Read the folk tale Elena loves
Mah-Pishani, the Girl with the Moon on Her Forehead
A poor girl’s kindness to a stranger earns her a moon on her forehead and stars in her hair, in one of Persia’s best-loved fairy tales.
In a small village at the edge of the desert, there lived a girl whose stepmother treated her unkindly and gave her the hardest chores of the house, while her own daughter sat idle by the fire. One day the stepmother sent the girl to the river with a basket of raw cotton, and told her not to come home until every last thread was spun into yarn.
The girl sat by the river all morning, spinning as fast as her fingers could move, until the wind lifted the last thread from her lap and carried it across the water. Afraid to go home empty-handed, she waded across the river to find it, and came upon a small clay house she had never noticed before.
The house across the river
Inside sat an old woman, bent and gray, who asked the girl to help her with a few small tasks before she would return the lost thread. She asked the girl to sweep a floor that seemed to make no more dust however hard she swept, to feed a scorpion resting in the corner, and to comb through hair as tangled as thornbushes. The girl did each task gently and without complaint, never once flinching from the strange old woman’s requests.
A moon and a shower of stars
Pleased with her patient kindness, the old woman told the girl to lean her head down over a small clay basin of water. When the girl lifted her face again, a soft crescent moon glowed on her forehead, and every time she combed her hair from that day on, tiny stars would shimmer and fall from it like dew. The old woman returned her spun thread, and the girl thanked her and walked home, glowing softly all the way.
The stepsister tries her luck
When the stepmother saw the moon on the girl’s forehead, she grew envious, and sent her own daughter to the river the very next day, hoping for the same reward. But when the girl reached the little clay house, she turned up her nose at every task, refused to touch the scorpion, and complained the whole time about the mess. The old woman, seeing this, sent her home with a small tuft of a donkey’s tail sprouting from her forehead instead, and no amount of scolding ever made it go away.
Found by moonlight
Not long after, a young prince rode past the girl’s house at dusk and saw a strange, gentle light shining from an upstairs window. He followed it to find the girl with the moon on her forehead, and once he had heard her whole story, he knew he wanted no other bride. They were married within the month, and it is said that on clear nights, if you look carefully at the moon, you can still see her kindness shining back.
Kindness, the story says, is easy to give to those who can repay it. The real gift is offering it just as freely to those who, it seems, cannot.
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Lalayi
Play this softly while you read: a traditional handplayed Persian lullaby from Iran, the same culture this tale comes from.
More stories, more lullabies
This is one tale in a growing collection of traditional stories from around the world, each one paired, where we can, with a real lullaby from the same culture.