The first excerpt that caught my eye from this week's reading revolved around an exchange between Draupadi and Kunti, right after the two first met. I recognized, too, the thinly veiled insult in Kunti's words. This woman, as though I were a nameless servant. It angered me, but it also hurt. From the stories I'd heard about Kunti, I'd admired her. I'd imagined that if she did indeed become my mother-in-law, she would love me as a daughter. Now I saw how naive I'd been. A woman like her would never tolerate anyone who might lure her sons away. With every new thing I learn about Kunti, the more I love the idea of recasting her as the steely, calculating matriarch of a crime family.
My second note also involves the mother and daughter-in-law, when Draupadi has first come to live in the Pandavas' brahmin hut and is struggling to pass the cooking test that Kunti has set her up to fail. Kunti sweetly notes that Draupadi's a complete failure at cooking, which makes sense, considering that she's a pampered princess. Instead of lashing out like Kunti wants her to, Draupadi recognizes that Kunti's baiting her, and instead replies sweetly, "Respected mother, being so much younger, I know my culinary skills can't equal yours. But it's my duty to relieve you of your burdens whenever possible." All throughout their early days together, the two are constantly engaged in a series of mind games, passive-aggressively trying to push each other to the brink. I think it could be fun to do a story involving a couple of similarly passive-aggressive enemies, forced to team up and being oh-so-courteous even while they're trying to find loopholes to work against each other. Kind of like Ilya and Solo in U.N.C.L.E., actually.
Also, this is a pretty fascinating character hook/setup, from the end of a dream scene Draupadi has involving an insect in the lac house: (And I? I died. No need to mourn me. My work was done.)
It could also be interesting to play with this idea, keep it in mind while building a landscape/setting around a character. I'd have to find a meaningful way to work it into the story, like the Palace of Depression junkyard in Eddie and the Cruisers, but if I could, it might be worthwhile: For isn't that what our homes are ultimately, our secret selves exposed? The converse is also true: we grow to become that which we live within. That was one of the reasons why I longed to escape my father's walls. (But—unknown to me—by the time I left, it was too late. The creed he lived by was already stamped onto my soul.)
Once again, Kunti is a really compelling character, both as a mother figure and just as herself: He said: "When she realized that Duryodhan had offered us this holiday at Varanavat in order to kill us, our mother went into her chambers and wept for a day and a night.
"We paced outside her room, not knowing what to do. She'd always been so strong, our foundation stone. When she came out, we rushed to comfort her. But her eyes were dry. She said to us, I've used up all the tears of my life so that they will not distract me again." Something tells me Dean Winchester would love to sign the heck up for this aggressive new form of repression.
You see more of that signature steel here, as well as an unflinching ruthlessness that's all the more interesting because she shows it's not that she doesn't care about guilt and selling her soul to do it—just that she's squared her shoulders and accepted that fate: "When they were asleep, she asked us to set the house on fire. We saw the perfection in her plan: the nishads' charred skeletons would be taken for ours; Duryodhan would believe he had succeeded in ridding himself of us. But we were distraught, too. They were our guests. They'd eaten our food; they'd gone to sleep trusting us. To kill them would be a great sin.
"Our mother looked us in the eye. I drugged the wine, she said. They'll feel no pain. As for the sin of killing them, I swear it will not touch you. I take it all on myself. For the safety of my children, I'll gladly forgo heaven."
I also love the almost Machiavellian edge to both female Pandavas' motivations, as seen here. And I also love that because of that edge, they'll never quite be able to trust each other, either, even as similar as they are: For by this time Kunti and I (yoked together uneasily by our desire for Pandava glory) had frozen into our stance of mutual distrust.
At one point, the threat of a blood threat between families also crops up, and I think that could be interesting to work with. In a way that's more me than, say, Romeo and Juliet, obviously.
There's also this line, which appeals really strongly to my personal storytelling id list: Family loyalty was what had saved the Pandavas all these precarious years.
I loved how meta this line was, and how it can be interpreted and relaunched in so many different directions, all of them with a ton of potential: "Let them go... Besides, how long can you keep them cloistered? They're heroes, after all."
This section caught my interest because it helped me consider palace life in general in a different way than I ever have: sort of one sprawling, messy, never-ending extended family reunion. No wonder there's always so much royal drama: There were endless banquets among the extended family (the Kauravas loved to carouse) that I was expected to attend (appropriately veiled and chaperoned), though I had to leave these gatherings, along with the other wives, before the drinking and gaming started and matters grew interesting. Afternoons, Kunti would drag me with her to visit the other women in the palace. At these gatherings, the women spent much time in casual display of jewelry and clothing, or in making discreet references to their husbands' feats.
Also, I love how Gandhari is essentially an Indian-epic Scott Summers crossed with Josh Foley: She went on to tell me how some god, pleased by Gandhi's devotion to her husband, had granted her a boon. If she ever took off her blindfold and looked at someone, she could heal him—or burn him to cinders.
As ever, I still love the friendship between Karna and Duryodhan, and I think it could be really great if applied to a different story about a couple of princes going around and shirking their responsibilities as long as they can—sort of a princely/fantasy Ferris Bueller's Day Off, if you can dig that: The one man I hadn't seen since I came to Hastinapur was Karna. I knew that at the request of Duryodhan, who considered him his closest friend, Karna spent much of the year in Hastinapur, leaving Anga in the care of his ministers.
Again, at the risk of broken-record syndrome, I think Kunti is such a cool, cool character study: From the way his voice dipped low I knew what he'd never admit: throughout their childhood my husbands were famished for affection. Kunti had given them her entire steely devotion, but no tenderness. Perhaps she'd cut it out of her nature when she was left in the forest widowed and alone. Perhaps that was the only way she knew how to survive.
I've also been wanting to do a strong protagonist-grandparent dynamic for a while now, and something inspired by Bheeshma might be the perfect opportunity: Then Bheeshma entered their lives with his large lion's laugh. He carried them on his shoulders and hid sweetmeats in his room for them to find. He told them wondrous, terrifying stories late into the night. He praised their small achievements, which Kunti failed to notice, and bought them toys as good as the ones Duryodhan wouldn't share. When Kunti caned them for waywardness, he secretly rubbed salve on their cuts.
Bibliography: The Palace of Illusions, by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni.
Image Credit: Blindfold, by BarnImages. Source: Pixabay.
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