A Spider and a Fly

Ek Makda aur Makkhi — 'A Spider and a Fly' — is one of Iqbal's children's fables, a poem with a story and a warning built into it. It opens with a spider speaking sweetly to a fly: you pass my door every day, it says, yet you never honour my poor little hut with a visit; come up, my staircase is right there in front of you.

The poem belongs to the early children's section of Bang-e-Dara, the collection brought together and published in 1924. Iqbal is openly working from an English source here: the poem closely follows Mary Howitt's famous nineteenth-century verse 'The Spider and the Fly', which generations of English schoolchildren learned by heart. Iqbal does not hide this. He retells a known fable in Urdu for Urdu-speaking children, and the retelling is part of the poem's history, not a flaw in it.

The poem is built as a long, patient conversation, and the patience is the point. The fly is not a fool. When the spider first invites her in, she refuses cleanly: this is a trap, she says, no fly that climbs your staircase ever comes back down. She refuses the soft bed, she refuses the curtained rooms, she refuses the offered comfort. Iqbal lets her win every round of the argument that is about danger.

Then the spider changes its weapon. Having failed with invitation, it tries praise. It tells the fly her eyes are like sparkling jewels, her head is crowned, her dress and her grace and her singing are beyond compare. And here the fly, who was proof against every argument about safety, begins to soften. Flattery does what fear could not.

The turn is handled with real care, and Iqbal does not sneer at the fly for it. She comes a little closer, telling herself only that it is unkind to refuse a compliment, that breaking someone's heart is not a good thing — and in that small, almost decent self-justification she is caught and eaten. The moral is not 'never trust anyone.' It is sharper and kinder than that: the danger we have braced ourselves against is rarely the one that gets us; we are undone through the door of our own vanity.

Ek Makda aur Makkhi endures because the trap it describes is permanent and universal. Every reader, child or adult, of any background, has at some point been talked past their own better judgement by someone who knew exactly which flattery to use. Iqbal took a borrowed English fable and made it carry a lesson about self-knowledge that does not age.