A rival grammar, and a wife's fame outgrowing a husband's

Vararuchi's penance succeeded where his scholarship had failed: Shiva, satisfied with his devotion, revealed to him the very same new grammar that had cost him his reputation, closing the old rivalry with Panini for good. He returned home to find his own achievement almost eclipsed by his wife's — the whole city was still talking about Upakosha's cleverness, and he received the news of it with more pride and delight than any wound to his own vanity could survive.

A teacher's fee, and a dead king

When his teacher Varsha asked to learn the new grammar in turn, his fee was a staggering ten million gold pieces, more than Vararuchi and his fellow pupils Vyadi and Indradatta could raise on their own. They set off to ask King Nanda for it directly — only to arrive at his camp and discover, to their horror, that the king had died only moments before.

A sorcerer's soul, borrowed for an afternoon

Indradatta, a gifted sorcerer, offered a solution as strange as the problem: he would send his own soul into the dead king's body just long enough to grant the money, while Vyadi stood watch over his own empty body, waiting in a nearby temple for his return. It worked exactly as planned — the dead king rose, ruled for a moment as though nothing had happened, and ordered the fee paid in full.

A minister too clever for his own good

But Nanda's real minister, Shakatala, was too sharp not to notice something deeply wrong about a corpse that suddenly asked questions and issued orders, and — before Indradatta could return to his own waiting body — ordered every unclaimed corpse in the region burned as a precaution. Indradatta's true body was destroyed in the sweep, sealing his soul permanently inside the dead king's form. The court, meanwhile, celebrated a miraculous royal recovery, never realizing the truth.

A new minister, and an old rival imprisoned

On Vyadi's urgent advice, the transformed king — now known as Yogananda — made Vararuchi his chief minister, wary of what the too-perceptive Shakatala might have already guessed. At Vararuchi's own suggestion, Yogananda then had Shakatala thrown into a dark dungeon, along with all one hundred of his sons, to remove the threat entirely.

A hundred sons starved for the sake of one father's revenge

The prisoners were given rations barely sufficient for a single man to survive on. Shakatala's sons, reasoning that only their father was capable of ever avenging them, insisted he alone eat what little food they were given — and, one by one, all hundred of them starved to death in front of him, leaving Shakatala the only survivor of his own family, and a man with nothing left to lose.

A softened heart, and an old grudge that never actually died

Years later, moved by conscience and the pressures of his own growing duties, Vararuchi had Shakatala released from the dungeon and restored as a co-minister — genuinely believing the old man's hunger for revenge must have been broken along with his family. It had not. Shakatala accepted the reinstatement gratefully, and quietly began waiting for a better moment.

A riddle answered by a hand in the river

Vararuchi's brilliance, meanwhile, kept the whole court in awe. When the king once saw a mysterious hand rise from the middle of the Ganges with its five fingers pressed together, Vararuchi alone understood its silent question — what can five men accomplish together? — and answered by holding up two fingers of his own: enough, he meant, when even two minds are truly united. The hand vanished, satisfied, and Shakatala watched with quiet dread as his rival's reputation grew harder and harder to challenge.

A dead fish that laughs, and a harem full of secrets

When the king, in a fit of baseless jealousy, ordered an innocent Brahmin executed over nothing more than a queen glancing his way, a dead fish in the market was heard to laugh aloud at the sight of the condemned man being led away — and the king, baffled, demanded Vararuchi explain it. Guided once again by Sarasvati, Vararuchi hid overnight in a tree and overheard a demoness telling her hungry children exactly why the fish had found it so funny: that the whole royal harem was secretly full of men disguised as women, while an innocent stranger was about to die for nothing. The execution was stopped, the disguised men exposed, and Vararuchi's reputation climbed higher still.

A secret mark, and a king's dangerous conclusion

Then a royal portrait of the queen, painted so lifelike it seemed to lack only speech, caught Vararuchi's eye: he noticed, by pure deduction from the placement of her other features, that one small private mark on her body had been left out — and casually painted it in himself. When Yogananda discovered the correction, he could think of only one explanation for how anyone besides himself could know such an intimate detail, and — remembering the disguised men in his own harem — convinced himself in a fury that Vararuchi must be the secret culprit behind it all.

A death sentence quietly refused

Ordered to execute his own former rival, Shakatala instead chose to protect him — arranging a fake death, hiding Vararuchi safely in his own house, and keeping the truth from the enraged king. In gratitude, Vararuchi finally showed his protector two secret allies he could summon at will: a Rakshasa demon he had once outwitted with a riddle, and the goddess of the Ganges herself, both of whom appeared instantly at his thought and vanished again just as quickly, leaving Shakatala speechless with astonishment.

A story told to ease a long, anxious hiding

To comfort Vararuchi through the long uncertainty of his concealment, Shakatala told him the story of a minister named Shivavarman, once wrongly suspected by his own king of a crime he never committed, sent off to a neighboring court to be secretly executed. Rather than let himself be quietly murdered, Shivavarman insisted the neighboring king kill him openly instead — and that king, sensing something was deeply wrong with the whole arrangement, simply expelled him unharmed. Back home, the real culprit was eventually caught, and Shivavarman's name was cleared entirely on its own, without him ever needing to lift a finger in his own defense. Righteousness, Shakatala told his hidden friend, cannot be undone forever — only delayed.