The Three Fastidious Men

Three brothers of impossible refinement each detect a flaw no one else can. One smells corpses in the rice, one goats on a lady, one feels a hair beneath seven mattresses. Which is the most fastidious?

Three brothers, each supremely fastidious, come to a king's court to settle which of them is the finest. One refuses rice that faintly smells of the burning-ground; one rejects a beautiful woman who faintly smells of goat; one wakes welted by a single hair hidden under seven mattresses. All three are proven right. Which is the most fastidious of all? You judge first, then the king does.

The Burning Ground

The king climbed for the corpse, cut it loose, and carried it back across the ash. The Vetala, comfortable again, told a tale to match the last: not of delicate bodies now, but of impossibly delicate tastes.

The Three Who Could Not Be Pleased

Three brothers, the sons of a brahman named Vishnusvamin, were each so fastidious, each so impossibly refined in one thing, that they could not agree among themselves which of them was the finest. So they came to the court of King Prasenajit to have the matter settled.

The eldest was fastidious about food. The king had a splendid meal set before them, rice cooked to perfection with every flavour. The other two ate, but the eldest would not touch the rice. There is the smell of corpses about it, he said, I cannot eat it. It seemed an absurd insult to the king's kitchen, until they made inquiry, and found that the rice had indeed been grown in a field beside the burning-ground of a village.

The middle brother was fastidious about women. A beautiful lady, richly adorned, was brought to attend him, and any man would have thought himself blessed. But he drew back from her. She has the smell of a goat, he said. Again it seemed madness, and again they inquired, and found that the woman had been raised, as an infant, on goat's milk.

The youngest was fastidious about beds. They laid him down to sleep on seven soft mattresses piled one upon another. In the night he woke crying out in pain, and on his side there was a red crooked mark, as though a hair had been pressed deep into his flesh. They searched, and beneath all seven mattresses, at the very bottom, they found a single hair.