Book Review: The One who Swam with the Fishes

The One who Swam with the Fishes, Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, India, HarperCollins Publishers India, 2017, 1st edition, 152 pages, ₹250.

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Satyavati has long been seen as a fisherwoman who manipulated her way to the Kuru throne. A selfish unashamed woman who wasn’t satisfied merely by being the queen but made her to-be-born sons the heirs to the throne of Hastinapur instead of crown Prince Devavrata. Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan, in her The Girl who Swam with Fishes from the series Girls of The Mahabharata weaves the story of how a fish-smelling girl of divine birth, raised in a fisher community, finds her way to her Destiny. It shows the story of Matsyagandhi evolving into Satyavati of The Mahabharata.

The contemporary storytelling makes the book distinct from the poetic language of an epic. At the same time, the Vedic setting and time period isn't forgotten as the modern storytelling describes a span of year in terms of rain and that of a month in terms of the position of the moon. The book narrates the story of fourteen rains old Satyavati and that of the younger Matsyagandhi in alternative chapters. The parallel narration of the present and the past, the tale of how she became not only a queen but also a queen mother and the tale of how she was rid of her awful fish smell, keeps the reader’s nose in the book till the last page is through. The story of 'Then' ends where the story of 'Now' begins.

The theme of violation of a woman’s body stays constant throughout the story. It is presented in the tales of child molestation at the age of 8; of women as the conquest of soldiers; when sex is presented as a lesson that Matsyagandi is supposed to learn to reach her destiny and when Satyavati becomes a victim of King in his moment of longing lust, and a fleeting anger as a result of her denial to bed him before marriage. The first person narration describes the known fears, if not experiences, of women today. It makes the fisher woman’s tale from the mythology, a tale of every woman. Having said that, Reddy also shows how fiercely the protagonist survives through all the violations to rise up to power.

Power, forms the other theme of the book. The story tells the tale of a Vedic time when women can be partly powerful if they are married to king and fully powerful if they are mothers of kings. Matsyagandhi, unaware of her own desires subconsciously longing for more than what the fisher community has to offer, inevitably finds her way to her destiny via tools like her cruel foster mother and a mystical island where her illegitimate son is born. At the mere age of fourteen, unaware of the “history to come” she makes way to own her destiny to become the queen(mother) of the Kuru clan.

The book tells the story of Satyavati before she became part of the epic to be sang, written, and retold for the Yugas to come. Meenakshi Reddy Madhavan does a fine work in not only voicing the woman of The Mahabharata but also, builds a story around the struggle of a fisher woman’s body to reach the position of power in the world of men where no one can dare to violate her again and that makes it stand out from every other retelling.  Definitely, a must read. It is, after all, a story of a survivor.