A village had come under Persian rule, but nobody there spoke Persian. This made doing business difficult, so they sent a man to buy some Persian.
"Do you have Persian for sale?" he asked, but everyone just laughed at him.
Finally, someone said, "I'll sell you a jar of Persian! But don't open it until you get home, or the Persian will escape."
He sold the foolish villager a jar full of wasps.
"Come look!" he shouted when he got back home. "A jar of Persian!" But when he opened the jar, wasps flew out and stung all the villagers.
Inspired by: "Two Jars of Persian," in Folktales from India, by A. K. Ramanujan.
Notes: You can read about the Punjab region, now divided between India and Pakistan, at Wikipedia. The story is specifically about the people of Durrani Pashtun rule of the Punjab, and the jars of Persian come from Jalalabad in what is now Afghanistan. (Hamid Karzai, the former president of Afghanistan, is a Durrani Pashtun.)
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