As Tirumala tells it
Tirumala tradition: the king's trial · 2 min read
Around the year 1500 a holy man came walking down from the north to the Venkata hill and built himself a hut near the temple. He was called Ram Das, and he did nothing all day but sit near the god and look at him, and chant Rama's name.
The god grew fond of him. One night there was a knock at the hut door, and when Ram Das opened it, the lord of the hill was standing there.
"I cannot sleep," said the god. "Play dice with me."
So they played, by a little lamp, the god and the old man, until it was nearly morning, and the god went back to the temple. After that he came often. Sometimes he won and sometimes Ram Das did, and neither of them minded.
One night they played too long. The sky was getting light, the priests would soon be opening the doors, and the god got up in a hurry and went, and left behind him on the floor of the hut one of his necklaces.
In the temple the priests found a necklace missing from the image, and raised the alarm. And while they were searching, Ram Das came to the temple carrying it.
"He left it in my hut last night," he said. "We were playing dice."
Nobody believed him. A stranger with no money, a temple jewel, a story about the god coming to play: they took him to the king of Chandragiri, Giridhara Raya, who ruled the country below the hill.
The king heard him out, and thought.
"If the god is your friend," he said, "he will help you. I will lock you in a room full of sugarcane. If it is all eaten by morning, you are innocent. If not, you will die."
They filled the room with sugarcane to the roof, and pushed the old man in, and barred the door, and set guards outside.
Ram Das sat down on the sugarcane and chanted the god's name, and after a while he fell asleep.
In the night the guards heard crunching. Inside the room, though none of them saw it, a huge white elephant had appeared, and it was eating the sugarcane, every stick, and then it was gone.
In the morning the king had the door opened. The room was empty except for the old man, asleep on the bare floor.
The king fell at his feet, and gave him charge of the temple's rituals, and the people called him Hathiram, hathi for the elephant and Ram for the name he chanted.
As the pilgrims tell it
Pilgrims' telling: the priests' room · 1 min read
Among the pilgrims there is no king in it. It is the priests who do not believe him, and who want to be rid of the newcomer who claims the god's friendship.
"If you are as holy as you say," they tell him, "eat this."
They lock him in a room with ten measures of cooked rice and ten bundles of sugarcane, enough to feed a village, and tell him it must all be gone by daybreak.
They stand outside the door and laugh. One of them puts his ear to the wood to hear the old man weep. He hears him chanting instead, quietly, the same name over and over, as he has every day since he came to the hill.
Then the chanting stops, and there is a sound inside like a great animal eating, a crunching and tearing, and the floor shakes under the priests' feet.
"What is he doing in there?" one of them whispers.
Nobody answers. The rice and the sugarcane are gone in minutes. Then Hathiram, filled with the strength of the elephant, kicks the locked doors to pieces and walks out of the room trumpeting, and the priests scatter.
He does not go after them. He walks back to his hut, and sits down in the doorway, and goes on chanting, and that night, the pilgrims say, there was a knock at his door again, and the dice came out.
The god's dice game with him is carved on the temple doors, the pilgrims say, and his matha, the house of his followers, stands opposite the temple, with his tomb inside it.
