he had no other choice but to approach his elder brother, Rajan, for any kind of aid that he could kindly render. They say blood is thicker than water, but that day Mohan realised that this saying was entirely false. Rajan, although prosperous and well-fed, had turned his needy brother away, denying him even a morsel of food. Feeling both rejected and dejected, Mohan began his long walk home, his stomach gnawing with hunger.
Just then, an elderly man, each wrinkle telling its own unique story, noticed Mohan on his way home. “Son, why do you look so gloomy amid this festive cheer?” he inquired. Mohan, with his heart heavy as a stone, narrated his plight.
The old man, wisdom twinkling in his eyes and lips curling into a knowing smile, asked Mohan to assist him in a chore. “I am aging and have become weak. I need help to carry these bundles of wooden sticks back to my house. If you help me, I will surely reward you for your hard work.”
Eager to support his family, he did not even have to think twice before agreeing to help the old man. He laboured with utmost vigour, transporting the bundles of sticks to the elderly man’s house one by one. After Mohan had transported all the bundles to the old man’s house, he rewarded Mohan with not one, but three malpuas2.
Countless questions whirled in Mohan’s mind as to why he was offered just a few small traditional sweets for his toil. It would neither be enough for his family nor could he sell it to make an earning. “These are no ordinary sweets,” the old man revealed, as if he had read Mohan’s mind. “Do not make the naive mistake of eating them. Go to the cave in the deep, dense forest behind the village. There, you will find three dwarfs. Offer them these malpuas. Malpuas are their favourite sweets. They will be unable to resist asking for them and will be willing to offer you anything you wish for in exchange. In return, don’t ask for money. Rather, ask that they give you their magical chakki.3“
Confused yet intrigued, Mohan ventured into the depths of the forest, forced by his needs. He located the cave and offered the malpuas to the three dwarfs. True to the old man’s word, they bartered the malpuas with him for a chakki, a hand-mill crafted from a rare and unknown stone.
“This chakki,” the eldest dwarf explained, “will produce any type of grain and spice you desire, at an endless rate. To start the production of the desired product, turn its handle in a clockwise direction. As you do so, recite three times ‘Chakki, chakki, namak nikal,’4 if you wish to produce salt, for example. To halt its bounty, cover it with a red cloth.”
Grinning from ear to ear, Mohan returned home. He thanked Lady Luck for being kind enough to be by his side that day. He was relieved to know that he could finally fill his family members’ stomachs. Heeding the dwarf’s instructions, he spun the chakki. First, he asked for rice. One by one, he then requested lentils, spices and salt – enough to satisfy his famished family. After sufficient food had been collected, he covered the magical chakki with a red cloth, just like the dwarf had instructed.
As days passed, Mohan realised that he could utilise the food the chakki produced as his source of income. He began generating larger portions of grains from the chakki, to sell at affordable prices in the village market. Within a few months, he had sufficient savings to renovate his house into a new, larger home from the small hut he owned previously.5
Inevitably, word of Mohan’s good fortune had spread throughout the village like wildfire and eventually made its way to Rajan. Envy, like a serpent with venomous fangs, coiled in his heart. It just wasn’t possible. How could his once poor brother, who had begged him for help, outperform him, in just a few months?
As an excuse to see his younger brother’s refurbished home, Rajan learnt from Mohan how the chakki worked. However, Rajan went back home immediately after and did not see the method with which the chakki’s production could be stopped. Rajan hatched a plan to steal the chakki after which he would go on a rendezvous.
The following day, when Mohan was not at home, Rajan climbed in and stole the chakki from the cabinet in Mohan’s front lawn.
Wearing their best clothes, Rajan and his family set sail for a distant island. Once at sea, he immediately spun the chakki. Initially he was only driven by a simple, primal need. Thus, he demanded salt.
While he imagined controlling the spice trade, the chakki obeyed his orders, and salt poured forth in heaps. Soon a gargantuan mountain of salt had formed in the boat.
Alas, Rajan had not brought a red cloth with him. Part of his wife’s red sari6 or his red kurta7 could have helped act as a cover for the chakki, but blinded by his greed for riches, Rajan was unaware of the method of stopping the chakki. In no time the boat, laden with the ever-increasing weight of the salt, was unstable and slowly began to sink.
By the time salt had covered the entire boat, Rajan and his family had already been swallowed by the ocean, drowning to their deaths. The salt mingled with the waters and is now believed to be the reason why the sea is salty. The chakki sank with Rajan’s family, its magic unextinguished. It is believed the chakki continued spinning, making global waters salty.
Centuries later, the ocean’s salinity was a given natural phenomenon. With advancements, humanity’s reach extended further, deeper. A diver, exploring an underwater trench, stumbled upon the chakki, its surface still gleaming faintly in the darkness.
He immediately knew this was the magical chakki his grandmother used to tell him stories about when he was younger. This diver, like Rajan, was driven by greed, a greed of transformation. He was an inventor, a dreamer. He grabbed hold of the chakki and spun it once more. Driven by the needs of the twenty-first century world, he didn’t ask for food or even gold. Unaware that through his actions, he would be shooting himself on the foot, he asked for a material that was strong, yet flexible, versatile enough to be moulded into any shape, a material that would last.
Once again, the chakki began to grind, producing a viscous substance that flowed and solidified. The diver, initially triumphant, brought this new material to the surface.
This material continued to be exported from the ocean for man’s advantage. It revolutionised the world. But the chakki continued to produce it endlessly, even from its far-flung location.
This material was none other than plastic.
However, as the infinite production continued, the ocean became an endless deposit of plastic. The plastic that was taken out of the ocean and made into new substances, returned full cycle back into the ocean, merely in other shapes and sizes. Plastic debris clogged the waters and was innocently mistaken for food by marine life, tragically leading to their deaths. Microplastics infiltrated every level of the marine ecosystem, poisoning creatures large and small. Once-pristine coastlines became mountains of refuse. Meanwhile, the magical chakki’s gift, twisted by human desire, unleashed an age of unprecedented pollution.
The ocean’s nature was irreversibly altered, not by salt, but by humanity’s own creation, a substance born from a magical device and a greedy dream of progress. However, humans, unwilling to change, continue to utilise this deadly material today. What initially seemed like a boon, turned within just a few years into a curse, to the environment, to humans and to all life on Mother Earth. Lest someone or rather a group of people find a way to stop the production of plastic by the chakki, destruction is not far off. Advocating for the reduced use of plastic is good but taking steps to curb its use is more important. Man’s endless desires will bring mankind’s own end, that is approaching faster than one may perceive.
And that is why, they say, greed is the root cause of all evil and our actions come back to us in a full circle.
All visuals have been taken from: https://youtu.be/JcbkdvoqqIU?feature=shared
- When literally translated from Hindi, this would be an order given to a grinding mill to produce salt ↩︎
- A malpua is a fried, sweet Indian pancake. (pronounced: maal-poo-aah) ↩︎
- A chakki is a grinding mill, specifically a type of stone mill used to grind grains, especially wheat, into flour. It is a traditional method of grinding flour, particularly in rural Indian households. ↩︎
- Namak (pronouced: nuh-muh-k) means salt and nikal (pronounced: ni-kaal) means to produce or give out in Hindi. ↩︎
- The image below the text shows a tin labelled “ghee” which is the hindi word for clarified butter. ↩︎
- A traditional garment worn by women from the Indian subcontinent. ↩︎
- A long, traditional collarless shirt or tunic worn by men from the Indian subcontinent. ↩︎
