Story: Yes, Mother

Yes, Mother

The Pandava brothers had walked into their mother’s room excited to tell their her their good news but when they found her, she was tired and absentminded and as they told her that they had obtained something fantastic, she simply told them “Well make sure you share it between all of you so I don’t have to hear you complain when one of you tries to hog it for himsefl.” The brothers looked at one another nervously, no one brother wanting to be the one to tell their mother what she had just told them to do. Finally, after several seconds had passed the brothers simply slunk away without saying anything else. Their mother paid them no mind, thinking them as just being strange as usual.

And so they sat in the courtyard discussing what was to be done. “We can’t all marry the same woman. We’re not Mormons, here,” One brother joked and they all laughed. Yet still none of them really knew what to do. They all knew their mother was prone to anger and they had known that if they had laughed at her, she would have been very angry at them and so they instead sat around thinking about how to tell their mother. It seemed like it should be a simple thing but they made it something greater amongst themselves and kept arguing. At first, it had been planned that only one of them, the eldest was to go on a date with this girl. They had all met at a county fair where one brother, Drupada, had caught her attention by winning several games of darts in a row. She had sat with all the brothers and they had all vied for her, and they had returned home each planning to find a way of making her his own.

“I was the one who caught her attention and so I really deserve to be the one dating her,” Drupada said. But his brothers all disagreed for various reasons and tried to make their own points about why each of them was the actually deserving one. This went on for several hours with no progress being made.

“Look, we’re getting nowhere,” Drupada said. “We need to start suggesting solutions instead of just stating why each of us is the best for her. It’s not going to get us any further than this. Why don’t we have a competition of sorts?”

“Riddles,” one brother said.

“No way. Arm-wrestling is the only fair way,” another argued.

“That’s not fair. You’ll win. It has to be fair for everyone or else it isn’t worth doing,” yet another argued.

“Why don’t we let her decide?” Drupada said. The others asked him to explain himself. “Well you see, we can invite her out to something with all of us and then we will simply observe who she ends up choosing by the end of the night.” And thus it was agreed that they would all go on a group date in order to decide how they should proceed from there. But there were still more surprises to come.

Authors note: I wanted to do a modernized re-write of this tale but I was worried that if I used the stories names too much, it would make things seem out of place or out of time. In the end, the lack of names probably gets a bit confusing so I may end up re-writing it again and just modernizing the names. I tried to leave it open ended in case I decide to write a follow-up to it.

Bibliography: Wife of the Five Pandavas, Public Domain Mahabharata, link

(Draupadi and Pandavas, wikimedia commons)