The Heart of the Matter

The One Who Swam With the Fishes
Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan
HarperCollins
152 pages
Rs 250

In the author’s note of the first book of her series, Girls of the Mahabharata, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan writes: “…If you read it [The Mahabharata] closely, you’ll realise that they [the girls] are at the heart of everything that happens, even though so little is said about them”. Madhavan is on to something here, for barring Draupadi, Kunti, and perhaps, Gandhari, the other women of the epic are known to us by name and deeds, but not as fully formed characters as most of the male characters are. The One Who Swam With the Fishes begins with Satyavati, who is, arguably, the most important woman in the epic; whose wisdom and ambition set the course for the events that would tear a family apart.

But who was Satyavati, wonders Madhavan, before she masterminded her meteoric rise from partially-divine fisherwoman to the queen of Hastinapur? She was Matsyagandhi, the fish-smelling girl, an orphan found in the belly of her mother, the apsara Adrika, who was cursed by a sage. The timeline of the events from her birth, to her ascension as queen, run parallel, as Madhavan double-dutches between “now” and “then”. This might have proved tricky in a longer narrative, but at 150 pages, the device works.

Madhavan, a prolific Young Adult author, plays to her strengths here — by taking off on Satyavati’s origin story and turning it into a coming-of-age tale, she examines all the ways in which a young girl could have taken charge of her body, and by extension, her future. If Satyavati has been accused of being too forward, too calculating, Madhavan doesn’t shy away from fictionalising those details to great effect. After all, if men, whether they are sages or kings, don’t think twice about lusting after teenage girls, then why shouldn’t she set the terms of engagement?

This is a series to watch out for, but given that this is Madhavan’s first foray into a mythological setting, it is crucial that she gets the tone right in the following books. The One Who Swam With the Fishes is an easy-breezy read, but there are places where the language is too colloquial, too blog-like, and in other places, it feels like a direct translation of dialogues from the Doordarshan version of The Mahabharata into English. This unevenness jars the reading experience and shakes one out of the fantastical world Madhavan has immersed herself and the reader in.