Nakkeerar disputes Shiva's poem

A Pandya king lay awake over a small question: did the fragrance in his queen's hair come from the flowers she wore or from the hair itself? He hung a purse of gold at the academy for the poet who could tell him. Dharumi, a temple poet with nothing to his name, wept before the god for a verse, and a stranger came out of the shrine and wrote him one: the scent, it said, was the woman's own, as the bee knows. The academy approved it and Dharumi reached for the purse, and Nakkeerar, head of the Sangam, stopped him. There was a flaw: no woman's hair smells of itself. The stranger came to argue. Not even the hair of the goddess? Not even hers. The stranger opened the eye in his forehead. A fault is a fault, Nakkeerar said, even if the one who points it out is burnt for it, and he was burnt to ash on the spot. Then the god relented, raised him, quizzed him on grammar to be sure the lesson had taken, and sent him back to his seat. The temple stages the quarrel every year.