Tenali Raman's Cure for the King's Toothache

King Krishnadevaraya, suffering for days from an agonizing, swollen toothache that his physicians could not immediately resolve, grew so short-tempered and irritable that the entire court began avoiding him wherever possible, tiptoeing around every decision and snapping to silence whenever he entered a room, his foul mood infecting the whole palace.

While everyone else made themselves scarce, Tenali Raman deliberately sought the king out, approaching him directly despite the obvious risk of catching the brunt of his temper. He began telling, with total seriousness, an increasingly absurd and improbable story about a fictional neighboring king who had once mistaken his own royal turban for an angry cobra and spent an entire terrified night fleeing his own bedchamber from it.

The king, despite his pain and irritation, found himself drawn helplessly into the sheer ridiculousness of the tale, and when Raman reached the story's most absurd twist, Krishnadevaraya burst into sudden, genuine laughter — so sudden and forceful that the swollen abscess in his jaw ruptured on the spot, draining the built-up pressure that had been causing him such agony for days. His pain eased almost immediately afterward, and his mood lifted along with it. The court, astonished that Raman had succeeded where careful avoidance had only prolonged everyone's suffering, learned a lesson repeated for years after: sometimes the situation everyone is tiptoeing around is exactly the one that needs someone bold enough to walk straight toward it instead.