Week 12 Storytelling: Mankanaka

Mankanaka was a very odd fellow who did some pretty questionable things. One action of his that was very questionable was that he had chosen to live in the forest alone, in hopes of finding his “inner peace”, as if that was ever going to happen! He had also decided that he would never eat anything except the greenest, freshest, most luscious looking grass. It had been twelve years since Mankanaka had isolated himself in the forest and he had yet to eat anything else.

The deer were getting highly fed up with Mankanaka because he was basically either THEIR grass. How absurd was it that a human was eating deer food?! And besides, they had been here before Mankanaka had even been born. This was no place for silly little humans to be clowning around. So the deer got together and decided they were going to do something about Mankanaka. They had heard that if humans ate grass for long enough, their blood would turn into grass juice. Mankanaka, of course, was oblivious to this rumor and the deer figured that if he saw himself oozing out green grass juice instead of normal red blood, he would stop either their grass. It seemed like a brilliant plan to the deer at the time, but little did they know they were about to cause mayhem…

As night fell and Mankanaka fell asleep to the sound of crickets chirping and the wind blowing the leaves on the towering trees, a deer slowly crept up to Mankanaka to finally put this plan into action. It was all or nothing now, although the deer had probably the easiest job you could think of. All he had to do was bite Mankanaka hard enough to draw blood, or in this case grass juice, and he was done! The deer slowly lowered his head down to Mankanaka’s arm, looked around to see if the coast was clear, and then proceeded chomped down on his arm. Green grass juice spurted out of Mankanaka’s arm as the deer galloped off into the distance. Mankanaka woke up howling in pain and looked at his arm, which was throbbing as if it had just been amputated.

What he saw should have scared Mankanaka, but he was a strange fellow of course. When he realized that his blood had become grass juice, Mankanaka started grinning from ear to ear, as happy as can be! This was so cool to him! Instead of bleeding red, he was now oozing out green and this made him so excited that Mankanaka started to dance. He danced and danced so much that the whole world started dancing with him. All of the dancing commotion was creating problems in the ocean from the rumbling and stomping of everyone’s feet. Large tsunamis and whirlpools were formed from the chaos and wreaked havoc all across the world. The deer looked on in shock, appalled at what they had done.

The gods could take this no longer so they sent a messenger to Mankanaka telling him that the gods had requested that he stop dancing and destroying the world. Mankanaka had been so excited and happy, that he had not realized what a mess he had caused. He quit dancing and vowed to the gods that he would never eat grass again and cause this sort of mayhem ever again. After this incident, Mankanaka decided to go back home to his family and surprise them. He was done with the forest life and was ready to live out his own dreams!

Author’s Note: I had a hard time deciding what I wanted to write about this week but I finally ended up deciding to write about the story of Mankanaka. I found this section to be pretty comical and entertaining and figured I could add my own twist to it and make it more interesting. I found the whole concept of his blood turning to grass juice to be pretty funny. Leave it to these old epics to have the wackiest stuff you can think of!

I chose this image because it's how I pictured the forest that Mankanaka was in to be. It's so green and fertile, anyone would be tempted to eat the grass here. Okay, not really but I wanted the portrayal of this forest to pop out to the reader from the image selection and I think this picture does that pretty well.

Bibliography: Buck, William (1973). Mahabharata. 

The dazzling green forest; Wikipedia