In a forest at the edge of a great town there lived a jackal named Chandarava, thin and always hungry, who was forever slinking to the town’s edge to see what he might steal.
One evening, driven by hunger, he crept in among the houses. But the dogs of the town caught his scent, and set upon him with such a din of barking and snapping that he ran for his life down street and alley, this way and that, until at last he blundered through the open door of a dyer’s yard and tumbled headlong into a great vat of indigo.
When he clambered out and fled home to the forest, the dogs had lost him, but the jackal was no longer a jackal to look at. From nose to tail he was dyed a deep and brilliant blue, a colour no creature of the forest had ever seen.
Now when the other animals caught sight of this strange blue beast, they did not know what to make of it, and they were afraid. The lions and the tigers, the elephants and the wolves, all drew back and would not come near.
The jackal, who was cunning, saw at once how things stood, and he made the most of it. “Do not be afraid,” he called out grandly. “The great god Brahma has made me with his own hands, and sent me down to rule over you. Blue Majesty, I am called, and I am come to be your king.”
And so the beasts of the forest bowed before him and made him their king. The lions brought down game and laid it at his feet, the others waited upon him, and the blue jackal lived in great state, with the mightiest animals of the wood for his servants. But he was careful, in his cunning, to drive away all the other jackals, his own kind, lest they know him for what he truly was.
For a time all went well. But one evening, as the blue king sat among his court, there rose up from far off in the forest the sound of a pack of jackals howling at the moon, as jackals do.
And the blue jackal, hearing that old familiar cry, forgot himself entirely. He lifted his head, and out of him burst a long, high, howling answer, the unmistakable voice of a common jackal.
At once the lions and the tigers understood. The thing they had bowed to was no god and no king, but a jackal like any other, dyed blue and full of lies. And in their fury at having been made fools of, they fell upon him then and there, and that was the end of Blue Majesty and his kingdom both.
Fine colours may hide what a creature is, but sooner or later its own voice gives it away.