A tiger and a lamb drank from the same stream; the tiger upstream, the lamb downstream.
"Why are you muddying my water?" shouted the tiger.
"That couldn't be me," explained the lamb. "I'm downstream."
"And you did it yesterday too!"
"But I wasn't here yesterday," the lamb replied.
"Then it must have been your mother."
"My mother's dead."
"Your father then!"
"I don't know my father."
"So your grandfather's the guilty one!" yelled the exasperated tiger. "And now I'm going to eat you as punishment."
Then the tiger seized the innocent lamb and ate him up.
That's what tigers do.
Inspired by: "If It Isn't You, It Must Be Your Father" in Folktales from India by A. K. Ramanujan 1991.
Notes: Ramanujan reports hearing this story told to him in Kannada when he was a child. You can read about the Kannada language spoken in Karnataka and elsewhere in southern India at Wikipedia. This is an ancient story, found both in the ancient Buddhist jatakas (panther and goat) and also in the Aesop's fables of Greece and Rome (wolf and lamb).
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