The young girl who smelt of fish

With five books behind her, New Delhi-based author Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan’s next, The One Who Swam With The Fishes, swerves into Mahabharata. The first of 12 books that retell the stories of the women in the epic, this one focuses on Satyavati, queen of the Kuru king Shantanu and mother of the epic’s author, Vyasa.

“I’ve always been fascinated by the Mahabharata and have read all the versions I could get my hands on,” says the 35-year-old about her ‘mythlit’ series Girls of Mahabharata. “I figured that Draupadi, and for that matter Kunti, have many books written about them but other women have just been left out in the shadows.” Madhavan decided to follow a chronological order. “My only confusion was whether I should start with Ganga or Satyavati but then I decided to pick the mortal woman and not the goddess.”

Madhavan couldn’t find much literature on Satyavati. “She is important because the epic begins with her. It’s basically her dynasty. Ramesh Menon’s Mahabharata was the basic text I was referring to but I couldn’t find more than that about her.” Madhavan’s imagination filled in the blanks. “Satyavati was born in a time when women didn’t have any agency but she pushes back a lot.”

Through Satyavati’s experience with sage Parashara, Madhavan brings out consent. “When he pursues her, he’s like ‘I have to have you’, and she says ‘No, no I’m a virgin’, but he insists, ‘You can still be a virgin afterwards’.” This episode, in Madhavan’s reimagining, becomes rape. “The Mahabharata implies that she is quite young, and she didn’t want to have sex with this old man.”

Madhavan also depicts Satyavati’s identity as Matsyagandha (the one who smells of fish) as a part of her adolescent awakening. “The fact that she has this smell and has to get rid of it [and Parashara can help with that],” explains Madhavan. “There’s a section in the book where she begins menstruating, I’ve drawn a lot of it from actual experiences happening in villages today,” she adds.

The series will continue to revolve around the adolescent years of the epic’s female characters. “Many of the things that happened to women during the Vedic times — marriage, kids, travelling across the country to their new homes — happened as soon as they hit puberty, sometimes even sooner,” says Madhavan. It’s these years when most of their interesting back stories happened, she believes, “before they became just wives, mothers and queens,” and adds, “I like the idea of the women as people independent of their eventual fate.”

In the next book, The One Who Had Two Lives, Madhavan will focus on Shikandi being possibly the earliest transgender in the epics across the world. “The fact that everyone was so matter-of-fact about it, will make for a very interesting narrative,” she says.

(The One Who Swam With The Fishes is published by HarperCollins and will release on June 15 for Rs 250)