Reading Notes: Week 6 part A

This story already starts off a little different because of how the women ins this story is killing babies by drowning them in a river. There is a lot of different people marrying others and switching throughout this first part of the story. A lot of the couples are summoned because one person does not want to sleep with someone so they tell someone below them in the hierarchy chain to sleep with that person. This continues all the way till a more important character comes into play named Pandu. Pandu is born looking very pale and is not allowed to have children because of a curse put on him. He has two wives though. Pandu is hunting one day and kills a deer as it is having sex but he is curse again that he too will have to die while having sex the same way. Panda ends up having 5 sons by the help of a God, Yama, but ends up dying while having sex later on. His wife Kunti has to take their 5 sons with her to Pandu brother house so that they will have a place to live. The 5 boys also known as Pandavas are loved by the new people and Pandu brother kids start to resent them for it. They want to have the Pandavas exiled from their land. Eventually they build a trap for the Pandavas in this house of joy built for them. It is made of very flammable material so it will catch on fire when they are in it. They narrowly escape but everyone else thinks they are dead. Through a contest in the woods one of the Pandavas is able to win and makes Draupadi the wife of Arjuna but Kanti always says that the 5 brothers must share everything they win. This means Draupadi is now the wife to 5 husbands. This was not the first time this has happened to Draupadi however as once in a different lifetime she was married to a sage that would make love to her through 5 different men. Once her husband left her she prayed to shiva that she would have those 5 men again.

(Pandavas and their wife)

brothers and wife

Mahabharat,Slavitt, David R., and Henry L, Part A