Once upon a time there ruled six kings over six different kingdoms in India. As fate would have it [which actually means here, as their karma was influencing events], they all came to know, in different ways, of a princess called Mallī, the daughter of the king of Mithilā. The chief queen of one of these six kings was performing the Snake Festival on such a lavish scale that the king boasted to one of his ministers that surely he had never seen anything like it anywhere else. Indeed I have, was the answer, at the birthday party of Mallī. Similarly the pride another king took in the grand Bathing Festival he had arranged for his daughter got dampened. A third king asked sea merchants about their adventures, and they told him not just about storms and ogres, foreign lands and dangers, but also about the extraordinary beauty of Mallī. The king of Kāśi heard about her beauty from goldsmiths who, because of their incompetence, had been banished by her father. A painter scheming revenge for his banishment from Mithilā (his skill–to infer the whole person from seeing merely a toe–had not been appreciated by Mallī's father, when he saw her painted in a compromising harem scene) showed her picture to a fifth king. A Ṥaivite nun, defeated by the Jaina Mallī in an argument over true religion, went and told the sixth king about her beauty.