Markandeya Jagdish Mahanagalingam Chola was vexed. The reason, undoubtedly, could have been any of the myriad vexatious happenings of this woefully ill-fated day. Our young Maharaja was awoken this morning not by the gentle sucking of soft lips around his proud royal member, but the hideous screeching and yowling that accompanied a typical spat between Mayura, his prize peacock, and Karvara, his prize Bengal tiger. Maharaja Markandeya contemplated, for not the first time in his young life, whether he would instead prefer a splendid new peacock-tail punkha and a magnificent new tigerskin rug to fan and carpet the banquet hall with, but he relented just shy of the point of calling for the huntsman.
Struggling out of the immense mahogany hulk that was the Royal Bed of the Maharaja of Thanjavur, Markandeya grimaced his way past the tardy concubine, who collapsed grovelling to her belly, past his impeccably uniformed guards, down the unending flights of stairs, and into the kitchen. To meet, aggravatingly, with the absence of the deer he had shot only yesterday, and was expecting to put to use to break his fast. Gentle enquiries and even subtler threats of flogging and castration revealed that the hind had been devoured wholesale by Karvara as it stalked the halls of the palace last night.
Deciding, belatedly, that continuing his fast would be both virtuous and inevitable, the idiot chef's profferings of roast guinea fowl and fresh-baked roti and pomegranate juice to the contrary, the king of the Blackstone fort fell deeper into his melancholy as he completed his ablutions and entered his courtroom. His young brow furrowed deeper than a buffalo-ploughed row, and his lean physique shuddered almost imperceptibly as he saw the kingly duty which awaited him. The opening dispute was between two sprightly wives of the castle town over a shared mango tree, neither of whom could possibly have been below the age of eighty-four. As their shrill verbal combat began, Markandeya pondered what vile karma he had inflicted on a saint in a previous life to be so cursed in this one.
Struggling out of the immense mahogany hulk that was the Royal Bed of the Maharaja of Thanjavur, Markandeya grimaced his way past the tardy concubine, who collapsed grovelling to her belly, past his impeccably uniformed guards, down the unending flights of stairs, and into the kitchen. To meet, aggravatingly, with the absence of the deer he had shot only yesterday, and was expecting to put to use to break his fast. Gentle enquiries and even subtler threats of flogging and castration revealed that the hind had been devoured wholesale by Karvara as it stalked the halls of the palace last night.
Deciding, belatedly, that continuing his fast would be both virtuous and inevitable, the idiot chef's profferings of roast guinea fowl and fresh-baked roti and pomegranate juice to the contrary, the king of the Blackstone fort fell deeper into his melancholy as he completed his ablutions and entered his courtroom. His young brow furrowed deeper than a buffalo-ploughed row, and his lean physique shuddered almost imperceptibly as he saw the kingly duty which awaited him. The opening dispute was between two sprightly wives of the castle town over a shared mango tree, neither of whom could possibly have been below the age of eighty-four. As their shrill verbal combat began, Markandeya pondered what vile karma he had inflicted on a saint in a previous life to be so cursed in this one.