There once lived a beautiful princess named Savitri, and the time had
come for this princess to get married. Many princes from huge kingdoms and
small kingdoms came to see her and take her hand in marriage but she refused
all of them. Savitri thought "All of them are so stuck up! And none of them have ever earned
anything in their life." One day she had had enough of waiting for the
perfect prince to walk in to her palace, so she decided to take things into her
hands. She decided to leave the palace and find a man, any man who was
self-made and respectable.
On her journey to find her perfect husband she saw a lot of men,
but none fit her criteria until she ran into this one simple man in the forest.
This man had grown up by himself and had built a living all by himself and
everyone in the village loved him because he was really nice and caring. At
first sight she couldn’t help but fall for him, even though the village seemed
to avoid him. The entire village thought that this man was cursed and was a bad
omen because of his shortened life from an astrologer's reading, and so they all treated him like he did not
exist. She approached him without caring what others thought, believing in what
she saw, and asked to marry him but the man refused. She asked why and
the man told her that he only had a year to live. Savitri’s face dropped but
she didn’t give up. She told him she would like to spend every last day with
him and cherish it for the rest of her life. The man was shocked, thinking no girl
would ever fall for him because no one in the village paid any attention to
him, and he said yes in excitement.
The moment had finally come and it was time for her husband to go with
the God of Death, Yama. Savitri with a heavy heart tried to convince Yama with
all her might to let him stay. She even offered herself instead. But Yama said
no. She had nothing left to do but follow her husband with Yama, so she asked
Yama if she could move on to the next life with her husband. Yama was confused to why anyone would want to walk to
her own death and asked why. She responded telling Yama about how it was hard to
find such a good husband and when she did she loved him more than she loved
herself. Yama was pleased to see that true love like this still existed, and to
also find that their relationship was so strong. Yama decided to offer Savitri
a gift. Savitri’s eyes grew out of excitement and she asked for her husband’s life.
Yama could not just give up a life that easily, so he gave her a deal. The deal
was that she split her days on earth in half and give them to her husband.
Savitri without any hesitation accepted this deal and lived a full life’s
happiness in half the time.
Author’s Note:
I chose to retell the
story that Krishna and Vyasa told Draupadi and the Pandav brothers when they went to visit them in the forest. I was inspired
to write this particular story because I was impressed to read about such a
love story. I do not see that kind of dedication to their significant other. I see
it in my parents and my family, but outside of that I do not see it. The story
was not a complete copy of the original story. Some things were taken out so I
could fit in the four hundred word limit. In the original story the man she met
was actually a prince. He was the son of an old blind king. Also when Yama gave
Savitri this deal, Savitri somehow managed to get a couple of other wishes in
before she got her husband back. Her first wish was to cure the king’s
blindness, the second was to restore the king’s kingdom, and the third was for
her father to have a hundred sons. And then Yama finally gave up and offered
the deal mentioned in my story. This story was important to Mahabharata because it was told to show how Savitri and Draupadi are alike in their devotion to their husbands.
- Buck, William (1973). Mahabharata.
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