I liked the passage at the very beginning of the story where all of her wise advisors are proposing ways to help her conceive, and each method fails one after the other. Until finally, when every single method has failed, someone finally suggests "It might help if you had a husband." This poor queen has apparently not found out where babies come from, and her advisors are too scared or too embarrassed to explain the usual process to her and instead go on wild goose chases which they know will end in failure just to put off that moment.
THIS. (But I fixed your spelling mistake).
But then, when she was finally able to reproduce (
autogamically?) with the flower stuff I realized that the rules for this world are quite different. (Also, unless I missed something crucial, she gave birth minutes or hours after performing the lotion ceremony?)
I couldn't really get into this story though. I appreciate having someone with the proper ethnicity reading the story, to help flesh it out, but something just went wrong there. I don't think it was the accent, as I had no trouble understanding what was being said. I can't put my finger on it, but this story failed to engage me.
It might be because of the difficult (to my ears) names, that I had trouble remembering which character was whom and therefore couldn't connect to any of them.
It could be because of the unanswered questions (How did the guests get a tour of the rose gardens if they were given to pay for the shoes and lotion? How come we never heard about the transfer of ownership? How come Gulabi never paid the price for not following directions? In fairytales there are dire consequences to that).
Whatever it was, this story fell flat.