This week we’ll see how I was involved in the Indian mythology version of Sleeping Beauty! There’s no princess in this one, instead, there are a couple of brothers. And spoiler alert: there’s no evil fire breathing dragon.
The character this week is not one single person. Instead, it’s a role! There are 7 people who have occupied this role, one of whom we encountered in our very first episode – “Unicorn Fish”
This episode makes references to some events from an earlier episode – Episode 11 – The boy who lived and Episode 13 – Nurse Ratched and Umbrella Mountain. But you need not have heard either of those. I’ll give you a summary when we get to that part.
Kubera was the demi-God of Wealth. We’ve briefly met him before in Episode 25 – Up, Up, and Away as one of the Gods who gifted Hanuman something to prevent total world destruction.
Nalakuvara and Manigriva, whom I am going to call Nala and Mani were Kubera’s sons. They led a very pampered life.
Now, there are different levels of pampering – there’s the kind of pampering that for example, Harry Potter’s cousin Dudley had. There’s the Sleeping Beauty kind of limited pampering where her parents the grand palace-dwelling King and Queen, completely delegated the task to three fairies by sending her to live with them in a tiny cottage.
At least that’s how it happened in the Disney universe. There’s another kind of pampering that has to do with a brand of baby diapers but we will leave that out.
Kubera’s sons were definitely on the Dudley side of the spectrum. They had everything they could have wished for. Not surprising considering their father was the God of wealth. It was like having Credit cards with no max limit.
One day, as they were sipping wine and lounging by the custom lazy river in their mansion, scrolling through their Instagram feed. Mani saw something that made him sit up and.
“Hey bro! There’s a big party happening and we aren’t at it!”
He had Nala’s attention at the word Party. Turned out this one was in a garden near Shiva’s home in Kailas. Shiva the destroyer is one of the holy trinity in Indian Mythology, the others being Vishnu the preserver, and Brahma the creator who also happens to be my dad.
“No one’s invited us there,” said Nala seriously.
They both stared at each other and then burst out laughing.
They were habitual gate crashers, they didn’t need an invite.
“Race you to Kailas,” Nala said and jumped off his floatee.
It was a race, but they both got there about the same time. They had to, they each had taken a top of the line Chariot service(kind of like the ancient Indian version of a luxury Uber).
They jumped into the river and generally made a nuisance of themselves. The other party-goers were upset by this. But not upset enough to do anything about it. This was the hundredth time this had happened to them. They’d just grin and bear it.
This called for some divine intervention. That’s where I come in.
I had to put a stop to all this.
I think I arrived just in the nick of time. I saw Nala first wearing the Guacamole bowl on his head like a crown. With the Guacamole still inside it.
Mani ambled in wearing his swim trunks a wizard hat and a very silly smile on his face. He was clearly drunk.
“Voldemort!” he screamed when he saw me. “Expelliarmus” he shouted waving his bottle as it was a wand.
This was the limit! I’d had it with this pair of troublemakers. It’s not like they hadn’t had plenty of warnings before
I dragged the boys away from the scene, even as Mani kept wondering why my Veena didn’t fly out of my hands.
A few hours later, when the boys were quite sober, I put it to them quite plainly.
They were old enough to be mature and yet acted in the worst possible way. I was going to curse them. And no, they could not talk themselves out of this one.
I cursed them. They would be changed into a pair of Arjuna trees. They could observe people all around them and learn a few life lessons. Because they were quite literally rooted to the spot, they couldn’t just stop observing. Whether they chose to learn from this – that was up to them.
And they would be free in …… say…. a hundred years. Yeah, a nice round number.
Krishna, an avatar of Vishnu the Creator would free them.
But I did one thing to make that easier. I left them the pair of Arjuna trees exactly next to the house that baby Krishna would be in a hundred years from now.
And with that, I left the scene.
Krishna to the rescue!
Now let’s fast forward a hundred years. If you haven’t heard Episode 11 – The Boy who lived, here’s a quick recap.
Kansa was an evil tyrant king, who imprisoned his sister and her husband when it was prophesied that he would be killed by a child of the couple. Before he could kill the baby, the father pulled a switcheroo, with some divine intervention.
And so it came to be that the newborn baby lived in the home of Yashoda the milkmaid and Nanda Baba the cowherd, who thought he was their own child.
Even as a toddler Krishna had quite a reputation for being mischievous.
Most of his pranks were driven by his love for butter.
One day just as he was helping himself to a big fistful of butter directly from the pot just as his mother had warned him not to, she walked in.
He was caught red-handed. I mean technically white-handed given all the butter – but you get the point.
To Yashoda’s surprise, Krisha denied that he’d been eating butter.
This was followed by exactly the dialog from a popular children’s rhyme:
“Krishna, Krishna”
“Yes, Mummy?”
“Eating Butter?”
“No Mummy”
“Telling Lies?”
“No Mummy”
“Open your mouth”
And at this point, Yashoda was going to laugh at the obvious signs of butter inside his mouth, but she stopped. What she saw inside her son shook her to the core.
She saw the Universe! Yes, Galaxies, stars, even the Hubble deep field.
Either my child has swallowed a planetarium, or I’m hallucinating.
It had to be the latter, she’d probably been working too long in the sun.
Well, she was Krishna’s mother. She knew he’d been eating butter, even if she couldn’t prove it.
The boy had to be taught a lesson. She asked him to go stand in a corner. Yup right there next to the big grindstone that’s about twice your size and a hundred times your weight.
But Krishna wouldn’t stay in one place, so Yashoda bound him to it.
Before you get worried, he wasn’t bound uncomfortably its just that his movement was restricted, he couldn’t move too far away from the grindstone.
Yashoda went off on an errand.
Krishna the toddler didn’t want to spend his whole day stuck in the corner. So he didn’t. He wandered off, easily pulling the grindstone behind him as if it was made of plastic.
He had an idea of how to get rid of the grindstone. He could just wander in between those two trees in the yard. Yup, those two Arjuna trees that were growing so close together, like they were brothers.
He’d seen snakes crawling in between narrow passages to shed their old skin. It would work for him too. As he passed between the trees, he casually uprooted them.
And that released Nala and Mani instantly. They had beards now. And the guacamole on Nala’s head had dried up. They didn’t mind. They’d learned their lesson.
No more partying hard for them. Yes, they would partake in the occasional social event or two, but only when invited to it. And they would drink to moderation.
And maybe they’d start helping their dad out with some work here and there. He’d been mentioning just the other day, a hundred years ago how he could use a hand in the treasury.
That’s all for now
Notes
The core of the story might remind you of Sleeping Beauty. There’s a theme of somebody offending someone else, a 100-year spell, and then release. In the fairy tale, Maleficent cursed the baby Princess because her parents didn’t invite her to a party. The curse was that the Princess would die, but the good fairies changed that to a 100-year sleep.
Yeah, there’s a 100-year spell in both cases, but while Princess Aurora’s is real sleep. Nala and Mani are actually awake and conscious as trees.
The trees that the brothers are transformed into are called Arjun trees, or “Arjun ke ped” in Hindi. The scientific name is Terminalia Arjuna. I’ve linked pictures here:
Arjun tree picture
Terminalia Arjuna picture
Another Terminalia Arjuna picture
Arjuna tree facts
The character this week is not one single person. Instead, it’s a role!
This role is that of Manu. There isn’t a single person in this role because
The very first one was Svayambhuva and the most recent one was Vaivasvata whom we met during Episode 1 – Unicorn Fish. There are seven more to come in the future.
We have so many Manus because, in Indian Mythology, the world was destroyed not once, not twice, but seven times! Every destruction and rescue is part of a rinse and repeat cycle. The Earth gets destroyed in some sort of cataclysm. Vishnu is appropriate in his role as Preserver. He helps Manu each time as Manu rescues 7 other sages and all kinds of books to continue the human civilization. The gap between each cycle is roughly 4.5 billion years or so they say.
You may be tempted to point out that the Universe isn’t old enough to have been around for seven times 4.5 billion years, but then who’s to say the Big Bang itself isn’t just one of those cycles of destruction?
That’s all for this week.
Next Week
Next week we’re actually back to Vikram and Betaal. Now I usually like to spread out my stories, but I’ve had a listener request for this one specifically, so I’ll break with tradition here.
The character next week is a sibling of Varuna, who was a recent character of the week. This one rides a gazelle. Not surprising then that he’s as fast as the Wind. Another reason for that is that he is the Wind.
I’ll see you next week!