Sita's Ascent (11 page)

‘I saw Rama at first humouring
me, but then running out of breath and possibly losing his patience. I could see the
laughter was getting to him, because he thought I was laughing at him. He grew
reflective. Sugriva, who was offering Rama an ambassadorial tribute, too felt
self-conscious and began to reflect on that time when he had regained his kingdom.
He wondered if I was laughing at him for being drunk and unprepared with his army,
and how we had to wait out the monsoon before he came to our rescue to find Sita. In
his embarrassment he pulled at his ear and the earring fell out. It went clattering
down on the stone steps, spinning like a top towards Rama’s throne.
Sugriva clambered down after it; when he picked it up, his regal but monkeyish
awkwardness made me laugh even more.

‘Vibhishana, on hearing my
laughter, began to think whether he might go down in the chronicles of history as a
usurper of Ravana’s kingdom. He kept looking down as if he was considering
for the first time how the people of Ayodhya, perhaps even the generations to come,
might feel about him becoming the king of Lanka. Was he a good rakshasa or was that
really a question to be considered? But my laughter would not show any respect for
his doubts and wavering, or indeed his bravery. I could not stop laughing.

‘Kausalya Amma was present but
began to worry about why she was still alive when her husband was dead.

‘Bharata wanted to calm me
down as now it was distracting everyone in the Assembly Hall. He was worried I was
laughing at him for not having ruled the kingdom well or indeed because he had run
the country like a monastery while Rama, Sita and I were away. I could see what he
was thinking by watching his expressions, and that made me laugh even louder because
he should have known better about how much he was admired; but, at that moment, it
was so funny that he could not see it and kept putting himself down.

‘Sita at first wondered what
had brought this about. Then she wondered if the war was making me feel ill and
whether she was worth all the lives lost in the battle. But then she looked straight
at me and said, “Lakshmana, it has been fourteen long years. You have not
slept as you kept constant vigil over Rama and me. Had it not been for you,
we
would not have been blessed with sleep. Your supreme
sacrifice was that you did not see or speak with Urmilla as she had cast herself
into a deep sleep until your return. Now hurry, make up for lost time and be by her
side.”

‘I could now see Nidra dancing
around. I was reeling with laughter and could not help thinking how the goddess
of sleep had nothing to do with inertia; sleep was a source of
energy. But with her approach everybody becomes cautious, even reflective. I
realized that Nidra is the keeper of our secrets, which, in waking, we are not even
aware of. When she descends, she churns the ocean of memories that lies deep within,
and we start to see ourselves in a way that we have forgotten to when awake. I also
remember saluting her because much as I had prayed to her to stay away and thought I
had won final control when she did not return, her timing had finally exposed me in
public! I was the prince who never slept, who had conquered sleep. That was really
something to laugh about—about who was really in control. Sita was the
only one who could see that I was dancing with Nidra. She saw my laughter was not
intended as a show of superiority and to make others feel uncomfortable. It was
about losing control and surrendering.

‘It was then that I left the
court and slept soundly. How many days passed, I have no count of; there is no
chronology in sleep. People, places, events tumble in from top-down and sideways. I
had so much dream-time to catch up on. I had not met Rama properly since. I remember
waking up and rushing out to meet the hunters. When I returned, it was already too
late.

‘I heard Rama’s
decision. I could not convince him against it. I slept at the most crucial moment of
Sita’s life. And when I brought her to the forest and was told to
abandon her so Rama could prove to his people that …
I don’t know what he wanted to prove; I could not punish her like that. It
amounted to deceit. Even if he thought people would come around and want their queen
back, how could Rama ignore Sita’s feelings? Or had he taken her for
granted? Like most men who expect their wives to fit into a mould! He always told me
Sita was different. She was not a woman who expected to be tossed around in the
maelstrom of misfortune. He had always insisted she would be the one to light the
dawn of a new age for women. Then to hear this decision of his …

‘Valmiki was the safest
option. I left her there. Even though I could not look back, I could imagine her
standing there, one hand clasping the other. Stunned into stone the way Ahalya was.
I had always feared the fire in her eyes, like the time she commanded me to light
the fire when Rama rebuked her in Lanka. It was worse to imagine she had turned to
stone. I knew I could not drive back to the kingdom and face Rama and his dual lives
of state and self, stretched like wet leather in the sun. I had nowhere else to go
but to die.

‘The lightness of the air, of
so much sleep after so much wakefulness, made me leap into nothingness. My body
flung itself like a tongue in the laughing mouth of the ravine. I found nothing in
myself to redeem after what had happened to Sita, and I am left with
nothing.’

Hanuman heard all this through the
wheezing and moaning and troubled breathing of Lakshmana.

Some leaves parted, as a deer munched
its way through. Hanuman and the deer gazed at each other as their nostrils quivered
to seek the essential scent of the other, distinguishing prey from predator.

Hanuman wept. In his stillness he had
heard every creak, sigh, groan, trickle, whisper, and seen a flood of images forcing
their way through Lakshmana’s story. So great were Hanuman’s
powers of understanding breath. He continued anointing Lakshmana’s broken
skin with the herb ointment and sealed it with the porous pith of a plantain tree.
It became a hammock that generated and cradled new skin; it also looked like a
shroud. Hanuman wept his animal-human tears watching Lakshmana’s broken
body resisting any kind of treatment. But more than that, he howled from within on
hearing the way Lakshmana’s bones were crushed under the weight of his
unnecessary guilt.

The air was humid. Lakshmana was
thirsty. He was overwhelmed by the sheer exhaustion of being kept alive over the
years by wandering ascetics before Hanuman discovered him. Hanuman’s tears
ran down his furry cheek and formed a steady drip and seeped between the cracks of
Lakshmana’s battered lips. The salty sweetness of the moisture must have
burned; Lakshmana’s broken skin flinched. Hanuman was relieved his body
was still responding. He knew all too well the struggle between the tenacious urge
to live and the desire to die. The greatest difficulty was that fiery particle, the
mind. It would not let go of memory, association, status and the great pyramid of
entombing itself with the loose-footed grasp of sensory things.

During all that time in which they had
known each other, Hanuman had been the real insider to Sita’s story, and
only he had known Lakshmana’s place within it. Hanuman could only speak
with his eyes. Lakshmana could sense every word. Hanuman could not help feeling
pained, and slighted, that Lakshmana did not contact him with the mantra they shared
for danger signals ever since the sanjeevini herb incident—
especially about the mission to banish Sita
. Hanuman would
have reasoned with Rama against his fears. Hanuman knew Rama’s fears and
loved him in spite of them. He knew Rama to be a wise and compassionate leader.
Rama, in his bouts of gloom after
being separated from Sita,
hovered around thinking the right thought, whether it was solely for the individual,
or the collective good, and acting swiftly upon it. Hanuman also sensed
Rama’s discomfort with being constantly judged in the public eye, in the
present and the future. Rama was often tormented by the possibility that whatever he
did would set an example that others would follow, and in varied contexts it could
stigmatize him.

Hanuman also knew Lakshmana would never
advise Rama against his darker moments, because that would seem like undermining an
older brother’s authority. ‘Even when it was about shedding more
light on a subject! Human courtesies often went too far in killing one’s
instinct, or do they call it “spontaneity”?’ thought
Hanuman. But more than that, Hanuman could not bear to see Lakshmana’s
life ebbing away because he mistakenly burdened himself with the guilt of being the
cause of Sita’s abduction.

Hanuman could see deeper under the
layers of stories that would be chronicled and told for ages to come, that the truth
lay in Lakshmana’s reticence. Hanuman was a pioneer in espionage in
Sugriva’s kingdom, and he could detect that in Lakshmana’s case,
it wasn’t the miscalculation of being in the wrong place at the wrong
time; it was about a feeling of rejection and loss ever since that moment that paved
the way for the abduction.

Lakshmana’s breathing was all
Hanuman needed to map the dark forest of the invalid’s being. In fact, he
was reconstructing the fibre of his skin cell by cell. It was the word
‘abduction’ that seemed to rankle Lakshmana the most. Hanuman
wondered if facing the truth was what was holding him back.
‘Abduction’ was a word amongst humans that threw them into a
black hole of confusion, fear, despair and hatred. There was a collective view of
defining and thinking about abduction. Abduction carried the weight of someone being
taken against their will, and yet it was also about surrendering against their
will.

All those years ago, that fatal
afternoon, the golden deer had flitted into the thick of the forest with Rama
determined to capture it for Sita. He was undecided at first, but Sita turned on him
and said: ‘That deer could be our souvenir of all this time that
we’ve spent in the forest. I’ve never asked anything of you
these last thirteen years, and even this one thing seems so difficult, is
it?… Oh! What’s the use! That enchanting deer has
fled!’ The last thing Rama uttered was: ‘Lakshmana, make sure
Sita comes to no harm! I will return.’

After a while, following the tunnel of
shrieks and wails of birds and monkeys, the afternoon was wrenched apart by
terrifying cries in what sounded like Rama’s voice. Lakshmana saw how
distraught Sita became when she heard Rama’s voice; she was consumed by
her concern for
Rama. She looked so vulnerable, without a sense
of her self. In that shining moment he saw the totality of Rama and Sita’s
love, which transcended boundaries of body and space. It was an epiphany that washed
through him like a wave buoying him from his finite body to an immersion in
infinity. Something in Lakshmana’s expression indicated his longing to
belong to that infinity. He sighed—an expression of wonder at having
witnessed something so sublime. Sita turned as she heard him sigh and was distracted
by his look of pain and longing. She coded another signal. Longing for the infinite,
translated through his finite body, was read by Sita as temporal desire. The
infinity that Lakshmana had perceived in Sita was being manifested through a
woman’s body experiencing loss, fear, love and anger. As Sita’s
eyes flashed with anger, Lakshmana saw her infinity merging and constricting itself
into the finite. ‘Is this the time you have found to look at
me?’ was her first utterance. He was speechless. What had at first
enraptured him now eroded into something so base. Yet, both were expressions of the
same body. He now felt
abducted
by a power greater than
himself and it seemed he was surrendering himself to it against his will. His sense
of loss brought his characteristic impatience to the surface, and in an act of love
and despair he drew the lakshman rekha, a laser circle to protect Sita as long as
she stayed within its circumference.

When he ran towards Rama, his thoughts
were flying in all directions, churning the years of selfhood that he had created.
So, when he returned with Rama to encounter the reality of Sita’s
abduction, he was totally consumed by a wave of guilt. It was not because of what
had happened, but by the tangible sense of having been abducted by something beyond
him and having become powerless. Sita had seen through it, and now Hanuman could
sense through his pulse how deeply that anguish had filtered into
Lakshmana’s being; Hanuman could hear it in his very breathing. Lakshmana
always felt second best and more so when Hanuman came into the frame of the
relationship between the brothers, and that much more did he feel abducted by guilt
for leaving Sita alone. Rama never once rebuked Lakshmana, and that weighed heavily
too. Hanuman alone knew the extent of Rama’s love for Lakshmana.

The deer that was peering at Hanuman
gained confidence and came closer. Hanuman looked into its past lives and discerned
that in none of them was it a rakshasa, or capable of shape-shifting. ‘But
what of Sita, where could she be now?’ he thought.

Hanuman had learnt over the years that
if one had to go in search of something, even a spiritual quest, it had to be done
by following some clues, however random they seemed. It was only after the mission
had begun that he
could find the reason or purpose behind the
quest. For him, the first thing was to know the quality of the person or the quest
that he was seeking. When he went to seek Sita in Lanka it was clearly because of
his love of Rama that he set out on that mission. When he met Sita, he was ready to
turn Lanka upside down for the suffering that Ravana had caused her. Hanuman had
seen Sita the way no one else had, or could. In captivity too she was brave, never
giving in to Ravana’s manipulative logic, shape-shifting and delusions.
She had shared her anguish about the state of corruption that was embedded in
everyone who visited her. ‘If this way of being takes over, what will
become of the future?’ she had sighed when they both sat under that tree
in Asokavan.

He thought of the three symbols
associated with Sita. The first was the iron bow granted by Shiva. It was impossibly
large, unwieldy and sure to fail any contestant—human, animal or divine.
But Sita having discovered it in the vegetable garden was able to pluck it out like
a weed from the earth. He marvelled at how she knew the real trick—it
wasn’t about physical strength. It was about sheer mental and spiritual
grit. Determination. That was the magic formula in Shiva’s bow. Not for
acclaim or physical prowess but for the accomplishment of the task at hand. Hanuman,
who was an avatar of Shiva born to Anjani and Kesari, knew this.

The second symbol was the ring that Sita
had given Rama when they had married. The gem was a deep forest-green emerald and
the gold filigree around the band held an inscription which read:

My earth, my moon, my sun. Rama, my full circle.

After the war, even after that fateful
agnipariksha fire trial, Rama continued to wear the ring. Hanuman would often catch
him musing at sunset. He would press it close to his lip as if Sita’s ring
held his life in its eternal circle.

‘Why then would Rama make this
preposterous decision? Dirt can cover gold, but it will not affect its purity. On
the other hand, doubt, like a black speck within a diamond cannot be removed
…’ Hanuman twisted and turned many arguments till his head
started to spin.

The third symbol was the scrap of
Sita’s sari that he had preserved as a relic. He had never had the time to
ask her whether she had torn it as a clue for Rama to come in search of her when she
was being carried away; or whether Ravana in his scramble tore it and it fell; or
indeed when the aerial chariot was rising in the air and Jatayu challenged Ravana
mid-air, the sari got ripped by the branch of a tree and slid down with the heavy
rains that followed? Did it matter that it would never be known?

Hanuman placed Lakshmana’s
crushed body in a hammock created of pith, soft grass and feathers, leaves and
abandoned bird-nests. He ensured that the hammock
was suspended
between the sturdy branches of two low-lying boughs and anointed him with a powerful
mantra so no beast or human would attack him. Hanuman was on a mission. He decided
to seek Valmiki. He wanted to know the truth—why does human understanding
in such ideal relationships get corrupted, and how does it happen?

The important thing was to tell
Sita’s story. When he sat with her in Asokavan in Lanka, Hanuman had
offered to end her trials by taking her back to Rama. But she was insistent that he
return to Rama alone, with her fervent conviction. ‘It’s not
about me,’ she had said. ‘Rama and Ravana have to face each
other. Rama is single-minded and wedded to the truth. Ravana has myriads of
distractions, and he continues to delude himself that power is the real source of
knowledge. He believes that corrupting power to suit his own ends will make him
immortal. My returning with you would be “safe”. But what would
Rama have signalled to the rest of the world? I sometimes wish we were down to earth
in our aspirations. But no, it’s not enough. Things have to be stirred at
the very root. To me, this is about my abduction, yes, but it is also about being
avenged. Why should anyone, human or animal, be used as a pawn? Why am I a pawn in
this game of creating alliances and oppositions between forces? Why is the focus a
woman’s vulnerability? Why not her strength as a bargaining power for
peace—even if by means of war?

‘I’m not weak,
Hanuman, I know what I have endured. The rakshasis hate me, perhaps the whole world
despises me. I can rise above what is to come, but I’m no martyr. The real
test is to come after all this, in spite of all this. It is up to you, Rama, me, all
of us to rebuild a world of trust with the seeds of our belief. A world without
trust will never have the strength to seek the truth. Without the quest for truth
there is no love—and dear, dear Hanuman, without love this life is
meaningless. That is the cycle of the birth and death of hopelessness that I want my
freedom from. Ra-ma!’ She sighed. The name, the being, the man, her
love—it was her life-breath.

When the war got over, Hanuman ran
swiftly to Asokavan to meet Sita. He needed to see her in person and tell her that
Rama was alive and Ravana was dead. He knew about the various tricks Ravana had
played on her. He might even have got one of the rakshasi attendants to misinform
Sita of the turn of events after he was killed. As he reached Asokavan where she was
still being held hostage, he found her sitting alone with the look of someone who
had endured too much and was close to tipping over the edge of sanity. She was
gazing mindlessly at a crow that was plucking a red strand of intestine; its beak
was stained with blood.