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The Sultan and The Beggar


There was a Sultan who loved to play tricks on people and derived pleasure from seeing people tortured from his cruel jokes. He likes to disguise himself as a commoner and goes around looking for his victims so that he can play his sick jokes on.

One day, while disguised as a traveller, he found a drunken beggar who wished more in the world to have the destiny to become a sultan. The Sultan knew he found the perfect victim. He made him drunk to the point of unconsciousness, took him back to the palace, cleaned, shaved, dressed and perfumed him and let him lie on the bed while he disguised himself as one of the palace guards to watch his joke in play.

As expected, when the beggar woke up to find himself in the sultan's palace and everyone calling him 'Your Majesty' and all that, he was driven crazy, and the Sultan went almost mad with laughter as he watched the poor beggar trying to figure out whether it was a dream or not. The subjects had no choice but to play along with the Sultan's joke for fear of being beheaded if they give away the secret.

But what the Sultan did not expect was that the beggar soon believed that he was the Sultan and unlike the real Sultan, he took his role very seriously and actually began to care for his subjects. The real Sultan didn't think this joke was funny anymore, and decided to end it by drugging him, strip him off his fancy clothes and throw him back to the streets where he belongs.

The poor beggar woke up finding himself in the streets again as a beggar and went almost mad, shouting throughout the streets that he was a sultan, which earned him a trip to prison. The Sultan giggled as he watched the beggar trying to convince himself that he was the sultan, but slowly eased in to the fact that he wasn't. The Sultan decided to play the same trick again to him by repeating the same process: drugging him and changing him back to the lavish Sultan's clothes.

When the beggar woke up again in his fancy state, he again went crazy, screaming "No, it's happening again~!" But this time, the tables were turned. The Sultan made a mistake by hiding behind the wardrobe while watching him going crazy while his subjects tried to calm him down, and while he laughed out loud, the beggar thought it was demons playing a joke on him and took a nearby dagger and stabbed the Sultan in the wardrobe to death.

The subjects were a little distraught. The Sultan had no heir and there would be a civil war if the news of Sultan's death ever got out. They decided to cover it up by saying to anyone who asked that the Sultan had went on a holy pilgrimage to Mecca and had asked his friend to take over. After agreeing to that decision, they tended to the beggar who is the current "Sultan".

"Who was that?" the beggar asked.

"Oh, that's the royal jester," they replied. "Don't mind him. His last joke was a killer, anyways."

And soon the beggar became the most well-loved Sultan among his subjects and the old Sultan was, through time, completely forgotten


Moral: Never tell the same joke twice

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