The Storytellers Who Come Back as Rats

A man came to her because his son had died.

He was a Charan, a storyteller, of her own community. And she was Karni Mata, who the people of that country already believed was Durga walking among them.

So he asked her to bring the boy back.

And she went. She went to Yama, the god of death, and asked for the child.

Yama refused. Death, once given, is not returned. That is the arrangement, and not even she could make him break it.

She could not undo it. So she went around it.

From now on, she said, no male storyteller of my community goes into an ordinary next life. When he dies he comes back as a rat, in my temple, and he stays near me.

That is the first account of why there are twenty thousand rats in the temple at Deshnoke, and why every one of them is somebody.