Who Is the Real Thief?

A wealthy merchant in the capital woke one morning to find a chest of valuable jewelry missing from his locked room. There had been no sign of forced entry, which meant the thief could only have been one of his own household servants — but which one, among the dozen who worked in his home, no one could say. The merchant appealed to the emperor for justice, and Akbar, unable to solve the puzzle himself, handed the matter to Birbal.

Birbal gathered all twelve servants together in the merchant's courtyard. He said nothing at first about the missing jewelry — instead, he walked among them, holding a bundle of plain wooden sticks, each cut to exactly the same length.

"I have consulted the wisdom of the old sages," Birbal announced solemnly, "and learned a method that never fails to reveal a thief. Each of you will take one of these sticks home tonight and return with it tomorrow morning. Here is the secret: the stick belonging to the true thief will have grown exactly one inch longer overnight. Innocent hands change nothing — but a guilty conscience makes even wood grow."

The servants, wide-eyed and uneasy, each took a stick and left for the night.

The next morning, all twelve servants returned and laid their sticks before Birbal in a row. He examined each one carefully — and immediately pointed to a stick noticeably shorter than all the rest.

"This," he declared, "belongs to the thief."

The servant holding it went pale and, moments later, broke down and confessed everything, astonished that Birbal's method could have possibly worked.

In truth, there had been no magic in the sticks at all. Knowing that a guilty man, fearing his stick might truly grow, would try to secretly shave a small piece off his own stick overnight to disguise the change — the one servant who trimmed his stick shorter than the rest had, without realizing it, given himself away by his own fear.