A father tells a story to his children (Abdullah and Pari) at the close of a day. He tells the parable of a poor farmer named Baba Ayub, who toiled, “tending to his meagre pistachio trees” in Maidan Sabz, a desolate village (1). Ayub considered himself fortunate because he had a loving family with a good wife and five dutiful, wonderful children, although he felt a special affinity for his youngest son, Qais. However, Qais had a tendency to sleepwalk, and because his parents feared they would lose him, they tied a little bell around him so they would be able to hear if he began to sleepwalk. Even though he outgrew his tendency to sleepwalk, he could not part with his bell. 

A div, a giant monstrous creature that eats children, comes to Maidan Sabz. The div approaches the apathetic Ayub household and warns them to make their child offering by dawn. Believing in the fable’s central theme, that “a finger had to be cut to save the hand” (5), Baba Ayub drew names from a sack, and his beloved Qais was chosen. 

Even though the family offers Qais as a sacrifice, the children are dying of thirst and the conditions in Maidan Sabz are awful, the village suffering from drought. Baba Ayub is in such despair over the loss of his youngest child, even years later. Stricken with guilt for not fighting the div, believing that the villagers are talking about him, he leaves his family. After a long, arduous journey, he reaches the div’s fort at the mountaintop and sets out climbing it immediately, “his resolve...to fulfill his quest [...] unshaken” (7). 

He meets with the div, who does not respond to Ayub’s challenge right away. The div asks where Baba Ayub is from, why he is there, and then wants to show him something. After going through a labyrinth of rooms and stairwells, they finally arrive at the most magnificent garden that Baba Ayub has ever seen. There are children running happily and playing together, even his beloved Qais. According to the div, Ayub has passed a test. Qais has a wonderful life, a life that Ayub could never provide him. Ayub could choose to take Qais home, but Qais can never return to the life he’s grown accustomed to. Ayub leaves Qais at the div’s fortress. The div gives him a potion to drink on his journey home that will wipe away his memory, even that of Qais’s existence. 

Following the journey, rains fell plentifully on Maidan Sabz and there was never a drought again. Baba Ayub had plentiful and successful crops and “thought about his long life and gave thanks for all the bounty and joy he had been given” (15). However, he sometimes would hear the jingling of a bell, and he would experience a “wave of something, something like the tail end of a sad dream...but then it passed, as all things do. It passed” (15).