SUNIDHI’s
KRISHNA/KRISHNAA
Sunidhi Arakere
There, disclaimer.
I am an atheist.
I’m an atheist, but the poems I most enjoy writing are mythological. I tell myself I am subverting the tropes of mythology by writing its characters differently from who they were meant to be, but I can’t subvert the trope I have grown to be: the child who loved reading became the woman who loves ripping words apart to find the stories that aren’t being told.
Maybe it’s that I was never satisfied with the neatly bow-tied endings of the epic stories I was told. Endings where everything was as it was meant to be. Maybe it’s that I knew, even then, that there was no grand scheme of things in the universe. That the people who said everything (the good and the bad) was part of the plan were usually the ones running the show, and they couldn’t be trusted.
I don’t remember much from my childhood. That’s what I tell myself to avoid remembering it.
Either way, I don’t know where I got my obsession with mythology from. Maybe my grandmother told me stories. Maybe my mother did. Maybe the school library fed us Amar Chitra Katha for breakfast (which never sufficed, honestly). Maybe the TV always had some fair-skinned guy on, pretending to be a dark-skinned god. Who knows?
What I do know is that I ended up spending my life making sure I know every version of every story I ever heard or saw or read. What I do know is that the versions no one has heard are always better than the “canon”, that the people of this subcontinent write the best fanfiction, that the voices that are deliberately left out of the chorus are always the most beautiful.
What I do know is that, mythological or otherwise, the story is always better when the people in it aren’t gods.
So when I write stories, when I choose stories to read, that’s what they’re like.
I am an atheist, but I found friends in the unlikeliest of places: in the stories I heard and read, the stories I keep telling and retelling because they matter in ways I sometimes don’t anticipate till the full force of something that’s not quite love, not quite divine, struggling to surface in the murky waters of my lack of faith, hits me when I least expect it.
There’s this folk song I heard a long time ago, a Marathi poem by Acharya Keshav Atre, which goes “bharjari ga pitambara dilaa phaduna, Draupadi si bandhu shobhe Narayana”. It was turned into a playback number for the film Shyamchi Aai. This is absolutely my kind of poem: a reimagining of an epic story that takes an alternative viewpoint on its characters.
Why do I bring this up here, for this theme? Because it fits, and perfectly. For a child who wasn’t quite sure what family was supposed to mean, a figure like Krishna was a deeply alluring one. He grew up with a foster mother, a stepbrother, a colourful bunch of strangers and a whole lot of friends, all of whom, in the stories, were always more important than blood relatives. Blood relatives kind of sucked for him, actually: they were basically either out to get him, completely absent from his life, or simply indifferent till he became convenient in various ways. For a child who didn’t find comfort in places that were meant to be “home”, these stories were everything.
Acharya Atre takes the well-known tale of Draupadi’s vastraharan and turns it into a study of what makes someone family. In this poem, Krishna cuts his hand, and Narada runs to Krishna’s sister Subhadra to ask for a strip of cloth to bandage it. Subhadra (in typical sibling fashion, to be fair), values her expensive Paithani saree more than Krishna’s bleeding hand, and refuses to rip it up. But Draupadi, Krishna’s sakhi, not a family member, rips her equally expensive saree to give him a strip of cloth.
Atre adds a layer to the story he’s telling by connecting this to the vastraharan: his Draupadi says that it is ironic that the man who protected her from being disrobed is now asking for a mere strip of cloth. In some versions other than Atre’s, the story goes the other way: Krishna is the one returning the favour during the vastraharan, after Draupadi gives him a cloth to bandage his hand. I find that equally endearing: however you look at it, someone is selfless and someone reciprocates in kind. Is that not what love is, after all? Maybe we all learn to resemble the ones we love.
“Draupadi si bandhu shobhe Narayana”: “Narayana is a worthy brother to Draupadi”, or “Narayana deserves a friend like Draupadi”, or “Draupadi is a worthy friend indeed to Narayana”. But whatever you read it as, whichever version you prefer, whichever way the relationship goes, it means the same thing: who you are to someone has nothing to do with blood. Love transcends any obligatory bonds.
Most of us grow up being taught that friends come and go, and only family is forever. Family always means the bonds forged by blood, in these trite lessons. But my stories, the ones I fell in love with, always told me otherwise. The stories I read and the ones I still tell, the ones in which even the gods were sometimes lonely children pretending to be heroes. The ones in which betrayal could come from anywhere, but so could love.
The stories that didn’t make me a believer, but gave me hope anyway.
I guess you could say I found family.
Bio:Sunidhi Arakere is a student of literature, part-time musician and full-time nerd. She has been published in two collections of poetry, and has edited an anthology of mixed-form pieces by poets from across India. She is based in Bengaluru, Karnataka.
She finds joy in barely making deadlines, rewatching Shah Rukh Khan films, and Oxford commas. She reads habitually and writes occasionally, because it’s easier to over-analyse and/or judge other people’s words than to string together one’s own. She listens to any and all kinds of music (language no bar, as long as the lyrics are good), and indulges her pet passion of creating elaborate, colour-coded to-do lists that she’ll never follow. Her hobbies include following various sports and pretending she can play them, rereading old books instead of picking up new ones, and appreciating Bengaluru weather despite never going outside.