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The Great Epics
A future narrator is born in the middle of the family he will one day have to explain.
The man who wrote the Mahabharata is a character in it, and he is the biological grandfather of both sides of the war.
Satyavati was rowing the Yamuna ferry when the sage Parashara crossed with her and asked her to lie with him.
She bore the child on an island in the river, the same day. He was dark-complexioned, and he was island-born, and those two facts made his name: Krishna Dvaipayana, the dark one of the island.
He did not stay. The accounts say he grew to adulthood at once. He took leave of his mother. And he went into the forest as an ascetic.
He left her with her virginity restored. A new fragrance. And no visible trace of any of it.
He told her to think of him whenever she needed him, and he would come.
Nearly forty years later, she did.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.