The older folk in the village often claim that they do not like it one bit that their children sit around the drunken Annaiah every evening listening to Ramani’s love story when they should be listening to tales of the gods. Annaiah’s defence, and that of the children, is that Kamadeva is also a god. Annaiah says, unless you understand Kamadeva and his motivations, you don’t understand life at all. He insists that the children learn more from his stories than what they are taught at the new-fangled government schools that have come up everywhere.

It is not as if the older folks go to Dasegowda, who is still offering to tell other gods’ tales. They sit with their children and listen to Annaiah, ostensibly to keep an eye on the children and their morality. Very often, the tales are explicitly sexual, but the children seem to take it in their stride. Indeed, it’s the adults who are less stoic, while the teenagers blush and exchange secret glances.

Each day the tale is different. You could listen to it on any day without knowing what happened before. Sometimes the older folk, in an effort to be helpful, remember earlier and other instances. These they retell the children late at night when Annaiah gets grouchy and stops at some excessively interesting point. The older folk crib, the children wail, but Annaiah says enough for today, go, and that is that. The only common element in all the tales is that the story is about Rajkumari Ramani, the most beautiful woman in the world, who had lost herself seeking Kamadeva.

Sometimes the king’s palace is five-walled or three, at others seven. Sometimes the leader of the king’s guards has daughters, sometimes he has daughters-in-law. Sometimes he carries her back on a black horse, sometimes white. In each version, the men who try to win Ramani’s hand with their antics do entirely different things. Strangely, even those belonging to the same generation, who supposedly listened to Annaiah’s tales sitting next to each other, cannot be brought to agree on the details of these stories.

Annaiah himself is exasperating. If he accidentally overhears someone retelling a bit, he gets upset that his special tale is being plagiarized by these ordinary folk. He promptly denies that he ever said that at all. The children, of course, always believe what Annaiah says. They accuse the helpful parents and the uncles and aunts of making up false stories in place of Annaiah’s real ones. His point achieved, Annaiah smirks and leaves, leaving the older folk chastised and fuming. And the next day, he jumps back in time to the period of the retold story and weaves an entirely new one.