The Wit that Won Hearts

This chapter is a story told in prose. It is not a poem and not a play: there are no verse lines, no stanzas and no stage directions. Events are narrated in ordinary paragraphs, with a narrator who describes the setting and reports what people say and think. No writer's name is printed with the text, so do not attribute it to anyone. When you write about it, talk about what the story does rather than guessing who first told it.

The setting is historical. The story opens by placing us in the Vijayanagara Empire, praised for its glory, wealth and cultural achievements, and then narrows to one ruler: King Krishnadeva Raya, who ruled from 1509 to 1529 CE. His reign, the story says, is often called the Golden Era, a time when art, literature and architecture flourished. Two details about the king matter for everything that follows. First, he was a supporter of learning. Second, he was himself a poet, and the story names two of his works, the epic Amuktamalyada and the Sanskrit drama Jambavati Parinayam. A king who writes poetry has feelings invested in his poetry, and that is the hinge the whole plot turns on.

The court is also introduced before the trouble starts. Krishnadeva Raya kept eight celebrated poets known together as the Ashtadiggajas. Two are named: Allasani Peddana and Tenali Ramakrishna. Tenali Ramakrishna, usually called Tenali Rama in the story, held his place for a particular reason. He was known for quick wit and humour, and for finding clever solutions to problems that looked impossible to solve. So he sits in the court as poet and as witty adviser at the same time.

Notice the shape of the storytelling. The opening paragraphs read almost like a history lesson, calm and admiring. Then comes a sentence that turns the corner, observing that even the wisest of rulers have moments of disharmony. That single turn takes us from a grand empire to a private domestic quarrel, and the contrast is the point. The story is going to show that a problem too small to be worth a war can still bring a palace to a standstill, and that the tool which fixes it is not power but cleverness.

The trouble begins away from our sight and reaches us second-hand. The narrator tells us only that the king quarrelled with his queen, Thirumalambal, over a matter that seemed trivial. The consequences, though, are described in full. For weeks the king did not speak a single word to her, and in his frustration he stopped visiting her altogether. His absence, the narrator says, cast a shadow over the palace, and corridors that had once been cheerful now felt quiet and forlorn. A private sulk has become a public mood.

Thirumalambal is not passive. She tries her best to settle the matter herself and fails. Only when she has run out of alternatives does she decide to seek help from Tenali Rama, and Rama listens patiently while she gives her account of what happened.

Her account is where we finally learn the cause. She says the king wrote a poem full of vague expressions about the sun, the moon, the stars and a beautiful sky, and that in her view it made no sense. She says that when he tried to recite it to his ministers, every one of them avoided him with excuses. Then, late one evening, he came to her and began reciting. She had had a tiring day and was so exhausted that she yawned, and not once but several times. The king took this as disrespect towards his poem, stormed off, and has not spoken to her since. She ends by wishing she had chosen another day, and by telling Rama that only he can make the king understand.

Rama does not rush. He agrees to try, but warns her that the matter needs a well-planned approach and that he may need time to find the right strategy. The queen, with her last hope resting on him, agrees and thanks him warmly.

The next morning the court is busy with ministers, scholars and courtiers. The narrator paints the room carefully: carved pillars rising towards a high ceiling, sunlight streaming through open windows, fine rugs on the floor. Yet under the lively chatter there is tension. The king sits on his throne looking stern, his sharp eyes moving over the room. It is obvious that the quarrel is still eating at him.

The day's business is how to improve paddy cultivation. Ministers stand up one after another with suggestions, some proposing wider irrigation networks, others better manure. Through all of this Rama stays at the edge of the court, watching everyone with an amused smile. Only when the king calls on him does he step forward, carrying a plateful of paddy seeds, and make his move.

King Krishnadeva Raya is not written as a foolish man, and reading him as one is the most common mistake students make. The narrator introduces him as wise, powerful, a supporter of learning and a gifted poet, and the story never withdraws any of that praise. Even in the court scene his instincts are sound. When Rama makes an extravagant claim about the seeds, the king calls it absurd and then explains why he is unconvinced: such cultivation would need special soil, manure, and pest and insect repellents, and if anything went wrong, the farmers would suffer. That is a careful ruler thinking about the people who would pay for a failed experiment. His flaw is narrower and more human. Where his own poetry is concerned, he is thin-skinned. He reads a tired body as an insult, and then lets weeks pass without checking whether he was right.

Queen Thirumalambal is the person with the least power in the quarrel and the most sense about it. She is described as distraught and upset, and she tries to fix things herself before asking anyone for help. Her account to Rama is honest rather than self-serving: she does not pretend to have admired the poem, and she does not attack the king either. Her regret is aimed at her own timing, at not having chosen a different day. At the end, when the king apologises, she does not use the moment to score a point. She offers to leave the quarrel behind and asks to hear the poem, which quietly gives him back the thing he felt he had been denied.

Tenali Rama is defined by patience as much as by cleverness. He listens without interrupting. He refuses to promise a quick result. He waits until the next day for the right opening, and once the court is in session he stands at the edge of the room watching rather than pushing himself forward. When he does act, he is unfazed by mockery and unfazed by the king's frown. The narrator's closing word for him is telling: he had orchestrated the settlement, a word that suggests arranging many parts so they sound right together.

The courtiers are a small but useful group. One of them, known for his sarcasm, mocks the seeds loudly enough to be overheard, and another adds that Rama probably found them on the moon. Their snickers show that Rama is taking a real risk in front of an audience ready to laugh at him. That risk makes his success worth more.

The heart of this chapter is a method, and it is worth slowing down to see exactly how it works. Rama's problem is not that the king lacks information. The king knows perfectly well that his queen yawned. The problem is that the king has already decided what the yawn meant, and he has acted on that decision for weeks. Anyone who argues with him directly is asking him to admit in public that he has been unfair for a long time over something small. Pride will refuse. So Rama does not argue at all.

Instead he builds a situation. First he needs cover, and the court's discussion of paddy cultivation gives it to him. Bringing in a plate of seeds during a farming debate looks like normal business, not like an ambush. Then he makes a claim big enough that nobody can ignore it: sow these, and the yield will be three times greater than at present. The claim is deliberately hard to swallow. It earns him mockery, but mockery is attention, and attention is what he needs.

Next comes the pivot. When the king objects on practical grounds, Rama agrees with him and then moves the subject sideways: the real issue, he says, lies not with the seeds but with the person who sows them. This is the crucial step. The conversation is no longer about agriculture. It is about human behaviour, and nobody in the room has noticed the change. The king, wanting a straight answer, demands that Rama speak clearly, which means the king himself invites the next line.

Rama then delivers it as a question rather than a statement. He asks what would happen if the sower had a habit of yawning while sowing, and whether the seeds would not scatter unevenly. Putting it as a question is smart, because a question cannot be contradicted the way a claim can, and because it makes everyone picture the scene. The court laughs, and the mood in the room changes from sarcasm to genuine amusement.

Then comes the part Rama could hope for but not force. Caught off guard, the king sighs and yawns. Rama, who has been watching him closely, immediately supplies the general truth: is there anyone in this world who does not yawn, he asks, and adds that it is as natural as breathing. He never mentions the queen. He never mentions the poem. He simply states a fact about all human beings at the exact moment the king has just proved it with his own body.

The king finishes the argument himself. His mind goes back to the quarrel, he remembers scolding her harshly, and he sees how unfair he was. Because he reached the conclusion privately and in his own words, there is nothing to resist. That is the whole design: give a proud person the evidence and let them do the concluding.

The plainest theme is that cleverness can do work that authority cannot. Nobody in this story could have ordered the king to change his mind. The queen could not, and the ministers who avoided his poem certainly could not. Rama has no army and no command over the king, yet the matter is settled the same day: he works on the king during the morning court, and by that evening the quarrel is over. What he has instead of power is observation, timing and a sense of humour. The story is quietly arguing that these are practical skills, not decorations.

Underneath that sits a theme about pride and misreading. The whole crisis rests on one interpretation: the king decides that a yawn is a verdict on his poem. He never asks. He never checks. And because he is the king, nobody corrects him, so a wrong reading hardens into weeks of silence. The story is careful to show the cost of this, which is why it spends a paragraph on the empty, gloomy corridors. Misunderstandings do not stay between two people; they spread to everyone around them.

The story also has something to say about how an apology should sound. When the king finally speaks to Thirumalambal, he does three separate things: he calls himself foolish, he admits that he overreacted, and he names the cause when he says that he let his pride blind him. The image in that phrase does real work. Blindness is not the same as ignorance; it means the information was there and he could not see it. That is an unusually exact piece of self-knowledge, and it is the reason the reconciliation feels earned rather than convenient.

Matching it is a theme of generosity in forgiving. The queen does not make him work for it. She offers to leave the quarrel behind and asks to listen to his poem, which is the most graceful reply available to her. She turns the object of the quarrel into the thing that ends it.

Finally there is the title itself. The wit in this story does not defeat anyone, and that is the point of the word won. Rama makes no enemy. The sarcastic courtiers end up laughing with him instead of at him, the king is not humiliated in front of his court, and the royal couple's bond is restored. Wit here is used to repair a relationship rather than to win an argument, which is why the story can end with the palace full of joy and laughter again.

The storytelling leans hard on sound, and once you notice it you can hear the whole court. A murmur sweeps through the room when Rama makes his claim. Snickers ripple through the courtiers. A hush falls when he pauses. The king roars his demand that Rama speak clearly. These are not decorative words; they track the mood of the room from doubt, to mockery, to silence, to impatience, and finally to open laughter. If you had only the sound words and none of the dialogue, you could still follow the emotional shape of the scene.

The writing also uses ordinary everyday expressions in a way that repays attention. The king's absence is said to cast a shadow over the palace, which is not literal darkness but a spread of gloom. He storms off, which tells you the speed and the anger together. The quarrel gnaws at him, an image of something small chewing away at him from inside. His mind races back to the quarrel, which captures how fast a realisation arrives. Each of these is a phrase you already use in conversation, placed where it does precise work.

There is careful scene-setting too. Before anything happens in the court we are given carved pillars, a high ceiling, sunlight through open windows and fine rugs, and then a single sentence saying that tension hung in the air despite the chatter. The beauty is set up first so the tension can cut across it. The same technique appears earlier with the corridors: they are described as once cheerful, then quiet and forlorn, so the change is felt rather than announced.

Compound words show up naturally in the writing, and they come in three shapes. Some are written closed, as one word, like sunlight and courtroom. Some are joined with a hyphen, like well-planned, which is how Rama describes the approach he needs. Some stay as two separate words that work as one idea, like paddy seeds. Collecting these as you read is an easy way to build vocabulary.

One habit is worth building here: separate what the narrator states from what a character claims. The narrator calls the king a gifted poet and never says a word against the poem. It is the queen, telling her own side to Rama, who says it was vague and made no sense. Both statements are in the story, but they do not carry the same weight, and mixing them up leads to writing that the text does not support.

This story is also used to show how sentences with if behave, and helpfully the examples come straight out of the dialogue rather than from invented example sentences. Every such sentence has two halves. The half beginning with if sets a condition and is the subordinate clause. The other half says what follows and is the main clause. The order can be swapped without changing the meaning.

The first pattern is the real, still-possible one. Rama tells the queen that if she likes, he will try his best to resolve the matter. The if half uses the simple present, and the other half uses will. This pattern is for something that genuinely may or may not happen, so it points at a possible future. The queen has not yet agreed when he says it, and she may not.

The second pattern is the imagined or unlikely one. The king says that if, by chance, something were to go wrong, the farmers would suffer. Here the if half moves into the past form and the other half uses would. Nothing has actually gone wrong. He is holding up a situation he can picture but which has not occurred, which is exactly why the past form is used even though he is talking about a future risk.

The third pattern is the impossible one, about a past that cannot now be changed. The queen says that if she had known this would happen, she would have chosen another day. The if half uses the past perfect and the other half uses would have with a past participle. She did not know, and the evening is over. This form is the natural grammar of regret, which is why it appears in the mouth of the character who most wishes she could go back.

A quick way to keep the three apart is to ask what is still open. If the thing can still happen, use the present with will. If you are only imagining it, use the past with would. If it is finished and cannot be altered, use the past perfect with would have. Reading the three lines from this story one after another makes the ladder easy to remember, because each speaker is standing at a different distance from what is possible.