The Three Sensitive Queens

One queen is bruised by a fallen lotus, one blistered by moonlight, one welted by a sound heard from far away. Which of the three is the most delicate?

King Dharmadhvaja has three queens of impossible delicacy. A lotus falling on one raises a wound; moonlight blisters the second in her sleep; the third is welted merely by hearing a distant pestle. The king cannot say which is the most delicate. You judge first, then Vikramaditya does, and the answer is a small lesson in how to compare things that all seem beyond compare.

The Burning Ground

Down from the tree came the corpse, onto the king's shoulders, and he walked on. After the grim tale of the lion, the Vetala offered a lighter one, though it hid a point of its own.

The Three Delicate Queens

A king named Dharmadhvaja had three queens, each of a delicacy beyond anything the world had seen, and he could never decide which of them was the most tender.

One day the first queen, Indulekha, was playing with the king, and a single blue lotus slipped and fell into her lap. Where the soft flower touched her, a wound rose on her skin, and she fainted from the hurt of it.

Another night the second queen, Taravali, lay asleep, and a beam of the moon came through the window and fell upon her body. She woke crying that she was burned, and blisters had risen on her skin where the moonlight had lain.

And the third queen, Mrgankavati, one day heard, from a house some way off, the dull sound of a wooden pestle pounding rice. At the mere sound of it she cried out that she was struck, and welts rose upon her hands, as though she had been beaten.

The king marvelled at all three, and could not for the life of him say which was the most delicate.

The Betaal's Riddle

"So, king," said the Vetala. "One queen was wounded by the touch of a lotus. One was blistered by a ray of the moon. And one was welted by nothing but the far-off sound of a pestle. Which of these three was the most delicate?

Answer, if you know. You know the rules."

You Be the Judge

Pause here, before the verdict. All three are delicate past believing. But look closely at what it took to wound each one. A flower that touched her. A moonbeam that fell on her. A sound that reached her from a distance. Which affliction, when you truly weigh it, belongs to the most delicate woman of the three?

Vikram's Verdict

"The third, Mrgankavati, who was hurt by the sound," said Vikramaditya. "Consider what it took to reach each of them.

"The first was wounded by a lotus, but the lotus touched her; something real, however soft, lay against her skin. The second was blistered by moonlight, and though moonlight does not touch, it did at least fall full upon her body; she was bathed in the very thing that harmed her. But the third was struck by a sound, and a sound is the faintest and most bodiless thing of the three. Nothing touched her. Nothing fell upon her. A far-off noise merely reached her ears, and that alone was enough to raise welts on her flesh. The fainter the cause that can wound a person, the more delicate that person must be, and no cause is fainter than a distant sound. She is the most delicate of the three."

The corpse slipped from his shoulder, back to the tree.

The Dharma

It is a light tale, and it means to make you smile, but the king's method inside it is worth keeping. He is handed three things, each of them extreme, and asked which is the most extreme of all. He does not throw up his hands and call them equal. He finds the one axis along which they truly differ, the faintness of the cause that could reach each queen, and he lays all three of them along it. A lotus touches; moonlight falls; a sound merely arrives. From the gross to the subtle, the causes grow fainter, and the delicacy they reveal grows finer. That is how you compare things that all seem beyond comparison: not by how strange each one is, but by finding the single dimension on which they can all be measured.

And there is a gentler truth folded inside the joke. Delicacy is measured by the subtlety of what can move you, and this is not only a matter of tender skin. It is the law of every fineness. The subtle, the tradition says, is perceived only by the subtle: the faintest note caught only by the finest ear, the smallest wrong felt only by the most sensitive conscience. To be moved by what others cannot even detect is the very mark of a refined instrument. But notice the cost sewn into the gift. The queen who could be reached by a distant sound could also be wounded by it. Every refinement is a matching vulnerability. The same fineness that lets you feel what others miss is the fineness that bleeds where others feel nothing at all.

In Your World

We are quick to call sensitivity a weakness. The person hurt by a tone of voice no one else noticed, troubled by a small unfairness the room shrugged off, kept awake by a single wrong word, we call them thin-skinned, too much, dramatic. But the tale asks you to look again. Sometimes what looks like weakness is simply a finer instrument, registering something real that coarser instruments cannot pick up. The sound was real; only the most delicate queen could feel it.

So hold two things together. If you are one of the finely tuned, do not wish your sensitivity away on the days it wounds you; it is the same faculty that lets you perceive what others miss. And when you meet someone more sensitive than you, before you dismiss their delicacy as drama, consider that they may be feeling something true that you are simply too coarse to catch. The finest of the three queens was not the most foolish of them. She was the one who could feel what the others could not.