Satyavati

Even from a young age, Satyavati was unusually bookish. Ethereal beauty could only get her so far in the popularity department when she smelled like a week-old fisherman’s wharf. After seven years of one-woman kickball and getting shafted from birthday celebrations, she discovered the key to growing accustomed to the solitude: literature. Books didn’t have the sentience nor the olfactory organs to care about Satyavati’s unfortunate ever-present odor. They could accompany her through the lengthy days and would wait for her to finish her chores like no friends ever had. The only snag was finding them.

Books could be expensive, and difficult to come by. Fortunately, young Satyavati, though socially inept, had the gift of a good mind, and went to great lengths to keep her personal library well-furnished. From befriending fellow bibliophiles to performing odds and ends tasks for the townspeople’s spare change, Satyavati had both the network and the inclination to indulge herself in her newfound reading hobby. One day, a local man paid her a hefty sum to lend his clothes her aroma so as to convince his wife that his day had been spent working the River rather than gambling in a nearby saloon.

As she grew older, Satyavati acquired books and additional responsibilities alike. As chief runner of the Yamuna River ferry, she was used to meeting unexpected clients of a…high profile nature. Nothing could quite have prepared her, however, for Parashara. He seemed fairly standard for a rishi, with a nice build and a certain conversational eloquence made no less impressive by his fervent and unrelenting demands that they have intercourse right then and there on her ferry.

Satyavati considered her options: she could rebuff Parashara and proceed as normal- there was a decent chance he could lay a curse on her or some nonsense but she’d taken her chances before and come out none the worse for wear. Or…she could accept his offer. Honestly, he was a pretty good-looking individual, and for whatever reason the whole “smelling-like-fish-as-an-anti-aphrodisiac” didn’t seem to be working on him. She could take a work break, have some fun, and move on with her life…and, if she played her cards right, she could get something else in return.

There were many books in the local tax collector’s lair centered around a general theme of business ideals. As a result, the concepts of give and take and general consumerism were ingrained in Satyavati’s brain. Given the degree that her emphatic passenger seemed to want to desecrate her workplace, she knew she had a reasonable amount of room to make demands. First: privacy. Next: no loss of virginity. Last (and furthest from the least), she wanted to be free of the odiferous affliction that had plagued her since birth.

Later that day, after giving birth, cleaning up, going out on the town, relishing in the lack of smell-recoil, and tucking in with some good epic poetry, Satyavati couldn’t help but think that she’d gotten the better end of the deal. She smiled as she opened to the chapter she’d left off in that morning, thinking wryly that old habits die hard.

Author's Note: The story of Satyavati intrigued me from the start of the Mahabharata- though cursed from the start with an unfortunate fishy odor as a result of her in-fish conception, she managed to use her smarts to organize a deal which not only rid her of the smell but set her up well for a future with particularly prolific progeny. In my Story I wanted to explore a little bit of what her childhood would look like as a smelly social outcast, and to highlight how she was able to use her intelligence to find a way to make herself a better life. Satyavati may only be a main player for a few chapters in the first quarter of the eighty sections of the PDE Mahabharata, but, as the great-grandmother of the Pandavas, she is no less important to the later events and culmination of the story. As a writer, it was fun to explore Satyavati's potential childhood coping mechanisms for the fish-smell, and to give her a love of books and reading as well as an intelligence based more in "book-smarts" than people-, physical-, or spiritual- smarts, which are championed by the other three heroines of this portfolio.

Bibliography: PDE Mahabharata. Vyasa and Ganesha. Link.