toujours_nigel | Entries tagged with december daily

viparinama (1583 words) by toujours_nigel
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: Mahabharata - Vyasa
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Draupadi & Kunti (Mahabharata)
Characters: Kunti (Mahabharata), Draupadi (Mahabharata)
Additional Tags: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Alternate Universe - Time Travel
Summary: Draupadi wakes on the banks of the Ganga in time to watch young Pritha crouch down with a casket in her hands.

for

allegoriesinmediasres, who asked for Draupadi time-travelling to stop Karna from being abandoned. A couple days late, I know.

avani008 asked for Kunti and Yuyutsu, and while I was meant to do that yesterday, yesterday was Very Bad Indeed. Today is still Not Good but it's a bit better, so.

I think Yuyutsu is fascinating as the third generation of the Excluded-from-Succession of the Hastinapur princes, and also as the opposite of the more famous of them in his generation: Vasusena.
Of course, unlike in the previous generations and due to their laborious planning, Yuyutsu's generation has any number of acknowledged princes (well, 105 to be precise) and he doesn't get as much centrality as either his uncle or great-uncle. But he also therefore gets to do his own thing and run away to his cousins when his conscience demands it. Privately I also think he might have been informing on his half-brothers for a while before then.

But in conjunction with Kunti he's important *because* he's such a nice foil to Vasusena. It's interesting that Kunti doesn't meet him till after Pandu's death... or, no she can't, can she, Yuyutsu's the same age as Yudhishtira, at most. So.
The thing is, there are any number of ways to have legitimate children in the Mahabharata, and very few to have illegitimate ones. Both parties in a marriage just need to acknowledge a child to make it a child *of* the marriage, whether or not born into it: either party has a child before marriage, either party has a child during it with another partner with spousal consent, either party has a child after the marriage with consent of either their spouse or the spouse's family, and of course both parties have a child together. Yuyutsu is the second, as are the Pandavas; Dhritarashtra and co are the third; the Kauravas are the fourth. Karna, acknowledged, would have been the first; interestingly, so would Vyasa.
I strongly believe that Kunti abandons Vasusena because she's traumatised by the rape and terrified of Kuntibhoja's reaction. We don't know, iirc, how pre- or non-marital kids are dealt with in Kuntipuri; nor can I remember instances among the Yadavas at large. But they abound in Hastinapur, and while Vidura's example she must have known of, I gotta wonder whether seeing Yuyutsu living his life would have made Pritha relent and tell Pandu about her eldest son, or whether--when she saw him as an adolescent after her return to Hastinapur--she was glad nobody had another way to taunt or undermine the Pandavas.

I wonder whether the purity brigade on tumblr and elsewhere have ever read something like The Persian Boy, where a 10 y.o. watches his family murdered and is himself castrated and sold into slavery, subsequently forced into prostitution and sold at... about 13 as a sex-slave to an Emperor and then at 15 handed over to his successor as spoils of war. Our protagonist of course falls wildly in love with said successor and spends the remainder of the novel besotted.

But one wonders how even the canonical tags would be received: Slavery, Underage Rape, Underage Prostitution, Underage Drinking, Underage Drug Use, Underage Sex, Age Difference, Power Imbalance. Nor is all of it presented as outright evil, some of it is indeed romanticised quite a lot.

I ponder because I'm writing in the fandom after years, and in the intervening time anti culture has become extremely prominent. But also my other fandoms where teenagers have sex they have it at a fairly equitable level. Emperor and slave is... not it, but hilariously I have a suspicion that the underage would summon more hostlity. Perhaps I'm being cruel.

filia_noctis gave me Chitrangada Singh and Ranveer Singh and specified something non-romantic.

Karuna (Chitrangada) is old enough to remember her mother’s death, but had been too young to actually remember the woman beyond an impression of sorrowful eyes and apathy. She’s later learnt that the apathy was helped along with enough brandy to kill a horse, much less the sleek and slender Jayati. She doesn’t know what drove her mother to alcoholism: her aunt is tight-lipped about it, and her father forbade her to tell stories to her brother. Karuna was too young to argue about the edict then, and hasn't bothered since: it's just one in a long list of reasons to resent and be suspicious of her father. Another--more significant but doubtless related--is the way he treats her as his heir, her brother as his child, and the two as entirely separate identities.

Lalit (Ranveer) has trouble recognising his mother in old photographs, and doesn’t care. His whole world is his sister and their father, whom he adores; when he was a kid he could go weeks without speaking to anyone but Didi and Papa, and whatever adjutant had been seconded to the care and feeding of Captain (then Major) Sharma’s children. Inconveniences and the occasional health-scare aside, Lalit still misses their childhood of moving from base to base, posting to posting. Army brat for life, yo! It’s not that he doesn’t like Mumbai, or the art scene, or his current life, he just misses being the centre of his Didi’s and--when he could spare the time to come back to quarters--Papa’s attention.

Lokajit (Naseeruddin) retired from the Army when it became obvious that neither of his children were likely to survive another posting: from stress, from illness, from Karuna stabbing the next boy who made a pass at her. When asked why he didn't hand the children to either of their aunts--and he was asked endlessly in the first few years--Lokajit always says Kargil was enough war for him, and he’s not prepared to orphan his kids. Karuna was 17 in 1999, Lalit was 13; old enough to know their father might die any day, young enough to be lastingly affected by the deaths of jawans and officers they had known for years. If anyone wants to accuse him of cowardice, they’re welcome to talk to his Yudh Seva Medal, and also to fuck right off.

But Kargil was twenty years ago, and his kids are grown and so is the business he started in 2000. What business? Oh, import-export, nothing too significant, just a few things here and there, he built up contacts in his military career, and people trust ex-Army, as well they should. It’s fine, it’s all fine, come audit him anytime you like. He’s a nice old man, progressive and liberal, planning on handing the reins of the company to his hyper-competent daughter rather than his dreamer of a son. That he worships the ground Lalit walks on and has weekly fights with Karuna have no impact on this decision, and Lokajit isn’t sure why it should; it’s not like they fight about the company or their plans for it.

I used to embroider rather a lot as a child, and I started at I think 3? Thereabouts, at any rate. One of the Wee Rhea stories is about the time I stitched my frock up into my embroidery hoop. Another is about the time I rucked up my frock before starting and consequently tried to stitch my thigh into my embroidery hoop. I was... a handful, let's say, and significant parental and grandparental effort was expended in keeping me occupied. A book would do it unfailingly, though I might take the book and sit inside a cabinet or on a wall or in the high branches of a tree; embroidery would do it most of the time.
School of course made us stitch samplers rather desultorily till the fifth grade, and more seriously since. Knitting as well, but that I pushed off to my mother, who is very fast, since I haven't the patience for it. We did cushion covers and tablecloths and such. Last thing I ever did was a landscape my grandfather drew freehand, a beautiful thing I haven't seen in years, because my grandmother hoards and then forgets. That was in Grade IX or maybe X, and then it sort of faded. I was getting into writing, and didn't have room for more than one hobby, and there wasn't any impetus from school. I've never been a self-starter, and any time I picked up a needle since, I'd get partway and then stop and never resume.
I've been doing better in the last year and half. Starting June last year I've done seven small hoops in all, and an eighth larger one has been on the shelf for months and will get started on soon. oh, and a cushion-cover in 2016, forgot all about that! The trick is to pick things i can finish before I get distracted, or like enough to return to even if I am: quotations and the like. Then you get to have the spark of satisfaction about having finished a thing, which really truly helps.
Thing is, I used to get a lot of surprise/resistance about my interest in embroidery, being as it was distinctly girly and I was distinctly... not, back in school and even through college. I also get shock about cooking, for much the same reason. Embroidery didn't fit, though idk what would have since never have I ever been sporty. i'm just quiet and snarky and sit in corners a lot, in my head embroidery works just as well as reading to support that image. I suppose reading is gender-neutral as an activity? I dunno. Conforming people are odd and incomprehensible. To complicate all this, the accomplished embroiderer in my family was my grandfather, who had never met a visual art he did not love and have some deftness in, so it was never to me a feminine thing at all. (Ditto with cooking, and my uncle; even my father's learning now he's retired: it's one of his projects.)
All of which is to say, I'm here, I'm queer, I embroider.

also for

avani008 who gave me Ranveer Singh, Deepika Padukone, Vicky Kaushal, and Konkona Sensharma

Bibha Sen (Konkona) teaches in Bethune College and lives by herself in a North Calcutta house that would certainly be better sold than maintained. She doesn’t exactly need the money, but the house is old and she’s not emotionally attached; it’s only stayed in one piece this long because Ma couldn’t bear the thought of it being otherwise. But Ma has been dead for two years, and she’s just had a very good offer.

Bimala (Deepika) loves coming home on vacations, but has spent maybe a total of ten months in Calcutta in as many years, and most of that was when Ma was ill the last time. She even still thinks of it as Calcutta, not Kolkata. The city won’t run away because they no longer have the house, Didi will have a flat and she can always crash there. Besides, she could use the extra cash; Pune’s an expensive city to move to, and she and Ilesh (Ranveer) are saving up for their upcoming nuptials.

The wildcard is their baby brother Barun (Vicky), who hasn’t properly lived in the city for five years, but is always on the verge of returning for good. Secretive, stubborn, and sentimental, Barun insists on reviving Durga Puja at home over Bibha and Bimala’s objections about financial, emotional, and physical costs, and then uses the Puja as an excuse to put off taking a decision about the house. The only one to whom he’s willing to speak is Ilesh, even though the two have never met that the sisters know of.

If Barun’s great secret is that he’s gay, Ilesh’s is of a different sort altogether. Bimala knows he’s bi, which is true; she knows he’s been faithful, which is also true. She knows he had anonymous and pseudonymous hook-ups right before they started dating three years ago, because she was one of those hook-ups that turned into a date, then two, then the best relationship of his life. She doesn’t know, because he didn’t know till Bibha-di introduced them, that he’d slept with Barun.

It’s Sasthi; they have a week to sort out family, fidelity, and finances.

selenak asked for favourite fictional mothers.

My current favourite is Concubine/Consort/Empress Dowager Jing, from Nirvana in Fire, which is a show that will eat your life if you let it. Jingmum, as fandom has largely dubbed her, is someone to whose given name the audience is not privy, who comes from a family without wealth and has lost her sponsors and supporters outside and within the harem to treason charges, and whose only child is rarely allowed to visit her. She ends the show with her son the Crown Prince, and herself the favoured Royal Consort, and all of it without particularly harming anyone. The Empress describes her as a cotton ball, bouncing back from any attempts at repression.

I love her. I would have anyway, because she's so much a Good Slytherin, down to being a deft cook and medic. But she's also extremely compassionate and sincerely kind to people who need her, from another--higher-ranked--Consort, through her long-lost nephew, to of course her son, who is one of the main characters of the show. Now NiF as a whole is very much a story about mothers and sons, so it's not surprising that Consort and Prince Jing are a Mutual Devotion Society. But it's... you know the Slytherin&Hufflepuff duos? These two are that way, and Jingmum sweetly, sincerely coaxes and manipulates her way from a low level concubine to highest consort and effectively Empress in, uh, less than two years. After having been a concubine for thirty years or so.

And she does it, obviously for her son but not on his behalf. There's no Mummy Knows Best going on; they're explicitly a team, and as long as they're together, they can withstand whatever comes. Since they've withstood the wrongful deaths of practically everyone they loved (Jingmum's adoptive brother and nephew and sister-in-law, her adoptive sister/co-wife and married nephew/step-son with his entire household), it's nothing like an empty boast. I love her, and while

selenak said this could be irrespective of relevant children, I do very much love Prince Jing and his obvious love and respect for his mother: one of the only moments we see him really gloriously happy is upon being granted permission to visit his mother whenever he wants.

But if he's only thinking he wants to see his Mum more often, she's definitely awake to the political implications and advantages. Consort Jing is one of the best political minds on this extremely political show, and once she gets going you can see she never really put in an effort before this. All of it, of course, with lowered eyelids and a sweet smile, because that's how you survive your husband being omnipotent and increasingly nuts, your surviving co-wives being power-hungry and/or terrified, and your son being stubborn and incapable of misdirection.
-
Consort Jing also fits my general favourite model for fictional mothers, especially in historical texts: ones who are very concerned about their children, but not necessarily every last detail of their daily lives. I adore Kunti from the Mahabharata; the Dowager Duchess of Denver from the Wimsey mysteries: mothers who are allowed to let go without being seen as abandoning, who effectively fulfill the 'distant but loving' parental role usually reserved for fathers in fiction.

avani008 asked for the Fake Movie Meme, with Aditi Rao Hydari, Aushmann Khurrana, and Supriya Pathak.

Ruhi (Aditi Rao Hydari) got married right out of college, and exchanged her Stephen Greenblatt for good old Sanjeev Kapoor. Her husband swore up and down that he wouldn’t mind her resuming her studies, but it’s always been understood that family (their family which really means his) comes first. He’s never said it, but he’s never had to: Ruhi’s attempts to enroll for a masters degree in the first years of their marriage were always set in second place to every family occasion and emergency. After the birth of her daughter she’d given up on her lingering hopes for further studies and devoted herself to motherhood.

It never struck her as possible that her in-laws might not think like her husband, till an offhand mention of her dashed hopes finds her mother-in-law Jayita (Supriya Pathak) up in arms about her missed opportunities. Ruhi finds herself enrolled in D.U in short order, with Jayita in charge of her daughter, husband, and household. There may or may not have been shouting matches to which she was not privy, but her husband has certainly been going around looking simultaneously cowed and self-righteous.

Possibly this is going to blow up in her face sometime soon, but Ruhi doesn’t have time to think about it. She has the Delhi traffic to deal with twice a day after twelve years at home, classes where most of the other students are a decade or more her junior, her own papers to write and her daughter’s homework to supervise, and Dr. Nitin Gupte (Ayushmann Khurrana), who teaches her Early Modern Lit now and used to steal her Shakespeare notes when they were in college together. He hasn’t forgotten her, and she’s got to get used to being called upon in class; worse, she’s got to tell him they can’t possibly be friends again.

aririne asked for Duryodhana and Karna switching places, answered on tumblr. Will probably work part of it up into a proper fic.

I love this stupid show so so much I can't tell you. Especially Season 2, where shit gets real and they have to deal with things as adults. Especially Stuart, whose speech coming out to his parents and telling-off of Vince's new b-i-l I used to have memorised, once upon a time.

As you can see, I'm a Stuart/Vince shipper, not necessarily in the romantic/sexual sense, but that they're each other's Person. The ending delighted me so very much in that regard. They give me feelings, alright? Stuart knows all the Doctors in order, Stuart's the one who's actually doing the chasing--what there is of it. Judith's entire wedding, oof!

from

moetushie

A Mythology Kink Meme. There's nothing Hindu up there yet, but it's certainly allowed.

I did a Hades/Persephone fill there, and a couple (MCU, and Greek Myth) over at the Three Sentence Ficathon.

is juuust past minimum word-limit, but it's done. I was feeling rather terrified about letting the default window run out, but I wrote today, and it feels complete.

avani008 asked for something about Satyavati, which I just said in Khilji's Padmavati tone, which would be wrongbad in any case but...

Okay, you know how there was this post making the rounds that if your kid wants to be a princess, use this as a tool to talk about community and responsibility and adventure? Well, when I was a wee Rhea, some three or four years old, I used to be Satyavati, Queen Regent of Hastinapur, with ever so many duties, and my grandfather would play Bhishma.

On an extremely related note I have seen Bhishma/Satyavati once and never have I ever backed out of a fic that fast. (not even the carebears BDSM one)

So, Satyavati. I don't think she's ever close to people with whom there is a burden of care. Maybe her father the Fisherking, but nobody since, and even there there's a stunning amount of calculation at work on both ends. I don't think she is as in love with Shantanu as he is with her, but then that's the tragedy of Shantanu's life; but also I don't think she can afford to love her sons or her daughters-in-law. Satyavati's place in most stories would go to a man, because she has this strategist's mindset that is constantly working away in the background. I love it; i love her Slytherin everything.

I want to think she adores Vidura, whose future she doesn't have to promote or judge, and in whom she recognises her own very careful mind. I also think she and Bhishma are close, but that is never an easy relationship at all.

Today is my mother's birthday, and she turns 59. I am missing it because I am sitting hunched over my laptop writing the first ten pages of my thesis for the fourth time. I had tickets home and everything, but my advisor looked in danger of having a stroke if I fucked off for a week. One of my friends is getting married next weekend, which I am also missing, but then I have never managed to attend a wedding ever, so they're used to it by now.

I'm not sure I like this living alone gig. Something will change next August, one way or another, but still it's awful. The one friend I have still living in the city is an hour and change away by bus, works full-time, and has housemates she really likes. They're all very loud together, give me a headache.

I don't like people enough to be this lonely. But here we are, anyhow.

And here she is, with her mom and younger daughter on either side.

moetushie asked for Bengali food.

dragonlady7 was looking at options for a real-world ethnicity for Bodhi Rook for The Sled Dog Guy Mystery, and she wasn't very happy with just giving him Riz Ahmed's.
"Why not Bengali Hindu/Buddhist," I said, ever so innocent. "I mean, I could give you pointers for all the culinary stuff, if you did that."
Reader, she made him a Bengali Hindu, and I did try my best to help with the culinary stuff. Mostly I shoved her at wikipedia, iirc.

Look, I have a complicated and at times hostile relationship with Bengali food. I don't eat riverine fish, I can't eat non-fish seafood, and sea fish are prohibitively expensive and I don't much like that either. It's a shock nobody's de-ethnicised me.
Anyhow. Bengali food is just... food, y'know, what I grew up eating, the unmarked category. Of course I later realised what I was eating was probably closer to East Bengali/Bangladeshi cuisine than not, because my mother's side is entirely and my father's side half East Bengali, even if my grandparents were all on this side when Partition went into effect. I didn't realise this in school or even undergrad, because of course it all *sounded* like the same food: dal dal bhat bhat it's the fucking same. I even avoided getting drawn into the hilsa/crab dialogue because I don't eat crab (allergies, aptly enough inherited from my mother).
Instead! I realised there were culinary differences in my first year of Masters, when my roommate, who could cook and was therefore capable of rescuing me from the university mess' notion of Andhra food, turned out to define everything very differently than me. She used different words for dishes! When she used the same words she cooked them differently! Bengali food was suddenly a marked category! It was all very upsetting.
The reason we're still together is

filia_noctis is a nice and tolerant woman who took my bewildered rage nicely. She's also entirely and extremely West Bengali, so we still disagree on most things, like sugar v. chillies in food, and what vegetable best accompanies hilsa, and what oil to use.

The complicated and hostile part of things, other than allergies and aversions, is that I'm fairly indifferent to Bengali food, partly because it's just normal food not worth getting excited about, but also because I don't know how to cook it. I learnt cooking in my Masters, where my mother's instructions over the phone were difficult, online recipes inadequate or overly complicated, and

filia_noctis' valiant attempts largely if indeterminately off. So instead I use onion-garlic with everything, when most iconic Bengali Hindu dishes abjure both as they were forbidden for widows; I also primarily cook a violently-simplified Italian for preference, because again garlic in everything and also tomatoes. Bengali food I love the first fortnight I'm at home, but can't reproduce, so my liking for it--such as it is--is a very childish liking for this is how home tastes. It doesn't help that our cook is incompetent at best.

What I do really miss is street food, the snacks available in every sweetshop and several snack-shacks; the cutlets and rolls and puddings of the Raj; the Calcutta-iterations of both Mughlai and "Chinese", adapted by the Lucknow and Chinese/Tibetan diaspora in the city: all the culinary heterogeneity of a port.

All this is reminding me of exactly how much I adore

denise even apart from her incredible fannish production.

In response to RW shock-and-horror about pornography!how could you!

We sure do and we sure are!

That sounds like I'm being flippant, but the question of "what is pornography" has been, for hundreds of years, the tool used by societies, governments, and corporations as an excuse to censor and suppress anyone who doesn't match the societally-accepted attitudes on gender, gender presentation, sexuality, and sexual expression. Because of how "societally-accepted attitudes on etc etc" are formed, "pornography" as a label falls disproportionately on minority populations and their cultural practices and the cultural, social, and legal penalties for producing "pornography" follow.

US judicial precedent, for years, defined obscenity primarily by the classic "I'll know it when I see it" -- that is, personal, subjective opinion. (Today's definition of obscenity that's replaced it is less pithily-summarized but equally personal and subjective; one of the three elements for a judicial ruling of obscenity specifically includes community standards, although nobody has ever defined the "community" involved, and so it is equally subjective and equally inequitably-enforced; in practice, it's been impossible to get a conviction for obscenity in the US in years, precisely because of the vagueness of the definition.) Our goal from the beginning was to remove as many subjective judgement calls from ToS enforcement procedures as we could, because subjective judgement calls, especially on adult-content related issues, lead to the burden of enforcement primarily landing against those who are gender/gender-identity/gender-expression and sexuality minorities, such as LGBT folks, trans folks, gender non-conforming folks, sex workers, and the like.

We sidestep all that by saying, flat-out, that with certain limited exceptions that are necessary to preserve the quality of the service for everyone, such as spam cleanup, it's okay to post here unless it's inherently illegal under US law. This undoubtedly includes a lot of content that people think shouldn't be allowed to post, but everyone's line for "people shouldn't be able to post this!" falls differently, and by outsourcing our particular definitions to "inherently illegal under US law", it lets us have a single standard that involves very few subjective elements.

I love her so much. I always have.

avani008 asked about best and worst adaptations.

I am increasingly fond of adaptations that do something interesting and pointed about the original text, in its reinterpretation. For instance, while I didn't love The Hobbit films (other than Richard Armitage's everything) I liked the refocusing of Tolkien's fantasy!Jewish dwarves from doing-it-for-money to searching-for-return-to-homeland, especially since the return displaced and caused harm to the people who were living right there, and also because of Thorin's descent into mad tyranny. I also love how the BBC Little Women takes up aspects of the novel other adaptations ignore.

Anyway.

Much though I dislike Whedon, one of the best cross-media adaptations *has* to be Buffy, which was a very odd and not good film, and an iconic tv show for rather good reasons. I also love love love the Joseph Fiennes-Jeremy Irons Merchant of Venice, because they're clearly boyfriends and Jeremy Irons is *such* a good heartbreaking Antonio. Oh! The Star Wars comics are stunning and deepen the GFFA world in lovely ways; especially the Poe ones are &hearts; because Poe. (I feel odd not talking about Marvel, but while I love them they're neither faithful nor interestingly divergent.)

Worst adaptation is a tie between Troy and Beowulf (the Angelina Jolie one). I flat refuse to watch Mahabharata shows, or have since I was a baby watching BR Chopra, so the other butcherings of epics will have to stand in for worst. Someday I'll get to watch an Iliad where Helen is at *least* in her late thirties, right? Even the lovely Troy: Fall of a City has let me down in that regard.