Land of Lala

Our lady of Vanga had trouble on her brow.
Trouble brewing darkly on the fair and lovely brow of a beautiful principal consort of the sovereign of Vanga: and no amount of sandalwood paste nor costly unguents couriered in from far away Alesandra could erase the creases that were taking up permanent residence on her fair brow.
It was, of course on account of a Beautiful Daughter.

But then this was nothing new in the Great Chronicle, where most of your Royal Seehala problems could be roughly categorised into:
a) Randy beautiful daughters who must be incarcerated effectively else they would duly elope with the neighbourhood despot and ruin your reputation
b) Calculating parricidal male offspring who couldn’t wait the ten or twenty years of reign an average Sinhala king could expect those days (what with antibiotics and the Hiemlich manoeuvre still being about two thousand years away from being discovered)
c) Drought, famine and a general shortage of war elephants
d) and invading Cholas,[1] usually in that order.

Queen Maya , the herself Beautiful Daughter of Kalingha was now seriously worrying on subject(a)
She had just had this mother – daughter chat with her glowing offspring and this most radiant of princesses had admitted to some of the most scandalous desires she had ever lent Royal ear to.
The princess was of course one of those endearing, mixed up and misunderstood nymphos that dot the Great Chronicle and as this story was written by a few serious minded and generally disapproving monks, in a secluded hermitage in Ceylon, the only possible reaction to her honest confession, was shock(!) horror(!!) and shame… (!!!)
She for her part was a feisty young thing who would not be restricted and demanded her independence unlike the unfortunate Ummada Chitta[2]…and this resulted in her finally being allowed to go for walks in the jungle alone.
That’s what the Chronicle says although it is difficult to imagine that the King would not have sent a pose of body guards at least a safe distance behind her – if he cared, I mean: it was his daughter and his reputation and all that not to mention, a matter of National Security if you look at the facts ….

The princess taking a solitary walk, unattended and disguised ….(pg29)decamped under the protection of a caravan chief who preceded to the Magada country…

And then along comes this lion..


She observed him and recollecting the prediction she had heard of the fortune tellers, freed from all fear , exciting him, caressed him…(pg 30)

We all agree we need to learn from history. My personal observations then are that :
(a) Fortune-tellers are darned dangerous: they tell you this sort of stuff and you take it seriously and then you go and do this sort of thing. If this lion had’nt been randy enough Ms Kalinga would have been just another statistic and there would not have been any Sinhala at all.
(b)If not for how poetically it was drafted, the Great Chronicle would be the oldest document to be rated triple x, considering that this is technically zoophilia we are discussing here.

…by her having thus fondled him, his passion being aroused the lion then…

more next time,folks...

Footnotes
[1] This was of course before the invention of Cable TV and the only recreation these poor dear Cholas seem to have been able to come up with was constantly but half heartedly plotting to invade Ceylon…
[2] another story in its own right