Rogue Reverend

Draupadi, the First Reading from Sunday’s Sermon that Bombed

This is one of the stories of Draupadi, wife of the Pandavas, and one of the main characters in the Mahabharata – one of Hinduism’s two main epics (the Ramayana being the other). It’s written in poem form and is the longest in the world. The Bhagavad Gita is but a part of the Mahabharata.

She’s significant because she’s a protagonist, someone with her own story, independent of the men who lead us to her, someone who doesn’t kowtow or apologize for wanting good things. She’s also beaten up for it – because she’s not pliant or submissive. She chews out her husband for gambling and losing her, saying she wasn’t his to stake in a dice game. She has moods and rages. Plays favorites. She’s human in a way that’s relatable.

~Sohini Baliga

Too many hours have passed. No ordinary dicing match has ever taken this long. Her husband is wealthy—a prince—but even if he has lost everything he owns, it should be all over by now. The women’s quarters are at a considerable remove from the court itself, but even back here one senses that something has gone terribly wrong: the silence is heavy as the monsoon cloud.

She is a princess and a woman of great distinction and beauty—“fragrant as the blue lotus,” chaste and devout. Her hair is unbound, and she wears nothing but a single piece of fabric wrapped loosely and barely secured.

Suddenly, she hears running footsteps and the protesting cries of her maidservants, and before her is a breathless emissary from the court.

“Impossible,” she answers, bewildered and angry together. “Can’t you see. . . ?”

He quails and vanishes, and in moments the sequence repeats itself. But this time there are no words. Strong hands seize her rudely, and when she resists, they bury themselves in her long black hair and drag her along as she clutches at her wearing cloth and tries not to fall to her knees.

She is in the court, the sabha, where a woman of her class would rarely be, and one in her condition never, and she knows before she is told that her husband has indeed lost everything. Lost everything he’d owned—but then kept on gambling. He has staked his four brothers and lost them, staked even himself and lost himself, and finally, sure his luck would turn, he has staked his wife. The man who has won the toss (luck could not have turned in this game, for the very dice were crooked) hates her and the whole class she’s married into. With lewd gestures he mocks her now and boasts of how he will use her.

“Impossible,” she whispers, as her eyes search the room. On every side are men she knows revere her and love her, but none of them moves. Frantically, she calls upon each of them by name—cousins, elders, brothers-in-law—and many of them are visibly anguished, but an unspoken understanding keeps every man’s hands at his sides. No one will come to her defense, no one will look at her. Something dreadful has been released in this room that is proof against any appeal.

“Strip her!” comes the order, and again the powerful hands close on the woman—a warrior’s hands, callused and brutal—but this time they seize the cloth she is wearing and tear at it roughly, and still no one moves, and mingled with their anguish and their shame is something else that is more truly their shame and that has to do with the loveliness of her and their inability to look away.

One sound she makes—throws back her head and hurls it at the heavens. Her eyes close, and she stops struggling, and her whole being is prayer—one prayer, one word, a name—her very self. Insensibly, she lets go of the wearing cloth, and rough hands pull at it now with growing excitement. They pull—and pull, and pull, and the fabric piles up around her feet and his feet, and he begins to sweat with the effort he is making. For something extraordinary has happened.

There is no end to this fabric. Ad she doesn’t need to open her eyes to know it. She feels her freedom and dances it. Spins around the room, oblivious now to everything but a song she alone can hear.

This comes from the book At the Root of This Longing: Reconciling a Spiritual Hunger and a Feminist Thirst.