Kottavi Raja and his Sleepy Kingdom

Yasaswini Sampathkumar

YAWN!
Kottavi Raja
was sleepy. His ministers were talking about a complex problem and he was
bored.
He hadn’t slept well last night, or the night before. Or the thirty
nights before that. He tried to concentrate on what they were saying. But the
sentences were so garbled!

“Insofar as the
lessee is concerned, the right glablaglablaaa to till and tax blblblublooo
loooballaooozzzzzzzzzzzz. ”
His head lolled
forward.
Raja Nalan was
a good king. But of late, he had a problem staying awake during the day. He
yawned in court all the time. So people had started calling him Kottavi Raja,
because
‘kottavi’ means ‘yawn’ in Tamil.

“Sujata,” he
asked his queen one night, gently waking her up,
“how come you are so alert and energetic throughout the day?”
“Because I
sleep at night,” she snapped. “And so should you.”
Yes, sleep at
night. But how? He was always sleepy during the day, sleepiest in the evening.
But by night, he was alert, not at all sleepy!
The next
morning, in court, Kottavi Raja asked, “Prime Minister, what do you do when you
aren’t sleepy at night?”
“I ask Nidra
Devi, the goddess of sleep, to bless me,” he said.
“How?”
“My mother used
to say the goddess cannot resist a full stomach. So I ask my cook to serve a
rich dinner, full of warm, sweet things. Two minutes after eating it, I’m fast
asleep.”
Kottavi Raja
saw the minister’s round stomach. And
believed him.

The Finance
Minister did not want to be left out. So he said, “I drink warm milk with honey
at night. Simple, no fuss. No need to trouble the cook. And I always sleep a
full nine hours.”
The court
musician did not like all these stories of food. When his stomach was full, he
couldn’t sing. But he wanted to help. So he said, “In our family, my lord, we
always invite Nidra Devi with music. A beautiful Neelambari, sung with the
veena… Ah, bliss!”

The poet said,
“A gentle stroll in the palace gardens with a soft breeze blowing and the
moonlight falling on parijatham f lowers....ah!
The beauty and poetry of the moment will wash away all your worries, Maharaja.
Nidra Devi loves a peaceful mind.”
The court
jester added, “If nothing else works, my lord, a good story will always get you
to sleep.”

‘So many things to try,’ thought Kottavi Raja.
‘One of them has to work.’
That evening, the royal cooks were asked
to prepare a special meal.

Warm rice with
ghee, hot sambar, fried potatoes, yam and khus khus payasam. And, to wash it all
down, cool buttermilk. The king wanted to be sure that he would sleep at night,
so he took two helpings of every dish.
It was nearly 11 pm when he finished. Yet – old habits are hard to break – he wasn’t sleepy.

He tossed and he turned and he became very unhappy
with his Prime Minister. Nidra Devi was missing! He decided he simply hadn’t
eaten enough.
“Cook!” he
bellowed.
A sleepy cook
hurriedly dressed and ran to the king.
“Get me a large
glass of warm milk with honey! Hurry!”

Kottavi Raja
gulped it down. Ouch! He was soooo full. He couldn’t get up, he couldn’t move
and he definitely couldn’t lie down and fall asleep.
‘Perhaps I
should try music,’ he thought.
He sent for the
court musicians. They came, turbans askew, with hurriedly tied dhotis. It was
past midnight.

“Play
Neelambari for me!” he said.
It was
wonderful to listen to the melody in the still night. Kottavi Raja relaxed.
What bliss!
Twenty minutes
later, his eyelids began to droop...
Then – TWANG!
THUD!
The veena player had fallen asleep on his instrument. .

They began
again. But one after the other, the sleepy musicians dropped notes and played
the wrong tune. It was cacophony. Nidra Devi heard those tunes and bolted! And
the king was wide awake and very annoyed.
He remembered
his jester’s idea and summoned him.
“Tell me a
story!” he said.

The jester
started a long boring story, hoping that the king would fall asleep. Ah, but
our Kottavi Raja was not pleased. He got impatient and kept saying, “Yes, yes,
but how does the story end?”
Nidra Devi
didn’t like the impatience. So she kept away.
One hour later, a hoarse jester ended the story and went home bleary-eyed. And the king? He was still awake.
He woke the
queen up and insisted on taking a stroll. She
got ready grumpily.

“Just up to the
jasmine garden, okay? After that I’ll come back and sleep!”
They walked in
the moonshine, heard the drowsy tittering of birds and went around the large
palace garden. The king found himself calming down and thought, ‘Aha! Now is
the time to go back and sleep.’
As he settled
down, there was a dreamy silence all around. Until he heard a curious rumbling.
From his stomach.
The music, the story, the breeze, and the walk had made
him hungry!

The queen took
matters into her hands. She ordered a small glass of milk, and got a masseuse
to press his legs. In a few minutes, Nidra Devi came and blessed the king. The
palace finally shut down for the night.

Every day, this routine continued. Over time, Kottavi Raja started to sleep earlier. In two weeks, he found that he fell asleep after his second glass of milk. A few weeks after that, he started sleeping just after his walk. A month later, the jester’s story put him to sleep.
And finally, he managed to sleep right after dinner. Most mornings, he woke up feeling fresh! He walked with a bounce in his step and smiled at everyone.

But what about
the cooks, the musicians, the jester, the masseuse, the queen? They remained on
standby through the night – they
never knew when the king might wake and ask for them. And they were sleepy,
tired and grumpy all day. So were the people who waited for them - the cook’s
wife, the musician’s son, the jester’s brother, the masseuse’s father, the
queen’s maid, the maid’s husband, the husband’s brother, the brother’s friend,
the friend’s parents... the whole city.
The king grew
worried about his sleepless people. He couldn’t recommend his elaborate remedy
to everyone. So he asked his chief priest for a solution. The wise man knew
that this was a tough problem. He said, “Get everyone to assemble in the town
hall fifteen days from now. They should have a warm bath, finish dinner and
arrive at sunset. I will summon Nidra Devi to bless everyone.”

So the entire
city gathered. They were all relieved that their sleepless nights were going to
end. The priest began to chant hymns in praise of the goddess.

A few minutes
into his droning, a new mother, the sleepiest of them all, yawned. Looking at
her, her infant yawned. The baby’s father saw this and...yes, yawned.
A
musician yawned halfway through a tune, and twenty people around him yawned.
Then, their neighbours yawned and a mighty wave of yawns swept through the
gathering.

Nidra Devi
couldn’t resist the power of so many yawns.
She came running to the city, and touched everyone with
a cooling breeze.
And from that
night onwards, she continued to bless everyone in Kottavi Raja’s land, every
night.