A jackal called Neela — though that was not his name yet — went into the town one night looking for scraps, and the town dogs found him first.
He ran. They came after him in a pack, and he went over a wall into the first open yard he saw, and the yard belonged to a dyer, and in the middle of it stood an enormous vat.
He went straight into it.
When he climbed out and got himself over the far wall and back into the forest, he was blue. Not blue-ish. Blue — deep, even, glorious indigo, from his nose to the tip of his tail.
The first animal who saw him screamed.
Within a day the whole forest had seen him and nobody knew what he was. He was not a jackal. Jackals are not blue. He was not anything anyone could name — and in the forest, a thing nobody can name is a thing nobody argues with.
So Neela, who had been running for his life the day before, drew himself up and said, "Indra himself made me and sent me down to rule you."
And they believed him.
He was king for a season, and he was good at it. He gave the lion a post and the tiger a post and the leopard a post. He held court under a fig tree. He ate first. And because he could not afford anyone standing near him who might smell what he really was, he drove every jackal in the forest away with cuffs and insults, and they went.
Then one evening, far off, the jackals began to howl.
It is a sound Neela had made every night of his life before this one. It went into him like a hook. His eyes filled. His chest lifted. His whole body remembered something his mind had spent a season trying to put down —
— and he threw back his head and howled.
The court went very quiet.
Then it stood up.
He got over the wall of the forest that night with nothing at all: no post, no fig tree, no name. He was still blue for weeks. It wore off eventually, in the rain, the way dye does.