A king humiliated by his own wife over a grammar mistake

During a royal water festival, Queen Satavahana's own wife teased him publicly over a simple grammatical slip — mistaking a warning not to splash her for a request to bring sweets, thanks to a subtlety of Sanskrit sound rules the unlearned king had never mastered. The whole court laughed. Satavahana, mortified at being exposed as unlearned in front of his own people, retreated to his chambers, refused food, and sank into a despair so deep that even his ministers feared for his life.

Two ministers, one impossible promise each

Gunadhya and his fellow minister Sarvavarman coaxed the king back to speech at last, and found his single demand simple but daunting: he wanted to be taught the entire science of grammar, and quickly. Gunadhya offered six years as an honest estimate. Sarvavarman, carried away by rivalry, rashly promised six months instead — and the two ministers, unable to back down in front of the king, sealed the boast with a wager: if Sarvavarman failed, he would carry Gunadhya's sandals on his own head for twelve years; if he somehow succeeded, Gunadhya would give up the use of Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the common vernacular forever.

A desperate pilgrimage, and a god's direct intervention

Regretting his own rashness almost immediately, Sarvavarman undertook a punishing fasting pilgrimage to the shrine of the god Kartikeya, and there, half-dead with exhaustion, received the entire science of grammar directly from the god's own mouth — a new, deliberately compact system that would come to be called the Katantra. He returned in time to fulfill his boast to the letter, and the king, overjoyed, learned the whole of grammar exactly as promised.

A losing wager, honored in full

Bound now by his own word, Gunadhya gave up Sanskrit, Prakrit, and the vernacular all at once, reducing himself to permanent silence in every language but one: the strange Pisacha tongue he had only just begun to pick up by listening to spirits argue among themselves in the Vindhya forest — the very language, as it happened, that would let him greet Kanabhuti when the time finally came.

A curious question about two old, unusual names

Once his own story caught up to the present moment, Kanabhuti had one more question left: why, exactly, had the two exiled gods been named Pushpadanta and Malyavan in the first place? Gunadhya, drawing on another tale he had once heard, answered with the story of a young man named Devadatta.

A guest insulted, and a family shattered over it

Devadatta was one of five sons born to a Brahmin named Govindadatta, and when a visiting guest was met with nothing but disrespectful laughter from the brothers, their furious father disowned all five on the spot rather than risk the guest's curse. Devastated by his father's harshness, Devadatta alone left home to undertake severe penance, eventually winning Shiva's own favor and a promise of future divine service — but only after he had first lived out an ordinary human life of learning and love.

A secret sign, misread by the one it was meant for

That ordinary life brought him, eventually, to the notice of a king's daughter named Shri, who signaled her interest to him from a window by dropping a flower from her teeth — a gesture Devadatta himself failed entirely to understand, and which his own old teacher had to decode for him instead, much to the princess's initial fury when she learned her chosen suitor hadn't solved her riddle on his own.

A god's own attendant arranges a secret marriage

Shiva's attendant Panchashikha intervened on the young man's behalf, disguising Devadatta as a woman and depositing him, under a false pretext, directly inside the princess's own heavily guarded quarters for safekeeping. There the two were secretly married, and once the princess was pregnant, the same divine attendant spirited Devadatta away again, restored him to his true form, and presented him properly to her father as the real husband all along.

A king recalls an old story about total sacrifice

Faced with the sudden, impossible disappearance of his own daughter's supposed companion and the miraculous reappearance of a son-in-law he had never met, the bewildered king found himself thinking of an old story about the legendary King Shivi, who had once offered pieces of his own flesh, and finally his entire body, to save a single dove from a hawk that was, in truth, a god in disguise testing his righteousness — proof, the king reflected, that the world was still capable of exactly this kind of impossible, self-sacrificing devotion, even now.