Week 6 Story: Shantanu Meets a Girl

It was just your average day as a king. I'd do my ruling business, order some servants around, eat like a me, and then go down to the river for my daily walk. However, this specific day, I met a girl. She was beautiful, and was washing her clothes in the river that I walk by. I had to speak to her. "Come here often?," I say, immediately regretting my stupid pickup line. "Not really," she says "I just moved here." "Well why don't I give you the Hastinapura welcome? Let me invite you over for dinner." And she came to dinner. And she came back over the next few weeks. We would talk and laugh and I was beginning to fall in love with her. I proposed and she accepted.

However, there was a catch. Not a huge catch, I just couldn't question any of her actions. Seems normal. She'd wear a weird shirt, I wouldn't comment. Not too hard for the first few years. But then it escalated. When she got pregnant for the first time and had the kid, she immediately took it to the river. I didn't ask why, but when she came back without the baby, I was suspicious. "I drowned the baby," she said. I couldn't believe my ears. Drowned the baby?! Our baby?! I know I'm not supposed to ask, but how could she. Over the course of the next few years, she drowned the next 6 babies we had. At the 8th baby, I said enough was enough and she had to tell me why she was doing such an awful thing. "I told you not to ask," she said "but I guess you're gonna hear it." She proceeded to tell me that she, my WIFE, was the incarnation of the river Ganga and our sons that she drowned were the Vasus, who were reincarnated as babies to be punished for stealing Vashishtha's cow. After telling me this, she took the last baby and just disappeared. Gone. Didn't even say goodbye. Women, am I right?

Ganga drowns her son (Blogspot)

Mahabharata by Narayan

Author's Note: I wrote this about Shantanu and his relationship with Ganga and how she drowns their children in the river when they have the babies. I told it through the perspective of the king and how he would react and his thoughts about the crazy situation that he got himself into.



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