A reward promised, and quietly forgotten

After some particular service to the throne — the kind of clever rescue or timely joke that Tenali seemed to produce on a weekly basis — King Krishnadevaraya, delighted and expansive in the moment, promised to grant him the revenue of an entire village as a mark of royal gratitude. It was a generous gift, sincerely meant, and like a great many sincere royal promises made in a moment of good feeling, it was never actually written down, and within a season the king had moved on to other business and forgotten the matter entirely, while Tenali, who had rather been counting on it, found himself unwilling to simply walk up and remind his sovereign that he owed him a debt.

Waiting for an opening that never comes

Months passed in this awkward silence. Tenali was too proud, or too shrewd, to raise the matter directly — a courtier who nags his king about unpaid favors rarely improves his standing, however justified the complaint — and so he waited, watching for some natural opening in the day's business that he might turn, with a well-placed word, toward the subject of his forgotten village.

A camel, and a king's idle curiosity

His chance arrived from an unexpected direction, in the form of a merchant's camel being led through the palace grounds on some errand or other, at which the king paused, struck by the strange, humped, long-necked animal in a way that only a man who has never had to ride one for a living can afford to be, and remarked to those around him on what an odd and comical shape the beast possessed.

A parable disguised as an answer

Tenali, seeing his opening at last, offered the king an explanation with a perfectly straight face: this camel, he said, had once been a king in a former life — a king who made a generous promise to a deserving man and then, through simple carelessness rather than any real unkindness, forgot to honor it. The gods, mindful of every unkept royal word, had condemned him to carry the weight of that broken promise on his own back for the rest of his days, in the shape of the very hump the king found so amusing.

A grant remembered, and a hump avoided

Krishnadevaraya, no fool himself and perfectly capable of recognizing a joke aimed squarely at his own conscience, burst out laughing, admitted at once that he had indeed forgotten his promise, and called for the grant of the village to be drawn up and sealed before the sun had set on the same conversation — remarking, as the scribes set to work, that he had no particular wish to spend any future incarnation quite so heavily burdened, and that a poet clever enough to remind a king of his duty with a camel's hump deserved every hectare he had been promised.