Draupadi

Draupadi wrestled the diaper bag over her shoulder and gripped the jam-gooeyed hand of her two-year-old. His older siblings trailed behind, the teens in a sulk. Laundry runs used to be a solo activity for Draupadi. She would leave her youngest with his siblings and spend the few hours before bed in the laundromat, folding, sweating, and defending her delicates. However, her teens proved to be untrustworthy to watch their brother by letting him shove beads up his nose while they played video games in the next room.

It had become a family activity. And maybe it was overkill that she made all four of the teens come with her, but it was a punishment of sorts. She felt a small, sick sense of vindication that they were all suffering together. Well, all of them except her husband. But he was suffering in a different way, she supposed. The casino that swallowed him every evening had introduced a new vice – one arguably worse than the gambling. Now, in addition to losing all the money they had and did not have, her husband was using cocaine. The cocaine helped him stay up later and thus spend longer hours at the casinos. He started at the commercial ones – on the side of the highway, with big gleaming neon signs. Over time, however, he found higher-stakes, off-the-grid casinos, where his spending truly went out of control.

Draupadi was drowning. Soon, she knew they would lose their home to his antics. Sometimes he came home with lobster (which she was tasked to cook, naturally) and jewelry for her, high on the thrill of a win. Those nights are OK. Those nights are rare. On most nights (or more like mornings), he came home angry, drunk, high, and ready to throw things at his family. Draupadi left her toddler with a family member around the time he was scheduled to come home, in the hours before his shift as a marketing manager. How he’d managed to keep his job, she did not know. It was the only thing keeping them afloat. Her job waiting tables barely paid for her youngest’s daycare.

As she and her boys lugged home the baskets of warm, folded clothes, she wondered what kind of husband she would find in the morning. Around three AM, she found out.

“Draupadi,” he said stiffly, as if presenting her, waving an arm in her direction. She sat upright in the bed they sort of shared – he often collapsed on the couch instead – and squinted through the sudden light. A stranger stood over her, while her husband leaned against the frame of the door.

“Seventy five?” The stranger appraised her. Her husband scoffed.

“Round up, buddy. She’s worth at least eighty.”

“What is this?” Draupadi grabbed up the bedsheets, hiding her nightgown from the man in her bedroom. “Get out!”

The men laughed. “Feisty,” the stranger said with a sneer. “That won’t last long.”

Draupadi, confused and terrified, stood and moved to avoid the man ambling toward her. He grabbed her face, turning her head from side to side, forcing her mouth open and looking inside. “And she has all her teeth. She’ll be a hot commodity.”

“Get her out of here already and hand over the cash.”

Her husband avoided eye contact with her as he pawed through an enormous duffle bag stuffed with cash. Not eighty dollars, she realized. Eighty GRAND. He was selling her.

The man grabbed her hair in one fist and her arm in the other, intending to drag her away.

Draupadi felt sick, like she would throw up on him any second. Maybe that would be for the best…

“No!” Draupadi found her voice and her strength, jerking her arm away, eyeing her possible escape. She was cornered – stuck in a room with only one exit. And then, suddenly, a sharp, cracking sound split the air. Her husband crumpled to the ground where he stood in the doorway, and her eldest son stepped over him, a baseball bat in his hand.

Shocked, the stranger was an easy target. Draupadi lunged at his face, clawing his eyes with a ferocity she never knew she had. The man wailed in anger and pain before being abruptly silenced by a swift kick to the family jewels. Draupadi spat on him before fleeing the home with her children .

The sheriff’s office came and collected both of the men, escorting them first to the hospital for treatment. Draupadi never saw her husband (EX-husband) again. While her family struggled horribly to make ends meet, and her boys sacrificed many opportunities to keep them going financially, they were far better off without him. They never looked back.

Author's Note:

I took the game of dice Yudhisthira, one of Draupadi's husbands, played and changed it quite a bit. In the original story, Yudhisthira gambled away first his brothers and himself, before at last resorting to gambling away Draupadi. It was a rigged game of dice, just as, in modern casinos, the chances of winning are so small it may as well be rigged. Those games are designed to get people addicted to the possibility of a big win while rarely delivering on it. In the original story, Draupadi has five husbands instead of five sons, but in a modern adaptation, five husbands would not make sense. So, instead, I made them sons.

In the way that Yudhisthira gambled away his family in the epic, my modern man gambled away his. He gave up on his sons and his wife, literally trying to sell his wife for gambling money. In the epic, Draupadi asserts that her husband has already gambled away himself, and thus lacks the authority to give her up. In my adaptation, Draupadi comes to this same realization - she is her own person, while her husband is not his own person. Both Draupadi representations have virtue and strength, but my modern version gets the awesome opportunity to act out against those who would disrespect her.

Bibliography: Narayan, R.K. The Mahabharata. Chapter 7: Stakes Unmatched. Kindle Edition.

Banner image source: https://pxhere.com/en/photo/571864

REVISIONS: Based upon the suggestions of our instructor, I made several revisions to Draupadi's story. In the first paragraph, I changed "two year old" to "two-year-old," to indicate that it is one word. I also switched "ok" with "OK." I changed the seventh paragraph from "Round up buddy" to "Round up, buddy." I also made sure all numerical values were written out (eighty instead of 80).

I edited to make the stranger grab both her hair and her arm, as per the suggestion of Prof Gibbs. She pointed out that in the original, Duryodhana grabs her hair, and I think it makes a beautiful parallel between my version and the epic. I clarified that Draupadi ran out of the home with her family, as that section was a bit unclear. I also worked, as usual, to eliminate passive voice from my writing (changed it from "was escorted" to "escorting them first to the hospital").

Personally, I made a few word choice changes. In the first paragraph, saying "proved themselves unworthy" sounded a bit off to me, so I changed it "proved to be untrustworthy." I also found the sentence about bringing home lobster to be a little too short, deserving of more explanation (she cooked the lobsters he brought home).