Of “mega”bharatha and other tales

As mentioned prior, junior is very fond of funny stories. Even those stories where he is aware of the characters, would always insist that the stories should be funny, setting the terms clearly while requesting for one. He has a decent collection of Amar Chitra Katha stories where he reads about the original version of the mythologies and before going to sleep, the last action item for the day would be a retell of those tales in a funny format. Junior being my only and most vociferous audience, who applauds and laughs out loud for any and every silliest mokkai of mine, I used to mash up the known tales with a bit of spoof element. The Bheeman character in my stories is an amalgam of Kaalia and Mayabazaar Ranga rao. For familiarity sake that character is addressed as Bheem (minus the “chota”). He is always fond of food and eats continuously right from the time he wakes up till he goes to sleep. More than Ramayana, Junior is very fond of Mahabharatha. Possibly because it has truck load of stories and the characters are so very different and unique. Even though he couldn’t tell why, his favorite character is Gandhari !!! Once when we bought him an Avenger superhero set, by mistake they had included Superman instead of Captain America. He converted that set into his “cast” from Mahabharatha where in Hulk became Bheema, Iron Man – Yudishtra, Ant Man – Nakula, Captain America – Sahadeva, Thor – Arjuna and the miscast Superman became Duriodhana. Since Hulk has very less dialogue while smashing thing, his Bhema became synonymous with Hulk with smashing replaced with non-stop eating. Once while reading the story he asked, how come 100+5 kids stayed in the Hasthinapura palace. That helped me in cooking up some peripheral stories of how chaotic that household would’ve been. Imagine a house with 105 kids of same age, accommodating their boarding and lodging, food preparation, number of servants needed to maintain the household, their own quarters etc. And for making it even more relatable to him, mixed it up with imaginary schooling situations wherein all the kids had to be woken up, bathed, served breakfast, dressed up for their school, which would be the Gurukul of Drona. Nakula being the tiniest as per the toy setup of his, often gets entangled on the circus tent size clothes of Bheema, who mixes up his socks with that of Sahadeva only to tear them. With over sized shoes of Bheema resembling treadmills, other kids getting lost in them and an ever hungry Bheema munching out all of their breakfast and snacks, it is chaos unlimited at the Kuru household. There will be overlaps with the original version, like the target practice episode, where Arjuna shoots the parrots eye, the one where Drona uses grass to take the ball fallen in a well are all weaved into the mokka mix. To mimic his own commutation to the school, all these kids take a plane to go to their school and spiderman being the pilot, has tough time in taking off with an overloaded Bheema keeping the plane grounded. And all this story telling starts at around 11PM when he finally relents to come to sleep. Hearing all these mokka tales he would be rolling with laughter much to the anger of wifey who will scold me for disturbing his sleep and making him fresh. We split the stories into “episodes” and once he is satisfied with couple of mokka sessions he will sign off for the day. More than him I enjoy telling these mokka tales for the main reason that it makes him laugh. Like stand-up comedy I think, we might’ve introduced lying-down-on-the-bed type!!! 😊