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Prawns in Copper Pots



I only remember that even then it was very, very expensive to buy prawns in Kathmandu,  and on the exceptionally rare occasions when prawns did enter our house, they came in small numbers  - a quarter of a kilogram, lesser sometimes, to be cooked and divided amongst six people.  Four men, one little girl, one woman. 
But first, let me tell you a story.
Two thousand years ago, gods roamed freely on earth.  One fine morning, the Sun God was very pleased with the Pandavas and granted the brothers a magical copper vessel.  For the following twelve years of their exile in the forest, the pot would feed the Pandavas and their common wife, Draupadi.  “Let Draupadi serve out of this vessel,” said the generous Sun God, “and there will be enough to feed a kingdom, enough to feed the world.  But the vessel will produce no food after Draupadi herself has eaten.” And so, for the next twelve years, Draupadi served her five husbands, she served the men that had followed them to the forest, served the friends they made along the way, served the army that the princes slowly but surely gathered to vanquish their enemy.  The pot overflowed with delicacies (I imagine extravagant, juicy prawns). Not one returned hungry or unsatisfied from the Pandava abode.  Every now and then Draupadi felt the fatigue of having to serve so many.  Every now and then, she was tempted to eat first.  But she never did.  She waited sometimes patiently, sometimes impatiently for that one person who was out on an errand and had not returned on time for lunch. 
Twelve years is a long time and slowly Draupadi forgot the magic within the copper vessel.  She forgot the Sun God’s boon.  She even forgot she was a queen, wife of five powerful men.  She remembered only the routine of the day.  She remembered that she ought to eat last under all circumstances, that the fate of many stomachs and tongues rested on her.  The five Pandavas forgot too.  They forgot to wait for their wife during mealtime.  Accustomed to her long absences they  forgot Draupadi was their queen.  They got used to her serving them.    
Twelve years passed and the copper vessel lost its magic.  It became an ordinary container capable only of giving back what was put into it, but Draupadi, dictated by habit, continued the routine.  Her husbands returned from the exile to fight and win the bloodiest war the world had seen.  Her sons died.  She grew old.  Through it all, Draupadi continued the custom of serving, of waiting, of being the last to eat. She was a stately woman and those around her were enamoured by the dignified, regal, self-effacing queen and learnt from her the quiet custom of serving.  They taught their daughters Draupadi’s practice, the daughters taught their children, and their children theirs, each carrying the ritual like a delicate, unbreakable thread that would not be violated.
Finally, the thread reached my mother who stared at the pot of prawns before her and wondered how she would serve the curry to satisfy her waiting family.  She could count the pieces under the gravy – twenty.  Twenty little aromatic prawns speaking of oceans – it was the simplicity of the math that muddled her mind.  I stood behind my mother, vaguely thinking my mother’s thoughts, and when Ma abruptly turned towards me and pushed a piece into my mouth, I was startled and happy.  I chewed for the juice in my mouth.  I was still only a little girl, not yet a woman, and so a piece before the curry vanished was still possible. When the piece was over, Ma put another into my mouth, then another, until I had eaten a decent number.  “You must eat what you want, my sack of sugar,” she said to me.  “The world is too quick with taking away.” 
My mother did not get the coveted piece for herself that day, and I wonder now if she ever ate a fill of scarce, delectable meals.  She fought most of her battles for me.  Once she said, “An uneducated man is still a man, an uneducated woman is a slave” and began a lifelong war to send me to the best schools, the best universities. By the time I returned from these universities to fight her battles, she had already become an angry, bitter person who sometimes found it difficult to empathise with the world around her, and often found it difficult to share.  And once she said she did not want to be born again after she died.  “I want to finish,” she said. “But I will never finish, will I?  I have done so many bad things, I will be born again.”
I think of it often, my mother’s desire to finish, to not return, to finally stop belonging to a world that wouldn’t give her her share, that coated her life with myths and platitudes and tales and denied her a chair against the social table. 
Years after Ma’s death, her loss sits like a perplexed eye within me, altering the way I see the world.  But I am glad too that she is dead, and the guilt of this terrible joy haunts me daily.  I, who loved my mother above all else in life, am glad my mother is dead.  What does this make me?  Which road does it lead me to? I did not do for her what she did for me.  I did not turn abruptly to feed her, I did not fight for her dignity, I did not scoff at myths and stories that reduced her to nothing but two hands, I did not question my father’s right over the meals he so happily ate.  And because I did not fight for her as she did for me, because I became one of the hundreds of people she served before she served herself, I am sometimes glad she is no longer around. 
But there are others, aunts, friends, neighbours, cousins, who constantly remind me of my mother and push me to take a stand. They remind me that my own place in a community that does not always grant women a place of dignity has come not through a singular fight but a collective one.  There is power in numbers and truth often sides with the louder majority.  If we want fair distribution of food, shelter, clothes, leisure, entertainment, walks, love, life within families, we have to speak for the sister who will not speak, the mother who will not fight, the wife who will not ask, the friend who does not know. The centuries old thread of tenacious stories must break now and the copper vessel must be recognized for the empty container it is.   

Read article here :

http://kathmandupost.ekantipur.com/printedition/news/2014-10-31/prawns-in-copper-pots.html


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