Karna was born wearing golden armour and earrings that kept him safe from any weapon. He also made a promise never to refuse anyone who asked him for a gift at midday. One day, a visitor comes to test that promise.
Two boys share everything at school. Years later, one is a king in a golden city and the other is so poor his family often goes hungry. Sudama walks to the palace with a small bundle of flattened rice. Will his old friend even remember him?
For years an old woman in the forest waits for Rama, sweeping the path and gathering fruit each morning in case today is the day. When he finally comes, she has only berries to give him. What she does with them surprises everyone.
Every evening, a big white dog waited at Shibuya Station in Tokyo for his master's train. One day his master did not come home. The dog kept waiting, for almost ten years.
A god offers King Midas any wish he likes, and the king already loves gold more than anything. By the next morning, everything he touches shines.
A young painter lies ill in a New York studio, counting the leaves on an ivy vine outside her window. When the last one falls, she says, she will go too.
Thrown out of her home at twenty with a newborn baby, Sindhutai Sapkal survived by singing for food at railway stations. Then she began to take in other people's abandoned children.
In a poor village in Bihar, a labourer picked up a hammer and a chisel and began to cut a path through a rocky hill. Everyone laughed. He kept going for twenty-two years.
Two old friends set off on foot on the long pilgrimage to Jerusalem. Only one of them gets there. Tolstoy's story of what it really means to keep a promise to God.
A lonely old cobbler hears a voice in the night promising a visitor tomorrow. All day he watches the street from his basement window, waiting. Tolstoy's gentle story.
A young couple with almost no money each secretly give up their greatest treasure to buy the other a Christmas present. O. Henry's most loved story.
A golden statue who can see all the sorrow of his city asks a little swallow to give away his jewels and gold, one piece at a time. Oscar Wilde's tender fairy tale.
A giant builds a wall to keep the children out of his beautiful garden. Then spring refuses to come. Oscar Wilde's fairy tale about a heart that opens.
A hungry traveller arrives in a village where nobody will share. All he asks for is a pot of water and a fire, because he knows how to make soup from a stone.
On 11 September 2001, dozens of airliners were ordered out of the sky and sent to a small town in Newfoundland. For several days its people looked after thousands of stranded strangers as if they were family.
