A clever boy finds every door closed

In the small Telugu town of Tenali, in the years when the Vijayanagara empire still stood as the last great Hindu kingdom of the south, there lived a sharp-tongued young Brahmin named Ramakrishna, whose father had died before he was old enough to remember his face and whose mother had carried him home to her brother's house to be raised on charity and correction in equal measure. He grew clever the way certain boys grow tall — without anyone quite approving of it — and by the time he was old enough to seek his fortune among the scholars of the land, his wit had outpaced his patience for their solemnities. He walked from town to town seeking a teacher who would take him in, but wherever he went he found the great pandits closed ranks against him: he was a worshipper of Shiva among men who prized only their own Vaishnava learning, and no amount of cleverness, they informed him with considerable satisfaction, could substitute for the right god. He was turned away so many times, and with such uniform courtesy, that he began to wonder whether cleverness itself might be a kind of curse — a gift nobody wanted delivered to their door.

A stranger's advice at the end of the road

It was somewhere on this long circuit of polite refusals that Ramakrishna, footsore and considerably less amused with the world than his reputation would later suggest, fell in with an old ascetic who had made a study of exactly the kind of hunger the boy was carrying. The sage listened to his complaints — the doors shut, the scholars smug, the years slipping past with nothing to show for his cleverness but a longer list of towns that didn't want him — and offered not sympathy, which the boy plainly did not need, but instructions. There stood, at the edge of a certain village, a temple of the goddess Kali, half-forgotten and rarely visited; if the boy went there at night and repeated a particular mantra one thousand and eight times without faltering, the sage told him, the goddess herself would appear and grant him whatever he asked. It was the kind of promise most people receive with polite disbelief and quietly ignore. Ramakrishna, who had nothing left to lose and rather more patience for ritual than for pandits, walked straight there and began.

A night of chanting, and more than chanting

He sat before the ancient, weather-worn image in the failing light and began the count, and being a young man who did nothing by halves, he did not stop at one thousand and eight. The night wore on; the mantra wore smoother and smoother on his tongue until it seemed to recite itself without him; and still he kept on, past the point of obedience and somewhere into the territory of pure stubbornness, until the temple around him had gone entirely dark and silent and he could no longer say with certainty how many times he had spoken the goddess's name. It is the sort of devotion that either burns a man out entirely or, very occasionally, actually works. That night, for once, it worked.

The goddess appears, and the boy does not ask for wealth

The image before him seemed first to tremble, then to glow, and then it was no longer an image at all: Kali herself stood in the temple in her full and famously alarming splendor, garlanded in skulls, a thousand arms fanned out around her like some impossible many-limbed tree, ready — as goddesses always are in these stories — to grant the exhausted young man before her absolutely anything he cared to ask. A wiser petitioner, or at least a more conventional one, would have asked for wealth, or learning, or a place at some great court. Ramakrishna looked up at the vision of the terrible goddess of destruction, considered his own two arms, and began, quite helplessly, to laugh.

A joke, offered instead of a prayer

Forgive me, Mother, he said, when he had recovered himself enough to speak — but I have only two hands, and on a bad day I cannot manage one running nose with both of them. You have a thousand arms. I only wonder how you would manage, poor thing, if you ever caught cold. It was not reverent. It was not even, by any strict measure, wise. But it was exactly the sort of joke that only a mind entirely unafraid of its own audacity could produce in front of the goddess of death with a boon still hanging in the air, unclaimed.

A blessing better than any he had asked for

Kali did not, as legend rather sensibly points out she might have, strike the impertinent boy down. She laughed instead — a rare enough sound in that particular goddess's repertoire — and told him that where solemn men brought her solemn prayers by the thousand, he alone had thought to bring her a joke, and that this, of everything mortals had ever laid at her feet, pleased her best. She named him vikata kavi, the jesting poet, and promised that his wit, sharpened now by her own blessing, would carry him further than any grammar or scripture could have done — all the way, in fact, to the court of the great king Krishnadevaraya of Vijayanagara, where he would sit among the finest minds in the land and be remembered, long after the pandits who had turned him away were forgotten, simply as Tenali Rama.

How the jester found his kingdom

What followed took years rather than a single night — a court does not open its doors to a wandering Shaiva boy from Tenali merely because a goddess has vouched for his sense of humor — but the blessing proved true in the way the best ones do, sideways and slowly. He made his way at last to Vijayanagara, talked and joked and argued his way into notice, and was in time seated among the Ashtadiggajas, the eight great poets who ornamented Krishnadevaraya's court like matched jewels on a crown — the only one of the eight, as it happened, whose particular jewel was mischief. The scholars who had once shut their doors on him would have been astonished to learn what became of the joke they had all been too solemn to make themselves.