Week 5 Storytelling: Madhavi's Memoir

Hi. I’m Madhavi, and this is my story…

Growing up I was one of eight, and the only girl for that matter. As my brothers and I got older, we decided it would be best if we all stayed in the same large house on our farm. Every day my brothers would tend to the fields, while I would get water from the nearby stream and then cook them dinner. I loved cooking dinner for my brothers! It was my little way of saying thank you for all their hard work and taking care of me. Unfortunately, my sisters-in-law did not quite seem to understand that. You see all seven of my brothers decided to marry, probably so that they could expand our family, but I am convinced that they married the seven most horrible women alive! I’m not really sure what these women’s problems were, I mean it’s not like I wasn’t cooking dinner for them too, but for some reason they were just extremely jealous of the fact that I cooked dinner every nights and they didn’t. So you know what those psychos did? They made a deal with a magical nature spirit called a Bonga, essentially selling me to him if he got rid of me! Well, at the time I was unaware of this plot, so I went out to the stream to get water for the boys like I normally do when suddenly the pitcher would not go in the water and the water began to swirl around me getting higher and higher! I screamed out to my brothers for help but none of them heard me, none of them came. I could feel myself drowning. The pitcher began to fill with water causing me to sink to the bottom,  drown and die. Suddenly I was alive again, only I was not all me. I had been transformed into a Bonga. And when I opened my eyes, there, before me, was the Bonga my sisters-in-law had promised me to, and he carried me away. Let me tell you something about this Bonga, he’s kind of a weird guy!

Well, I managed to escape that relationship by turning myself into bamboo. I thought all was good, I had peace and quiet, I was by that beautiful stream I died in; life was good. That is, until this Yogi decided to come on over, chop me down, and turn me into a fiddle. I mean who does he think he is! And then he wants me to make music to entertain people so that he could get paid! What was I getting out of it, you ask? Nothing, absolutely nothing. So I decided that I would make my music the best, and saddest, of all so that maybe I could escape this Yogi. As luck would have it, this Yogi guy decided to play me for the village chief who took me away from the Yogi, thank goodness! Well, this chief gave me to his son, and I was so delighted that I was in better hands that I produced wonderfully happy music every time I was played. During the day everyone would depart my new home, leaving me alone and bored. So I, as the Bonga girl, would come out of the fiddle every day, cook dinner for the family, eat my fair share, take a plate for the chief’s son to his room, and then re-enter my fiddle. Then one day I’m heading back to my fiddle prison, just minding my own business, when suddenly someone was grabbing me! I began screaming, that is until I realized that it was the chief’s son. Still holding onto me, he looked me in the eyes and told me that I was "the one." I guess I did something that impressed him...  and he didn’t even realize that I was human AND Bonga until his family come home and got all worked up about it. Like it’s some big deal or something.

So time went on, as it always does, and my old family, pre-drowning, decided to come visit the chief. I was so excited when I saw my seven brothers, but those stupid boys did not even recognize me, can you believe it!? I shook it off and decided to bring them some water and cook them dinner like I used to, hoping that maybe it would jog their memory or something: it didn’t. So I sat down next to them and began pouring my heart out to them, telling my brothers about the horrible treatment I was subjected to by their wives. I told them about every horrible thing that had happened to me since their wives made that evil plot with the Bonga. My brothers just looked at me, blank stares on their faces. That’s when I extracted my revenge! I looked at those seven boys dead in the eyes and said, “You must have know it all, and yet you did not interfere to save me.” Well, you should have seen the look on their faces! Shock, sadness, shame, and guilt all together! It was priceless.

I am telling you this not because it is a happy story, but because it is the true story. And I want my story to be known.

Source

Author's Note. This retelling is based off the story The Magic Fiddle. In the original story the sister (the Bonga girl) is betrayed by her sisters-in-law, made into a Bonga, then becomes bamboo and is turned into a fiddle. She seeks her revenge on her brothers by telling them that they must have known about their wive's plot against her. The woman originally did not have a name in the story, so I named her Madhavi. I wrote the retelling as if it were her memoir, her last words before the great beyond. By doing this I could further add emotions to the story. I felt as though writing it from Madhavi’s perspective gave a funny twist on an otherwise depressing story. Using verbal echoes from the original story is something I enjoy doing because it allows you to essentially keep a piece of the story within yours, making things more familiar to someone who has read it and easier for someone to follow if they have not. My verbal echo was the quote I used at the end of the last paragraph. It is an important part of the original story since it is the climax to when she exacts her revenge. But her revenge is not about betrayal or necessarily physical revenge, it is more revenge upon the soul. The massive amount of shame and guilt thrust upon her brothers in one single sentence was enough to torture them for a lifetime.

Bibliography. Indian Fairy Tales by Joseph Jacobs with illustrations by John D. Batten (1912).