The beggar's trick

There was a beggar who was very kind and, at the same time, very wise. He used to beg and, again, he used to help other beggars and old people. But sometimes, when people were nasty, he would play tricks on them and deceive them.

One evening he stopped in front of a small shop and picked up an Indian rupee that was lying on the street. The owner saw him and shouted, “You! That coin was mine, mine! I dropped it there.”

Some other people said, “No, no, you are such a rich man. How can you say that coin was yours?”

The shopkeeper started shouting at the beggar, “You have to give me the money. Otherwise, I will have you arrested.”

The beggar said, “Can you not be nice to me? I am a beggar, whereas you are a rich man. Can you not at least give me half? I picked it up and you say it is yours. Since I didn’t see you drop it, I am not sure whether it is yours or not. And even if it was yours, you lost it. Since it is now evening, you would have closed your shop and gone home. Before you returned in the morning, someone else would have found it and taken it. You would not have got anything. So please give me at least fifty paisa.”

The rich man said, “All right, take it,” and handed the beggar fifty paisa. The beggar gave him the rupee and left.

The next day, very early in the morning, the shopkeeper saw his wife searching for something in front of the shop. He asked her, “What are you doing?”

She said, “Oh, I am just looking for something.”

He said, “I know, I know, you fool! You are so careless. You lost a rupee.”

The wife said, “That is right. How did you know?”

He said, “Yesterday a beggar found it. I gave him fifty paisa and took the rupee back. I left it in the shop. You take it. It is yours.”

The wife was very happy and ran to get the rupee. But when she picked it up, she saw that it was counterfeit. She said, “What is this?”

The husband said, “What has the beggar done? What has he done?”

What had happened was that the beggar had found the real coin that the shopkeeper’s wife had lost. But because the shopkeeper was so nasty to him, and because he had heard from others that the shopkeeper was deceiving people and cheating them in so many ways, the beggar played a trick on the shopkeeper. He kept the rupee that the wife had actually dropped and gave the owner a counterfeit coin.

When the shopkeeper discovered what the beggar had done, he cursed the beggar. But the beggar had really given him a good lesson. Because he was an unkind shopkeeper, he got this kind of treatment.