A curry the king cannot stop craving

In the royal gardens of Vijayanagara there grew a particular strain of brinjal, tended nowhere else in the kingdom, from which the palace cooks made a curry so rich and so strange in its flavor that King Krishnadevaraya had long ago declared the recipe a state treasure and the garden itself off-limits to anyone without express royal permission. He served it only rarely, and always with a certain proprietary pride, as a man might show off a jewel nobody else was permitted to touch. It was at one such dinner that Tenali Rama, seated among the other courtiers, took his first mouthful of the famous curry and understood at once why the king guarded it so jealously — and understood, with rather more concern, that he was not going to be able to stop thinking about it.

A wife's simple request, and an impossible garden

He went home still tasting it, and made the mistake of describing the dish to his wife in loving and exhaustive detail over dinner, a meal she had cooked herself and which suffered badly by comparison. She listened to the whole rapturous account and then, with the flat practicality wives in these stories generally possess, told him that if the brinjals were so remarkable, he ought simply to bring some home so she could cook the curry herself, and then he could compare the results honestly instead of pining after a single royal dinner for the rest of his life. It was, on its face, a reasonable request. It also required stealing from the king's private garden, which was watched day and night by guards who took considerable pride in never having lost so much as a single vegetable to a thief.

A night climb over the palace wall

Tenali, who had talked his way out of worse situations than an overprotective wife, decided that a poet's cunning ought to be equal to a gardener's fence, and went that very night dressed in dark clothes to scale the garden wall while the guards dozed at their posts or paced their rounds at the far end of the grounds. He moved among the prized brinjal vines like a man robbing a temple, plucking three of the finest and heaviest fruits he could find by touch alone, and slipped back over the wall with his prize before the watch had come round again — pleased with himself in the particular way of a man who has gotten away with something he fully expects, sooner or later, to be caught for.

A curry cooked, and a son who saw too much

His wife made the curry that very night, well past the hour any respectable household should have been cooking, and the two of them ate it together in a satisfied and slightly guilty silence, agreeing — as people always do after going to considerable trouble for something — that it had absolutely been worth it. Their young son, however, had woken in the small hours, wandered out half-asleep, and seen his father slipping in from the garden wall in the dead of night with his arms full of something he was trying rather too hard to hide. Children remember exactly the details their parents would most prefer they forget, and Tenali knew at once that a boy who had seen his father climbing walls after midnight was a loose thread that could unravel the whole business by morning.

The rain that never fell

So Tenali did what any resourceful father with a guilty conscience and a much cleverer mind than most fathers would do: he fetched a pot of water and poured it gently over his sleeping son, then woke him with great concern, exclaiming that a sudden rain must have caught him out on the veranda, poor boy, and wasn't it lucky his father had been up and about to notice and bring him in. The boy, damp, disoriented, and half-convinced by his own father's evident alarm, accepted the explanation, ate the supper he was given without a second thought, and went back to sleep with no memory that would trouble anyone by daylight — a small, damp masterpiece of misdirection.

The missing brinjals, and a confession offered with a smile

The theft was discovered the very next morning, of course, when the royal gardener made his rounds and found three of the finest fruits gone from vines he had personally sworn were beyond any thief's reach; the king was informed, the guards were questioned, and the whole palace buzzed for a day with theories about who could possibly have dared such a thing. It was Tenali himself, in the end, who put a stop to the speculation, presenting himself before Krishnadevaraya and confessing the whole affair — the dinner, the craving, the wife, the midnight climb, and the small performance of rainfall he had staged for his own son's benefit — with such evident relish in his own audacity that the king, who had begun the audience genuinely irritated, found himself laughing before the story was half finished.

A pardon, and a standing invitation

Krishnadevaraya, who valued a good story rather more than three brinjals, pardoned the theft on the spot and declared that any man clever enough to steal from a royal garden and then charming enough to confess it afterward without losing his head deserved a standing invitation rather than a punishment — and from that day the palace gardeners were instructed to let Tenali Rama take whatever brinjals he pleased, by the front gate and in broad daylight, sparing everyone concerned, not least the boy, a good many more damp and mysterious nights.