Reading Notes, Mahabharata Part A

There's something fishy about this...
Wordpress

I've decided to go with the first story from the Mahabharata, because I almost died laughing whilst reading about the children who were born to a fish.

I'm going to write a letter from the pen of Satyavati.

First of all, I'm very interested to see where she is taken within this story. What a strange character! Since I imagine her to be a teenager, I think I'm going to have her writing a letter to something like a Cosmo mag along the lines of, "Why do I smell like a fish? and other needs for advice."
I see a lot of people writing letters as their form of storytelling and I have habitually stuck to writing new, general, stories. Writing a letter will be a much different pace and I think it will provide challenges I didn't expect.


"There was a king called Uparichara, king of Chedi, so devoted to asceticism that the gods feared he was seeking to rob them of their power. They accordingly sent Indra to bribe him with the offer of a crystal car capable of carrying him through the sky, a privilege designed for him alone of all mortals. One day in spring, as he was flying through the sky, his semen fell into a river. It was swallowed by a female fish with the result that ten months after, when the fish was caught by a fisherman, two children — a boy and a girl — came forth.

The fisherman told the king of his wonderful find. The king took possession of the boy but left the girl to be reared by the fisherman’s wife. The girl was very beautiful, but she had a fishy smell. Her name was Satyavati. She often helped her foster father, who acted as a ferryman on the river Yamuna.

One day she was ferrying across the river the rishi Parashara. The rishi persuaded the girl to yield to his embraces by promising that she should remain a virgin. She also made a condition that she should lose her fishy smell. She became so sweet-smelling that the fragrance could be smelt seven miles away.
A child was born, and because he was born on an island, he was called Dwaipayana or Island-born. He is called Vyasa because he arranged the Vedas"

















mahabharata PDE