The namesake

When I was a young kid, I remember calling an ancient lady as "Mahabharata" because every few alternate days she used to come to our house at dusk and then read out verses from the Mahabharata and explain the stories to me and my elder brothers. She normally used to come in the late afternoons and chat with my grandma, mother and my aunt about the going-ons under the different roofs which she used to visit, just like ours. Once she was done with her renditions and comments on the worldly issues, she would take out the old, dilapidated thick volume of the Epic from the room where our family deities were kept and worshiped. The thick volume, I vaguely remember now, used to be covered in a maroony, moth eaten velvet cloth which might have been red when it was first wrapped around the book. Then she used to place the volume of text on an X-shaped wooden cross, and carefully unwrap and open the book to the page where she had taken her break last time. I don't remember to have seen her ever starting from the first few pages and my memory tells me I never saw her finishing the last pages. It almost always used to be the three-quarter of that thick volume where she started. The bounded volume was in itself a testimony of the times and generations of readers who have gone through it's sheets of wisdom and tales, and in the process had gained an ivory tint and tunnels for bookworms. I lifted it occasionally and it took a real strain on my back to do so.


So by the time the dusk set in, and our mom,aunt and grandma had finished the evening Puja, me and my two cousins were all huddled up to listen to that day's tales. Even the ladies joined us and then "Mahabharata" with her wrinkled face and strained vision started reciting from her namesake. It was a shrill voice but which was equally apt at describing the modern tales of common households as well as the ancient tales of valor and betrayal, the myths of lords and larger-than-life humans. She used to chant the Sanskrit verses and then after every few lines explain it in vernacular. Many a days, the power would go out and we'll be sitting around a kerosene lamp with shadows playing with the mythical characters which seemed to come alive with "Mahabharata's" hypnotizing portrayals. And soon she would finish yet another episode of magnificent fable, leaving footprints on our impressionable minds.


I don't remember when she stopped visiting our house, which was such a gradual process that by the time I really noticed it, I had grown up for B.R. Chopra's epic TV serial. In all those years I never really got to know her name, certainly she had an existence beyond the gossip circles and the Epic but for me she'll always be the lady who illustrated the mythology in all it's grandiosity and detail.