Sugar and Sand

One day a courtier who loved puzzles came into the court carrying a bowl. In it was a mixture of fine white sugar and pale sand, stirred together so well that you could not tell one from the other.

“Here is a challenge for the clever Birbal,” he said, setting the bowl down with a flourish. “Separate the sugar from the sand. But you may not pick out the grains one by one, and you may not use water, or it will all dissolve into mud.”

The court murmured. It seemed impossible. The sugar and sand were exactly the same colour, and the grains were tiny.

Birbal looked at the bowl for a moment. Then he smiled, picked it up, and walked out into the palace garden. The whole court followed him, curious.

Beside an old mango tree there was a little hill of earth with a hole at the top, and a busy line of ants coming and going from it. Birbal knelt down and carefully sprinkled the mixture of sugar and sand in a wide circle around the ant hill.

“What are you doing?” asked the courtier.

“Asking for help,” said Birbal. “Come back tomorrow morning, and you will see.”

The next morning the whole court came back to the mango tree. The circle on the ground was now pure, pale sand. Every single grain of sugar was gone. The ants had worked all through the day and the night, carrying the sugar grain by grain down into their nest, and leaving the sand exactly where it was.

“There you are,” said Birbal. “The sand is separated from the sugar. I didn’t pick out one grain. I simply found workers who knew the difference better than I did.”

The courtier laughed in spite of himself. “But now you have no sugar!”

“That is true,” said Birbal. “But you asked me to separate them. You never asked me to keep them. And somewhere under this tree, there is a family of ants having the best week of their lives.”