In today’s mini-episode, we’ll meet Shishupal.
While most of our characters of the week have been good people, Shishupal’s a villain.
Shishupal’s mom, Shrutashrava was Vasudev’s sister. Vasudev if you’ve heard Episode 11 – The boy who lived was Krishna’s father.
When Shishupal was born, he had 4 arms and 3 eyes! Normally that’s a sign of being divine. Look at most gods, they have extra pairs of arms and Shiva has three eyes. But this one was different.
Understandably Shishupal’s parents were shocked to see their baby boy with the extra arms and the extra eye. They took him to the pediatrician. Given these were ancient times, the pediatrician didn’t know how to handle this and redirected them to a priest.
The priest had a ready explanation. The good news was that the extra pair of arms and the eyes were temporary! Within a month, the boy would look normal. There was no risk of him being bullied in the playground for his appearance.
The bad news was that the extra arms and the extra eye would only disappear when the baby came into contact with the one who would kill him.
The parents were disturbed of course, as you’d expect them to be.
Over the next few days they were morose even as they were introducing the baby to all their family. And then Krishna and Balaram arrived. They were Shrutashrava’s favorite nephews. Thinking this would be a pleasant change from the terrible news they’d been brooding on all the time, they introduced their baby boy to Krishna and Balaram. The moment they did the extra pair of arms and the extra eye disappeared!
Shishupal’s parents were in shock. Their favorite nephew was going to kill their boy!
Shrutashrava pleaded with Krishna to spare her baby boy. Krishna of course being an avatar of Vishnu knew what was going to happen in the future. He was fond of Shrutashrava though. So he promised her that he would not harm Shishupal in any way. Until he’d committed a 100 sins. So basically a hundred get out of jail free cards. All that Shishupal had to do, was to keep a running total of every sin he committed and make sure he didn’t exceed a hundred. And only serious sins, not minor things like picking his nose, or jaywalking.
The next part of the story is for a later episode when we get to the Mahabharat
That’s all for this mini-episode.
Next Episode
In this weekend’s full episode we’ll finally begin on the Mahabharat! Kind of. We won’t get to the main story, but we’ll cover what happened at the very very beginning. There are some ties to the Ramayana as well. We’ll learn that if you ever get engaged to someone you shouldn’t just forget about them! Also, if you lose a ring in a river, it might show up sooner or later – on your dinner table!