The King of Lunatics - 1
They tell this story in the village below the hill. In the years I have carried this story, it has grown a little at the edges, the way stories always do. The heart of it has remained unchanged, however, in spite of a whole millennium and a half that has passed since the time of our protagonist. Those were the days when kings ruled in Valluvanad and the Bharathapuzha ran fuller than it does now. A Brahmin scholar named Vararuchi was counted among the nine gems of King Vikramaditya’s court at Ujjain, and it was said that grammar and logic sat in his head like lamps in a temple, always burning, never flickering. Vararuchi loved a woman he was not permitted to love, a woman of the Paraya caste, the lowest in the land. He didn’t know who she really was. Otherwise he wouldn’t have gone anywhere near her. Panchami was found floating in the Bharathapuzha and was adopted by a poor childless Brahmin without knowing anything about her low-caste origin. During his long wandering in search o...
