Kumara And His Six Mothers From Mahasena: Murugan Trilogy by Kala Krishnan

In this first volume of Mahasena: Murugan Trilogy by Kala Krishnan, the authors expands the mythologies of the god. Kumara, Karthikeya, Kandhan, Velan, he is the god of Tamizh, the patron of the Great Assembly of poets in Madurai, friend and mentor to the hot-headed and fiercely loyal Aambal, who is known to all as ‘Murugan’s poet’. An excerpt:

There were few to match the Krittikas in the telling of fortunes and prescriptions for antidotes to life’s misfortunes. Many came to them to learn about the fate of things they held dear or dreaded: kings asked if they would return from wars; lovers if they would make and keep a life together; physicians if their treatments would be timely; generals if they might lose courage; the mothers of young women if their daughters’ heads would be turned by beautiful but mercurial men. Others came asking for cures: for stubborn wombs that would not bear children, for the impotence of husbands who could not give pleasure, for varieties of harm done by themselves, and by strangers and loved ones. The Krittika sisters could read your stars, they could draw a chart of your life events, they could read your fate from your hands, your feet, your face, or by touching you—a tip of their  finger barely making contact with your throat, the inside of  your wrist, your ankle, the underside of your foot, your ear, your  forehead—or from what you were wearing, the direction of your  entry into their forest, what bird or animal called as you arrived. In short, all things were potential signs and they could read them all.  But whether they would tell you what they saw is another matter.

They could offer you remedies for all your misfortunes—a herbal cure, a cure of prayer and speech, of turning inwards, a cure to appease the spirits of ancestors or of the Gandharvas that lived in the trees or the wells, lakes, ponds, flowers around your dwellings.  But the question always was, would they? It was difficult to tell why or when they would choose to remain silent because they did not discriminate between seekers on any discernible grounds: wealth, knowledge, species, gender. There was only one thing they consistently refused to do, which was to corroborate or refute suspicions of infidelity: they knew well what such knowing could do, as they knew how desire was sometimes beyond antidotes and righting.

They had gained this knowledge in a time before they learnt to read signs and tell what lay ahead. When they lived in the northern sky, these star-women, a cluster of seven at the time— among them a sister, now gone—were a modest constellation, one among hundreds of others ruled by the Sun. They were married to the Seven Sages, whose names are of no consequence, it is their actions that matter. The tale of how the Krittikas came to be the mothers of these six boys starts up there, in the skies.  The seven star-women went about their days, effective in what they did, happy to be where they were, wanting for nothing, resenting no one. Then, one day, the eyes of a passing god fell on  them as they were bathing, and their strong bodies, their lustre, the  way they were one despite being seven individual women, filled  his head with visions of being in the midst of them as they tended  to his lust, fourteen hands, fourteen legs, seven mouths, fourteen  breasts, seventy fingers and seventy toes, and seven vaginas into  which his organ could go! His loins swelled, his heart expanded, his breath slowed. He approached the women and made his proposition. He was, he said, so filled with longing for them that he could barely breathe; he wished, he said, in a voice that held no doubt, to lie with them and enjoy them and to give them the enjoyment of his supreme virility.

The Krittikas looked at the god and said that they were spoused to husbands whom they would not cuckold or betray, and turned away. The god, knowing all too well the fate that befalls gods who let their lust go to their heads, left, crestfallen perhaps, or maybe scheming to get what he wanted. That, however, is not the crux of the story. It is this: one among the seven, looking on the god and hearing him describe his desire, was in turn filled with an irrepressible urge to participate in it. Her thoughts and dreams and all of her imagination was swept up into a tornado that spun between her and the things around her. The days passed, but not her wish to know the pleasures of lying with the god. And so, one day, she turned herself into six more, approached the god, and said to him that time had not let them forget his desire. Instead, it had entered their bodies and hatched into swarms of eager birds, ready to take wing. He lay with all seven, not knowing that they were but one, and she did with him, not once but seven times of everything.

Then, their desire spent, there was nothing left, nothing to say or do, and the seven women walked away from him, turned back into the one, and went home. She blurted out the truth to her sisters, fearing what it might bring. The six were appalled, angered, saddened and disappointed, but she was their sister, and a partner in the work that they jointly accomplished—they would not betray her. All except one, who said, ‘I will not be part of this trickery. She strayed from her path, she deserves punishment. You must not stand in the way of her getting what she deserves.’ This one, called Arundhati, was forever celebrated by aftercomers as a paragon, elevating the role of spouse

above that of sibling.

All might still have gone on as ever, for it was not as if the seven sages enjoyed their wives’ bodies or thought about their own as a source of pleasure. But the god, of course, went about boasting of his prowess, using words like ‘irresistible’, ‘potent’, ‘chaste’, ‘travesty’, and perhaps also ‘cuckold’ and ‘dried-up sages’. And, of course, word got around to the seven sage husbands of the seven women, and, of course, they came storming in, demanding explanations. Perhaps they took up handfuls of water, readying to curse their wives, but Arundhati stepped forward and offered proof of her whereabouts on the day that ‘the sin’ had been committed. She went off with her husband, his smirk a template that men to come would mimic. As for the other six, they said to their husbands, one of us could not restrain our longing for the god; one of us lay with him.

Excerpted with permission from Mahasena: Part One of the Murugan Trilogy by Kala Krishnan.  Published by Context (an Imprint of Westland)

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