Royalty

Very muchly unfinished yet. It's an illustration to a story I used to read when I was small. The story is from a book my mom got when she was a little girl. I loved reading the book when I was a little girl. The stories are Indian folktales and I guess I've just always liked reading foreign stuff :P I was reading the book again the other day and it occurred to me that maybe the fact that it has so many tales about stupid rich people isn't necessarily just a coincidence -- the book was originally published in the USSR.

The story is called The Jester's Revenge. In the story there's a jester who worked for many years for a rajah. The rajah never said a single kind word and used to beat the jester up when he was in a bad mood. Once the rajah beat the jester so much that he got ill and got completely bed-bound. When the jester was lying in his bed he started thinking about how to take revenge to the evil rajah. He told his wife to tell the rajah's old nurse that he had suddenly died. The old nurse scurried off to tell the rajah and rani that the jester has died.

So in the picture the old nurse tells what has happened and the rajah says how dare the jester go and die like that and the rani says that too bad he didn't have his head chopped off in time, he really didn't have the decency to appreciate the rajah's good will.

The jester tricks the rajah and rani to believe that he is Shiva and will bring them to heaven. In reality he has them died to the back of an ox, wlak around all night, have their faces smeared black and then leave them by the river for everyone to see. The everyone laughs at them, of course, and are made fun of for the rets of their lives.