Epic Retold: The Mahabharata in Tweets (2 page)

It is easy to spot why my first tweets sucked: in my excitement to get the project going, I had focused only on brevity.

I had forgotten the intensely personal nature of Twitter. I had forgotten people connect to people—one to one, in real-time.

There was no room for impersonality in micro-blogging. If I wanted followers I needed a voice, a character, they would want to follow.

But a character-driven story—what the Bulgarian literary theorist Tzvetan Todorov calls psychological narrative—could only take me so far.

Equally important was the real-time nature of Twitter: the immediacy, the breathless urgency expected of every tweet.

This trend in storytelling—this urgency of style—has been noted as early as 1999. Scholars call it
concurrent narration
.

There is an overlap of action and narration now, a desire to
tell as you live
, rather than
live now, tell later.

Twitter embodied this narrative philosophy. It was built for creating
NOW moments
.

27 July 2009.

So the story will be told in present tense. It will be a first-person narrative.

From MT’s powerful etching of Bhima and the recent reading of
Bhimsen
, I have seen how a pathos-filled protagonist can hook the reader.

So, yes, a pathos-filled Bhima will be the protagonist in this story, too.

He will live his life on Twitter, telling this story, sharing his NOW moments as they ‘happen’.

Oh, it will be a simpler tale that he tells, a less complicated plot, digestible by even a reader unfamiliar with the original epic.

The simplicity is important. Only such a story can capture the readers I have in mind—those hungry, impatient children of Twitter!

Bhimsen
would be my main inspiration. Its episodic format lends itself to Twitter nicely. It is the closest to what I have in mind.

I kept questions of fidelity—what liberties I would take with the original storyline of the Mahabharata—at bay with a simple thought:

This was not reimagining the Mahabharata, but reimagining the Mahabharata for Twitter.

It was a storytelling experiment on a new medium, which called for an adaptation of the epic.

And as with any adaptation, the changes required to the original—and I was certain there would be some—would be medium-specific.

In other words, Twitter would be the lord of my revisionism! I liked that very much.

October 2014.

In the 1605 days it takes to finish this retelling, I stray many times. Fidelity is not a master I serve well.

The protracted storytelling—a direct consequence of the sporadic writing habits of this novice author—is one reason for my transgressions.

To compensate, to retain the reader through a narrative distributed across four years, I resort to frequent interjections in the tale.

Cliff-hangers, flash-forwards, deviations designed to foreshadow, to create suspense—all, I use unsparingly.

The second reason is the media attention the project attracts. Suddenly, there is a sizeable Twitter following. A book contract materializes.

Now, there is pressure to be different. To reimagine, to revise, offer something fresh.

Then there is the ‘participation’ of followers, their (near) real-time feedback. There are questions, critique—nudges to read other versions.

Thus, I pick up S.L. Bhyrappa’s
Parva
, Chitra Divakaruni’s
The Palace of Illusions
, Shashi Tharoor’s
The Great Indian Novel
.

I read the versions by R.K. Narayan and Ramesh Menon. I dip into C. Rajagopalachari’s interpretation.

And I read, re-read, MT.

This story is indebted to those influences. The original plot and characters remain, though you may notice several liberties in narration.

In this retelling, you may find there is silence about some incidents, simplification of others. Amplification and extrapolations, too.

At times you may see it moving away—perhaps audaciously—from the Mahabharata you know.

In all that, I hope I tell the simpler tale I hoped to tell. A retelling—as writer Louis Begley notes—is often ‘a labour of simplification’.

The transgressions you notice, particularly of Bhima’s— Wait, why am I giving it away?

Read!

THE PALACE

EPISODE 1

TWEETS 57

I stare at the lady with the black cloth over her eyes. I feel disturbed, scared—but I cannot look away.

Pale, beautiful face. Black strip wound tight. Beneath it, the eyes—the eyes with which she would not see. Aunt Gandhari. The queen.

She hugs Mother. Then us five. Yudhistira, then me, followed by Arjuna. Then, the twins, Nakula and Sahadeva. Why is she sobbing?

‘Come,’ Aunt Gandhari says. ‘The king is waiting.’

She turns. I see the knot of blindfold, black against her grey hair. I stare.

I follow with Yudhistira, Mother and the young ones. The palace doors close behind us.

So it is true? We are really princes?

We had all lived in the forest. Us five with Mother, Father, Ma Madri.

The hermits there called our father ‘King Pandu’. I had never understood that.

I did not understand many things. Yudhistira said I was slow and stupid. But if Father was king, why were we living in a forest lodge?

I never got answers. Still, life was fun. Yudhistira sat with the hermits, Arjuna played at archery; I wandered, hunted rabbits with my toy mace.

And I swam. Sometimes, when Yudhistira joined me, I would hold him underwater. Maybe I was slow and stupid, but I was strong.
Very strong.

That day, Father had wandered off with Ma Madri, laughing. Mother sat by the window, still, silent. Then I heard the wailing.

I rushed out, Mother behind me. Ma Madri fell into her arms sobbing. Father had slipped, she said, hit his head on a rock.

He was dead.

I ran along the forest path to where Father lay, under the trees. There was blood on his face. I hadn’t known him well; now I wouldn’t.

Later, they built a pyre. As the flames sprang up, I saw Ma Madri come out in her best robes. She hugged us each tight, walked to the pyre.

She circled it thrice, head bent, lips moving. Then she turned, looked at us once—and walked into the flames.

I wanted to look away. I could not. Ma Madri, she did not make a sound as the flames engulfed her.

Days later, men came in chariots. Mother spoke to them at length. After they left, she said, ‘We are going to Hastinapur, our kingdom.’

And now we are walking through the palace—our palace?—with Aunt Gandhari. She walks alone, ahead, her blindfold black against her grey.

I know the story of that blindfold. A balladeer sang about it on our last night in the forest, the first time she ever sang about our clan.

Our aunt had vowed to cover her eyes, never see again, when she learnt she was to wed Dritarashtra, the blind prince of Hastinapur.

She leads us to a doorway where two warriors cross spear points.

They step aside. We walk into a huge hall lit by a hundred lamps.

My feet slip on the polished marble. At the far end, on a golden throne, sits King Dritarashtra. Our uncle.

He is huge—huge head, enormous chest, bulging arms—but not as huge as some of the foresters I have seen.

Our uncle is stronger than a thousand mad elephants, the balladeer had sung, the strongest man in the world. Is he? Really?

He rises. The sightless eyes stare at Mother as she says, voice breaking, ‘The widow of your brother Pandu bows before you, O King.’

He blesses her, hugs her tight. Yudhistira steps forward and prostrates. Then it is my turn. I hesitate. Someone pushes me forward.

He bends to touch my face, my shoulders, rough hands surprisingly gentle. ‘Bhima has grown,’ he says. ‘Only five, but so tall! A warrior!’

His eyes are milky white, cold and dead. They devour me. ‘I am glad you came,’ he says finally, to Mother. ‘Now I have five more sons.’

I know the king has many sons—a hundred, the songs said. Why aren’t they here to greet us? I look around. And I see him.

He is my age, swathed in yellow silk robes. A gold necklace of many strands covers his chest. He stares at me fixedly from behind a pillar.

I smile. He keeps staring. Then abruptly, he turns and walks away.

I stand there feeling foolish, angry with the boy, angrier with myself.

I do not see him the next day. Or the next. But late one evening the next week, I come across him in one of the smaller courtyards.

I am returning from another wander. Yudhistira has taken well to palace life—to the silk robes, the maids, the sleeping chambers. Not I.

I miss the forests, my old carefree life; I spend much of my time outdoors. This time, when I get back, the boy is standing in the shadows.

I have guessed who he is. Duryodhana, Uncle Dritarashtra’s son, eldest of the Kaurava brothers. He steps forward.

I stop. I do not smile.

‘So you are the one,’ he says, ‘the Pandava born to destroy my clan!’

That is one of the things I have heard the maids whisper. That, and that I was son of Vaayu, the God of Wind. I do not understand it.