Seasons of Splendour Read online

  Contents

  Introduction

  THE DAYS OF THE BANYAN TREE

  Savitri and Satyavan

  Shravan Kumar and his Wife

  A SPECIAL BIRTHDAY

  The Birth of Krishna, the Blue God

  Krishna and the Demon Nurse

  The Serpent King

  How Krishna Killed the Wicked King Kans

  TIME FOR THE DEAD

  Doda and Dodi

  DUSSEHRA, THE FESTIVAL OF VICTORY

  How Ram Defeated the Demon King Ravan

  I King Dashrat’s Special Heir

  II Ram is Banished

  III The Kidnapping of Sita

  IV The Search for Sita

  V The Siege of Lanka

  THE DAY OF THE WINTRY FULL MOON

  The Moon and the Heavenly Nectar

  KARVACHAUTH – THE LITTLE CLAY POT

  The Girl Who had Seven Brothers

  DIVALI – FESTIVAL OF LIGHTS

  Lakshmi and the Clever Washerwoman

  HOLI – FESTIVAL OF SPRING

  The Wicked King and his Good Son

  A DAY FOR BROTHERS

  The Mango Tree

  The Faithful Sister

  NINE DAYS’ FESTIVAL

  The Old Man and the Magic Bowl

  The King Without an Heir

  The Girl in the Forest

  THE FESTIVAL FOR PARVATI

  How Ganesh Got his Elephant Head

  A Guide to Pronunciations

  Acknowledgements

  MADHUR JAFFREY was born near Delhi and grew up listening to stories such as these, mainly from the older women in the family. Today she is known throughout the world as a talented actress and, more recently, an author of cookery books. In Seasons of Splendour she has returned to the colourful myths and legends she was told as a child, and the result is a dramatic collection for children to read for themselves or have read aloud to them in the traditional Indian way.

  This book is dedicated to those who inspired it:

  Prem Bhua, Kiran Bhua, Shammo Bhua and Bawa

  Introduction

  Dear Reader,

  When I was about five years old, there was a roll-top desk in my uncle’s study. Between its four legs was a space that seemed enormous and quite perfect for putting on plays. With a few old sheets tacked on as curtains, we had an ideal stage.

  We wrote the plays, my cousins and I.

  You see, we all lived together in my grandfather’s large house in Delhi. There were a good five dozen of us, a strange mix of short, plump women who spent their days pickling, knitting and gossiping, tall shrewd men who went to work every day in gleaming cars and returned to play bridge and drink whisky, old servants who polished the cars, milked the cows, mowed the grass and put up the mosquito nets, and a lot of cheeky children who spent much of their free time either listening to stories told by the elders or else translating them into live theatre. Presiding over this entire brood was my white-bearded, barrister grandfather.

  There was no tradition of bedtime stories in our family. Perhaps our parents, aunts and uncles just did not want to yell out stories to twenty bedded-down children.

  No. Our family tradition of storytelling consisted more of the family huddle. We would crowd around an aunt on the Big Room divan or around my grandmother on the Prayer Room carpet or, if my mother was telling the story from a drawing-room sofa, we would drape ourselves over its arms and back, even overflowing on to the floor, bodies overlapping bodies.

  The fund of stories seemed endless. The plump women of the house would no sooner emerge from their baths in freshly starched summer voile saris, their faces smelling of powder and vanishing cream, than we would drag them to a sofa or carpet or divan to tell us a story. They would demur, we would insist. They would give in and settle down languorously with a great rustling of their crisp saris. Pillows would be adjusted. One leg would be tucked under the other. Soon there would be no sound other than the whirring of the fan and the twittering of garden birds.

  ‘Since Lord Krishna’s birth is about to be celebrated, how about the story of his birth?’

  ‘Yes, yes, yes,’ we would say in unison.

  ‘Could you go up to the point when Krishna slays the serpent?’ a cousin would ask.

  ‘Please make the wicked King Kans really, really wicked,’ I would add. ‘Could we have red bulging eyes?’

  Some of the stories we were told were of ancient origin and were drawn from our religious epics. Others, also ancient, had no recognizable source. They had just been told, in my family, generation after generation for centuries. What all the stories had in common was a clear moral tone. This made it more comfortable for the elders to tell them to us and, strangely enough, it made us children feel secure. What was right and what was wrong was so very clearly defined.

  Death, however, was never hidden. As in our lives where those who had died were kept at home until the family could place them on biers and carry them to cremation grounds for the final ceremony, so in our stories death was always treated as part of the cycle of life – as much an open, family matter as birth. Children were born at home and the old died at home. I was born in my grandfather’s house in a back room that overlooked the Yamuna River. Years later my grandfather died in the same house in a front room overlooking the garden. The stories that we were told were designed not only to separate right from wrong but to prepare us, indirectly, for the vagaries of life and the fact of death.

  We, as children, did not know all this, of course. To us the stories were just plain fun.

  In the heat of the afternoon when the elders of our house, well stuffed with lunches of pilaf, kormas and pickles, would stretch out on large divans for the afternoon nap, their last words to us as eyelids drooped were, ‘Try to sleep. You need rest. Whatever you do, do not go out in the sun.’

  I am afraid we did go out. But we heeded our elders to the extent that we stayed in the shade of the mango or tamarind tree.

  It was here that we told our stories. One cousin might tell the story of A Midsummer Night’s Dream that he had seen as a school play, another might regale us with an episode from the adventures of Robin Hood.

  The next step was to put together all our new information in the form of a play to be staged under that roll-top desk, for the delight of our adoring and very indulgent parents.

  What sort of plays did we make up?

  We were children of two completely different cultures. I, for example, had a mother and grandmother who could not speak a word of English and who told me stories that reinforced my ties to my Hindu, Indian past. The schools I went to were either Catholic convents or Anglican missionary schools where all subjects were taught to us from English textbooks as if we were sitting in a small school in Cumberland. India was still a colony so I was learning ‘Little Miss Muffet’, ‘Half a pound of tuppeny rice’ and, many years later, devouring Jane Eyre and Great Expectations.

  I knew vaguely that the poems and stories at school were different from the ones my mother told me. But I did not really know why. Nor did my cousins.

  The result was that when, on those summer afternoons we met under shady trees to write our plays, our conversation would go like this:

  First cousin: ‘Why do we not stage the fight between the good King Ram and the demon King Ravan?’

  Me: ‘Could I play Ram?’

  Second cousin: ‘No, you are a girl.’

  Me: ‘It is only a play.’

  Third cousin: ‘Why do you not play Ram’s wife, the good queen, Sita?’

  Me: ‘But Sita does not do anything. She is only, well, good.’

  Fourth cousin: ‘Can you shoot a bow and arrow? I can. I should play Ram.’

  Me: ‘I could learn. I have
almost learned cricket.’

  First cousin: ‘Let us get on with it. Up to the time Ram is banished to the forest, events are quite clear. We will follow Grandmother’s story. When Ram reaches the forest, why do we not arrange to have him meet Robin Hood and his Merry Men who have also been banished to the forest?’

  Me: ‘Yes, yes. Then Friar Tuck can assist the monkey god Hanuman in finding the kidnapped Sita. I will play the demon king, Ravan, who kidnaps Sita.’

  Fifth cousin: ‘No you won’t. You are a girl. When Ram meets Robin Hood, could he say “Well met by moonlight, proud Robin Hood”?’

  And so it would go. We hardly understood the differences between East and West. We just assumed that Someone’s grand plan included all of us in it, with all our differing cultures.

  What follow are some of the stories that were told to us by the women of our household. They were always told, not read. I doubt if a good half of them have ever been written down. Some, like the story of Doda and Dodi, are possibly unknown outside my family.

  I have arranged the stories in sequence as they might be told at religious festivals during the course of a Hindu calendar year. We use the lunar calendar and our year starts at the time of the Spring equinox around mid-March.

  I hope you enjoy the stories.

  My very best to you,

  Madhur Jaffrey

  PS If you are going to read the stories aloud and need help with the pronunciation of proper names, please turn to here.

  There was an old banyan tree that grew just outside our house. It was more than a tree, it seemed to be a whole forest, all by itself.

  Its trunk went up, up, and up, almost a hundred feet. Some of the branches, instead of rising and spreading like outstretched arms, made nosedives towards the earth, where they burrowed in, took root, and reappeared as fresh trunks. My nanny – or aya, as we called her – said that the roots of a banyan tree went all the way to the Underworld and that when they rose again as fresh trunks, they carried up with them all sorts of ghosts and goblins. She insisted that there never was a banyan tree without a few ghosts lurking in its branches.

  I believed her.

  My grandmother, on the other hand, said that the banyan tree was a blessed tree because it had the wisdom of its years and because it provided so much shade. In fact, in the burning months of May and June, we prayed to it and offered it the best of the summer’s yield – seedless cucumbers, watermelons, aubergines and mangoes.

  I saw my grandmother’s point. In the summer, scorching winds blasted in from neighbouring deserts carrying with them particles of sand to irritate eyes and parch throats. When the sky overhead felt like an oven with its door left open by some careless cook, the banyan trees offered cool, natural arbours to perspiring travellers.

  My grandmother always advised me, ‘On your way back from school, remember to get off your bicycle and rest under the shade of the banyan tree.’

  Rest under the banyan tree and bump into a ghost!

  Oh dear me, no! I paid no attention to my grandmother. In fact, when I reached the banyan trees, I held my breath and bicycled for my life.

  No ghosts were going to catch me!

  Here are two stories that were told on the days of the banyan tree. One on a moonless day in May, the other on the seventh day of the waning moon in June.

  Savitri and Satyavan

  Once upon a time there lived a King and Queen, who after many years of being childless, gave birth to a daughter.

  She was the most beautiful baby the parents could have hoped for, and they named her Savitri.

  When Savitri grew up and it was time for her to marry, her father said to her, ‘Dearest child, we have to part with you. You have given us the greatest joy that humans can ever know. But it is time for you to start a family of your own. Is there any man you wish to marry?’

  ‘No, Father,’ replied Savitri, ‘I have not yet met a man I would care to spend my life with.’

  ‘Perhaps we should send for pictures of all the nobles in the country. You might come upon a face you like,’ said the King and he sent his court painter to bring back portraits of all the nobles and rulers in the country.

  Savitri examined the portraits, one after the other, and shook her head. The men in the portraits all looked so very ordinary, even though they were all emperors, kings and princes.

  The King then said to his daughter, ‘It might be best if you went to all the big cities of the world to find a husband for yourself. I will provide you with the proper escort of men, elephants, camels and horses. Good luck. I hope you can find a man to love.’

  Savitri set out with a large procession of men, elephants, camels and horses. In her effort to visit all the cities of the world, she had to cross many oceans and deserts. She did this fearlessly. But she never found a man she could love.

  When she returned home, her father said to her, ‘You have looked in all the big cities of the world and have found no man that you wish to marry. Perhaps you should now search through all the forests of the world.’

  Savitri set out again with a large procession of men, elephants, camels and horses, and began searching through all the forests of the world. She did this fearlessly.

  She had looked through the last forest and was just about to return home when she came upon a young man who was cutting wood.

  ‘What is your name?’ she asked.

  ‘Satyavan, your highness,’ he replied.

  ‘Please do not address me as “your highness”,’ she said, ‘my name is Savitri. What do you do for a living?’

  ‘I do nothing much,’ the young man replied. ‘I have very old, blind parents. I live with them in a small, thatched cottage at the edge of the forest. Every morning I go out to cut wood and gather food. In the evening I make a fire for my parents, cook their dinner, and feed them. That is all I do.’

  Savitri returned to her father’s palace and said, ‘Dearest mother and father. I have finally found a man to love and marry. His name is Satyavan and he lives in a cottage by a forest not too far from here.’

  ‘But will you be able to live a simple life in a simple cottage?’ asked her father. ‘This young man obviously has no money.’

  ‘That makes no difference at all to me,’ Savitri said. ‘He is capable, honest, good and caring. That is what I respect and love him for.’

  The King sent a message to the blind couple’s cottage saying that Princess Savitri wished to marry their son, Satyavan. When Satyavan arrived home that evening with his heavy load of wood his parents said, ‘There are messengers here from the King. Princess Savitri wishes to marry you.’

  ‘I love the young lady in question,’ replied Satyavan, ‘but it will be impossible to marry her. She has money, jewels, elephants, camels and servants. What can I offer her?’

  Tears rolled down the faces of his blind parents. ‘Son,’ cried the mother, ‘we never told you this, but long ago, before you were born, your father too was a ruler with a kingdom of his own. His wicked brother blinded us and stole our birthright. You should have been born a prince and heir to the kingdom, quite worthy of the beautiful Savitri. We have fallen on hard times, but if you two love each other, why should you not marry? Who knows what the future has in store for anybody?’

  So a message was sent back to the King saying that Satyavan had agreed to the match.

  On the day of the wedding, the King and Queen held a huge reception. Everyone of importance was invited.

  That is how it happened that the wisest Sage in the kingdom appeared at the scene.

  Just before the wedding ceremony, the Sage took the King aside and whispered, ‘It is my duty to warn you. The young man your daughter is to marry is decent and of good character, but his stars are crossed. He will die very shortly. This marriage would be a tragic mistake.’

  The King felt ill when he heard this. He called his daughter and told her what the Sage had said, adding, ‘Perhaps it is best to call the marriage off.’

  ‘No, Father,’ Sav
itri said solemnly, ‘I will marry Satyavan, whatever our future may hold.’

  Savitri was no fool, however. She had heard that the Sage knew of heavenly remedies for earthly problems.

  ‘O dearest Sage,’ Savitri said to him, ‘surely there is a way I can prevent my husband from dying. You, in your great wisdom, must offer me some hope. There must be something I can do?’

  The Sage thought deeply. ‘You can extend your husband’s life by fasting. Eat nothing but fruit, roots and leaves for a year, and Satyavan will live for those twelve months. After that he must die.’

  With a sense of doom hanging over the bride’s family, the wedding did take place. The groom and his parents were told nothing of what the future held for them.

  Savitri began to lead a simple life with her husband and parents-in-law. Early each morning, Satyavan set out for the forest to cut wood and to forage for food. When he was gone, Savitri made the beds, swept the house, and shepherded her in-laws around wherever they wished to go. She also prayed and fasted.

  One day Savitri’s mother-in-law said to her, ‘Child, we know how rich a family you come from. Since we have lost our kingdom, we can offer you no fineries but Satyavan does collect enough food for all of us. We have noticed that you eat just fruit, roots and leaves and never touch any grain. That is not a healthy diet. We are beginning to worry about you.’

  ‘Oh, please do not worry about me,’ begged Savitri. ‘I love to eat fruit.’

  The twelve months were almost over. On the very last day, Savitri got up with her husband and announced that she would accompany him into the forest.

  ‘Child, what will you do in the forest? The work is hard and there are all kinds of dangerous animals,’ said her mother-in-law.

  ‘Do stay at home,’ said Satyavan, ‘the forest is not a comfortable place.’

  ‘I have travelled through all the forests of the world. I was not uncomfortable and I was not frightened. Let me go with you today.’

  Satyavan had no answer for his wife. He loved her a lot and trusted her instincts. ‘Come along then, we’d better start quickly. The sun is almost up.’