The Gatiloke's second part opens — and it opens on the rascals. Chao Prak, a servant who has run away from his master's buffalo fields, joins with a fellow rogue, Nai Chea, in a tidy little fraud: Nai Chea will play the master, Chao Prak the servant to be sold, and the honest farmer Chao Loch will pay a hundred baht to redeem him. But Nai Chea keeps the whole price and vanishes by boat — and Chao Loch's hundred baht is swallowed a second time, by a court clerk with an opium habit, until nothing is left of it but the book's own lesson on the three hungers. Then a second rascal, dressed as a devout layman, invites the rich and silk-loving Abbot of Wat Koh to help him choose silk for a set of offering robes — and while the Abbot waits out the whole day at the merchant's house, his visitor crosses the river on the Abbot's own boat and empties fifty riels out of the Abbot's own chest.
Disclosure: this performance is narrated by AI-generated voices.
Chapters:
00:04 — Chao Loch and Chao Prak
16:00 — The Abbot of Wat Koh (Tonle Thom)
From the Gatiloke by Suttantaprija Ind (1859–1924), Cambodia's treasury of Khmer folk tales, first published in parts in Phnom Penh in 1914–1921 — public domain, and told here in a fresh in-house English rendering made from the Khmer text, in the book's own order. One question-chapter near the collection's opening is held back under house rule — its matter is murder itself, and such a tale is not read until it is ruled on; it stands recorded in the collection's written register, in its place.
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