In the household of a kind merchant named Dhanapati there worked a
servant called Manda, and Manda had perfected the art of doing as little
as possible.
When the master said, "Manda, water the garden before the sun is high,"
Manda would yawn. "Soon," he would say. "There's plenty of time." Then he
would slump in the shade and watch the day slip by. By evening the plants
drooped, brown and thirsty, and Manda would shrug. "Tomorrow, then."
Tomorrow, of course, was always the same.
He was as stubborn as an old gate. If a fellow servant gently suggested a
quicker way to grind the grain, Manda would scowl and stiffen. "I do it
my way," he would snap, even when his way wasted half the morning. He
would not bend, not for sense, not for kindness.
And he was sneaky. When the master asked whether the storeroom had been
swept, Manda would say, "Oh yes, spotless," though he had not touched a
broom. When a jar of ghee went missing because Manda had been careless,
he let the blame fall on a younger boy and said nothing. Worse, when
another servant built a neat new shelf for the kitchen, Manda, sour with
envy, "accidentally" knocked it loose in the night, just so no one else
would shine.
Mostly, though, he was gloomy. Nothing pleased him. The food was always
too plain, the work always too hard, the weather always wrong. He
carried his sulk around like a heavy sack, and being near him made
everyone's shoulders droop.
For years the merchant was patient. But one day he sat Manda down beneath
the very tree where the servant had wasted a thousand afternoons.
"Manda," he said, not unkindly, "I gave you the same hours the sun gives
everyone — the same as the boy who is now in charge of my granaries, the
same as the woman who runs my whole kitchen. They took their hours and
built something. You took yours and put everything off until it rotted in
your hands." He sighed. "A life is just a long string of days. String
enough wasted ones together, and you have a wasted life."
Manda opened his mouth to say, "Soon I'll change. There's plenty of
time." But for the first time, even he could hear how those words sounded,
and how, after all his soons and tomorrows, the garden behind him still
lay brown and bare.
