20. Problem Pupils

While they waited for the PM to show up, the sisters discussed education. Most of the conversation was about their failures.They were very conscious of them.

It was Sabatica that did most of the talking. But she wasn’t one of those people who talk just to hear themselves. She looked at you with the clear intention of seeing you. She also listened to every word you said if you dared to interrupt her and had something to say right back that proved she had taken what you’d said seriously. Also, she was always verifying things. When a fact was in doubt, she would lift the index finger of her right hand up in the air and with it pointing straight upward would say, “Let us verify!”

It was her thesis that MacMor wasn’t for everyone. The sisters had once been a lot more generous with their fish. But experience had taught them that some people didn’t benefit from eating him. Sabatica squinted at me as if trying to predict if I would benefit or not. I remained silent for I wasn’t sure myself. I wanted to hear more first.

She got to rambling about her most infamous pupils. She said she and her sisters particularly regretted having fed MacMor to the Scottish king Macbeth and after that to the immortal mortal playwright William Shakespeare.  

Macbeth had stumbled upon the sisters while they were brewing fish soup out in the heath on a stormy night. He was wet and cold and tired because he was on his way home from a cruent battle. He had won the fight, but this kind of effort takes its toll.

Now the sisters knew that Macbeth’s wife had a greater right to the throne of Scotland than a fellow named Duncan who was king at that time.They liked Lady Macbeth and were sympathetic to her cause and  thought it would make Macbeth happy to know that he and Lady Macbeth would one day get to be the rightful king and queen of Scotland.

So they offered Macbeth a steaming bowlful of their sapient soup, thinking it would do him good. But something went wrong. To begin with, he didn’t like fish soup. He gave it a sip to be polite, but that was all he took. And then, it turned out Macbeth was the kind that finds it hard to control his anxiety. There was no way he could hold still and wait for something to happen. He always had to be doing things himself.

The sip of the soup he took told him he would be king of Scotland at some point in the future but the man couldn’t wait and let matters run their course. He thanked the sisters, got up and went home and murdered the present king, who was sleeping over at his place that night. As if there were no other way he could sit on the throne, lamented the sisters.

This was not what they had intended at all. But it didn’t end there. Macbeth meant to be a good king. And he could have been a very good one. But when he saw that some people were scared of having a murderer for a king, he felt threatened and began to do away with them too. 

He was so upset about not being accepted by everyone and carried on so melodramatically instead of keeping his anxiety to himself that he drove his wife raving mad with his fears and suspicions and the sisters were beginning to think they would end up the same way, for he felt so insecure he visited them frequently to ask them what would happen next.

At last, to be done with him, they gave him two turnip chips fried in salmon flavored oil and he learned from one that he would be safe until the closest forest to his castle came climbing up the hill the castle was on. From the second chip he learned that no man born of woman would harm him.

Knowing this, he went home feeling secure and as happy as a king. The Wise Sisters exchanged a meaningful look upon seeing him leave their territory, but made no move to stop him and didn’t remind him that a little learning is a dangerous thing and you need to learn enough to see the whole picture.

Soon a man who’d had a Caesarean birth chopped the trees of Birnam forest down and used the branches for cover when his army climbed up the hill to attack Macbeth’s castle.

Spiridoola remarked she didn’t know why they said kings were happy. Kings were often more paranoid than happy. She nudged Sabatica with an elbow and told her to tell us about the ungrateful English poacher.

This was William Shakespeare she was referring to. The sisters held a grudge against him for having insulted them instead of showing gratitude for the colossal gift they had bestowed on him.

According to them, he couldn’t write an o with ink and a drinking straw before he stumbled upon them brewing their salmon soup in a forest while he chased a hare for his dinner.

They felt sorry for the hare and said that if he let it go, they would invite him to a very special dinner. He agreed, and finished the bowl of soup he was offered and licked his lips and asked for seconds. When he could take no more, he gave a deep bow and delivered the most beautiful thank you speech one could hope to hear.

So far, so good, but some years later the sisters heard the poacher, now turned playwright, had produced a Scottish play. It was about Macbeth and the three sisters were characters in it. Curious, they were among the audience when it was performed for the first time.

Back then there were no female actresses. The dainty sisters knew they would be played by men. But instead of casting pretty, beardless lads in these roles, the sisters were played by toothless, scraggly, bearded old men wrapped in filthy rags. These men were so miscast that the author had to have an actor say that the sisters were weird creatures, hideous and hairy, so the audience would accept their dreadful looks. Up till then Sabatica, Spiridoola and Luxviminda had been known and respected as the Wise Sisters. But when Shakespeare called them the Weird Sisters the name stuck.   

Good teachers don’t deserve to be given unpleasant nicknames. Never in their lives had the Wise Sisters felt more insulted.They retaliated by laying a curse on the play. It became notoriously unlucky to perform and disaster struck whenever anyone so much as mentioned its title within a theatre.