Sita's Ascent (12 page)

The first words Hanuman uttered had to
be carefully chosen. She saw him and stood up. Her legs were giving
way. At the verge of herself, she asked, ‘Is it all
over? And … him?’ Hanuman quickly said, ‘Rama
…’ and she began twisting and wringing the palla of the sari she
had been wearing since the time she had been captured. She was very agitated and it
seemed to Hanuman she was making a rope to hang herself with, thinking that it was
Rama who had been slain. In the distance when the conch shells sounded, she looked
again at Hanuman. Her eyes once again sparked with life when he finally spilled the
good news. She cried with relief. Triumph, victory, nothing mattered. To know that
Rama was alive poured the very essence of life back into her. Her voice, her limbs,
everything was restored. ‘I’ll keep this sari for as long as I
live; wherever I am. Its every wrinkle is inscribed with all my longing for Rama to
return. Return to the Light!’ Hanuman wept too, inaudibly uttering
Jai Sita Ram
.

When they were back in Ayodhya, many
months later, Rama and Sita were settling into a pattern of domestic life in a city
after years of roaming in the forest. Hanuman was visiting and stayed for a while.
He would help Sita clear her vegetable garden and they both talked of many things,
ordinary and extraordinary. It was often for an hour after lunch. One day, as
Hanuman approached, he saw another woman sitting beside Sita and reading her palm.
She appeared to be a mendicant with numerous little bundles tied to a forked stick.
Gifted with an inner vision
for reading the invisible aura of
beings, Hanuman could tell this was Soorpanakka in a shape-shifted form.

He tuned into their conversation.
‘It won’t be long now. You’ll be pregnant,’
said Soorpanakka, ‘and all the trials you suffered in captivity will be
washed away.’ Sita gasped at the foresight of the stranger but was
captivated by her soothsaying. The mendicant continued, ‘So, tell me, they
say he held you for one whole year in captivity? Surely, you could have found a way
to escape? I suppose he kept watch on you night and day. Or perhaps he watched over
you himself! So, what do you now remember of Ravana?’

‘Nothing, really,’
replied Sita as she was thinning some sandalwood to make a paste to anoint Rama on
his return home.

‘Really? Was there really
nothing that tormented you? Whatever his faults, he must have been very
remarkable!’ Soorpanakka pursued Sita.

‘I never looked at
him,’ said Sita plainly.

‘But you must have heard his
voice? Heard his footsteps as he walked towards your cell, shifting his weight from
one foot to the other, or even recognized his perfume?’ And so, on and on
Soorpanakka in the garb of a stranger persuaded Sita to confide in her.
‘Many palaces lingered with his perfume long after he had
left.’

‘That may have been so. But I
was subsumed by what had happened to me in one blinding flash that afternoon
in the forest. All I had was the memory of Rama, waving to me,
then rushing into the depths of the forest. What madness I sent him
towards—a golden deer! What was I thinking? That was the last image I had
of Rama, and it was all I clung to. Rama, night and day, day and
night.’

‘Surely, you took in what was
around you? There was a possibility during the twilight hours?’ asked
Soorpanakka mischievously.

‘As I never looked at
anything, I cannot tell you.’ Sita paused. She remembered looking beyond.
‘But just once, I remember seeing his toenail,’ she said, as if
not wanting to leave her guest empty-handed in her search.

Hanuman, watching through the trees,
winced. As he moved forward, he felt something tumbling inside him. The feeling of
arriving too late.

‘Describe it to me,’
whispered Soorpanakka. Sita began: ‘It was oval and shone like
mother-of-pearl. It was like a mirror … he must have wanted to look at
himself at all times.’ The woman started to draw.
‘I’ll complete this and return it to you tomorrow,’
said the mendicant Soorpanakka as she deftly rolled all her bundles into one big mop
and, casting it on her shoulder, began to sway out of Sita’s vegetable
garden.

Hanuman kept watch. The next day when
the stranger visited Sita, she unravelled a portrait of Ravana on cloth. Sita was
taking down her exile sari that had been drying,
and Soorpanakka
quickly rolled the painting with a smaller section of the sari.

When Hanuman met her the next day, Sita
told him what happened. They both peered at the open scroll. It had a line drawing
of Ravana standing, dressed in all his splendour. The tone was compassionate, as was
the subject, in spite of his magnificent attire; he looked down at his polished
toenail, almost as if to catch Sita’s eye in it. Hanuman could see
Sita’s predicament. ‘I don’t know what to do. She saw
me and predicted that I would be pregnant. How can I turn away a well-wisher, even
if she was only a passerby, just like that, Hanuman? In giving me the good news she
also wanted to make me a present, but I did not know what kind of present. I just
gave her one word … a toenail.’

‘And we are confronted with
our inner warrior to wrestle with our conscience,’ said Hanuman almost
inaudibly. Then, in his inimitable way of being decisive but hesitating out of
courtesy, asked: ‘Can you not destroy it?’

‘What if more harm comes from
it? Surely, it’s not good to do that with someone’s creation?
And that too of a woman’s who has spells and charms!’

It seemed to Hanuman that Sita had been
thinking of how to hide the scroll from Rama for a good part of the day. She kept it
under her bed, hidden in her wooden dowry chest. That night she dreamt the painting
had come
to life. Ravana emerged from the scroll and stretched
and yawned as if he had been in a temporary sleep and had awoken refreshed. As he
stretched, he caught hold of Sita’s sari palla and started unravelling it;
she was losing control. He smiled lasciviously and drew her so close she could smell
his perfume, and his breath, and she began to scream. Sita awoke with a start and
did not know what to say as Rama held her very close, even tightly. Rama wondered
what the matter was.

The very next day, Sita decided she must
get rid of the scroll. She had made sure that the maids and cleaners left early that
afternoon. It took her considerable effort to drag the dowry chest by one of its
side handles; she brought it out, keeping it close to the bed. Her hands were
trembling as she steadied the key into the embedded lock. She heard it click and the
well-oiled lid of the chest swung open. She bent down to get the scroll that was
hidden among some of the things she had collected during exile. She didn’t
hear the door open, the softness of Rama’s feet on the floor as he
returned unexpectedly. He was delighted that no one was around. To spend a few
moments with Sita, alone, during the day was a rare privilege. He wanted to surprise
her and stood still gazing at her. She stood transfixed by the skill of the artist
staring back at her from the open scroll as she held it in her outstretched right
hand. Rama wanted to surprise her. His arm slipped deftly round her waist and
as he drew her close she felt his soft breath on the nape of
her neck, until he saw what she had been looking at. She froze and he froze. He
moved aside and she turned to face him—her arm still frozen holding the
portrait of Ravana. ‘You don’t understand …’
she began and stepped towards him, ‘it’s not what you think
…’ when the scrap of the exile sari slipped from her other hand
that she had extended in an attempt to touch him. Rama recoiled; he had never been
wounded in this way before. He knew how precious that chest was to her, where she
had stored all the things that deeply mattered to her during exile. Seeing the chest
unlocked and Ravana’s portrait in her hand must have opened a door into
the dark for him. Perhaps he did understand what she felt but couldn’t
understand the situation they were in, tormented by Ravana even after his death. Yet
again, there was a bridge between them that could not be crossed. She took one more
step towards him and he stood, willing to listen. She could not mistake the love he
held for her in his eyes and the open wound in his tears. Outside, the herald
sounded the hour and in the hall of the apartment, a minister was announced for his
appointment with Rama. One more interruption. All he said was, ‘After all
that time, Sita, this?’ before he turned and left. There was a bridge
between them, but now silence was growing thick and fast like the darkness that
shrouds any glimmer of the possibility of moving forward.

Hanuman could see it all so clearly when
he went to meet Sita the next day. Her eyes had lost their lustre. Rama and Sita
never indulged in domestic quarrels that could become the hub of gossip and intrigue
along the palace corridors. But he sensed the storms brewing in their interior
landscape. Rama was meticulous in his attention to detail at the court, while Sita
carried out her duties with an inward gaze. It all looked frighteningly normal.

Hanuman decided he would do something
totally by instinct to solve the problem. Once again, he used his special power
granted by his father, Vayu, the god of air. He sighed at first, then took a deep
breath. He shrank to the size of an ordinary rhesus monkey. The monkey scampered on
all fours and began to spoil the ripe plantains hanging from the tree. The gardeners
and cleaners tried to chase the menace away, but the monkey leapt on to the veranda
of the palace apartment. Scurrying into the royal bedroom, it hid under the bed of
Rama and Sita and dragged out the scroll that was lying near the chest. Now there
was a longer train of cleaners, maids and stewards who were following the monkey and
were determined to catch it. The monkey gnashed its teeth and screeched at everyone
who in turn was paralysed into a stunned silence. Then it proceeded to eat the
scroll, bit by bit, and then in chunks as it was chased around in the room. With one
enormous belch it swung its tail, reached an
open window and
leapt out of it. With screams and shouts and the train of attendants following in a
long shuffle, the monkey reached the plantain grove. It sat and started growing
purple. Everyone stood around in a circle seeing it groan. It vomited at the base of
the tree. One of the gardeners approached with a flaming stick of wood. The monkey
swivelled this way and that and lunged up on to the tree, which had now caught fire,
and with a final screech through the smoke, disappeared. No one could tell what had
happened to the monkey.

The story of the vanishing monkey was
the talk of the domestic staff the whole of the next week. Then the great news broke
into the open—Sita, their beloved queen, was pregnant.

Hanuman smiled to himself as he
remembered the incident and jogged into a thicker part of the jungle. He came to a
custard apple tree and could not resist. He stopped and picked the soft fruit. He
placed one in his mouth—it was so creamy and sweet. Whatever the scale of
his mission, he couldn’t stop himself from playing his game of spitting
out the pips. These formed tell-tale arcs that mapped his way from Lakshmana, and
through the overgrown trail that led to Valmiki’s hermitage.

Drums were pounding and conch shells and
cymbals were resonating through the streets of Ayodhya. It was an hour before
midday. The perambulation around the temple had been completed and the procession
had reached the palace lotus pond. The procession had followed a golden idol of
Vishnu bedecked with emeralds, rubies, pearls and sapphires seated on a palanquin
carried by forty strong brahmins. The bamboo poles of the palanquin, each fifteen
feet long and five inches in diameter, rested on their bare shoulders. They deemed
it as a mark of the god pressing his feet into their bodies. They heaved with
entranced devotion, singing the thousand and one aspects of Vishnu, who to them was
the sustainer of life. Ten men each carried the left and right front poles of the
palanquin
with the space for a man to run between the columns,
dowsing them with water in the midday heat. The same arrangement was followed for
the two columns of men carrying the rear poles.

A vibrantly embroidered umbrella was
fixed above Vishnu’s head to protect him from the sun. The procession was
a labour of intense love. Vishnu was parading the streets. Women having their
periods and elderly men and women stood at their doorways—which were
wreathed with branches of neem leaves to mark a sign of illness in the
house—as Vishnu and his brahmin warriors passed by, chanting the hymns.
All those who could not go to the temple where he resided were now brushed with the
god’s grace. ‘You see, Vishnu loves us. If we cannot go to him,
he comes to us!’ said a salt seller, her eyes beaming as though by the
arrival of a long-awaited parent. The deity on the palanquin rocked on the shoulders
of the men who paused by her for one moment. Everyone’s heart was brimming
over with Vishnu’s visit.

Kings from neighbouring kingdoms were on
a state visit and Rama was in consultation with his ministers. The fragrance of
frankincense mixed with dust and the confetti of marigold petals wafted in through
the open arches of the Assembly Hall from the procession on the streets. They
couldn’t help hearing the exhilarated invocation to Vishnu:

You are the breath of
being
You are sound in space
You are wetness of water
You are
fragrance of flowers
The butter in milk, churned from the ocean of
consciousness
O let there be Love Eternal
The way You are

Sixty or more years ago, Valmiki had
seen a white luminous dot in the middle of a moonless night. The pounding on the
earth as he put his ear to the forest floor sang of freedom. Sixty or more years
hence, Valmiki could hear it again. A low thunder that would ascend into a
torrential happening. This was the Ashwamedha. The name of the ritual that every
king would dare to perform if he were invited to, but dare not for the fear of
failing. Like his father Dasaratha before him, Rama, counselled by his ablest
ministers, agreed to release the luminous white horse from the kingdom’s
stables. It would gallop without a rider, or a bridle, across the borders of
kingdoms. The rulers of these kingdoms had made their alliances and were in the
Assembly Hall listening to the invocations to Vishnu, in the hope of hearing that
the Ashwamedha horse returned to Ayodhya’s stables without being
contested. It was a foregone conclusion that Rama, like Dasaratha, would be crowned
King of Kings.

Even if there were rebellious kings, no
one had dared bridle the Ashwamedha, or ride it, as that would signal a challenge to
Rama’s rule. Preparations had been taking place for months. The
penultimate stage had arrived. The horse rode on for three days and three nights,
with Ayodhya’s messengers taking outposts at various locations to desist
the horse from stalling for too long. They hid behind rocks and hills, within fields
and valleys, past the bends along riverbanks, under the arches of gateways in and
out of kingdoms, inside monasteries, sanctuaries, granary houses, villages. Messages
were flown by courier pigeons and communicated through a code of clay whistles to
chart the Ashwamedha’s journey and relayed to Ayodhya. Ministers would be
given the information after the progress had been confirmed, to collate how many
kingdoms had submitted to the alliance with Rama. There was a loud cheer as results
declared that in none of the kingdoms represented in the Assembly Hall had the horse
been stopped by any rebellious group. Each king beamed with pride as he was honoured
for keeping his word and confirming the alliance to Rama’s court. The
other kings nodded assent. They knew who their allies were in case sub-alliances had
to be formed.

The countdown had been going on for
months as the horse charted new territories. It was a night with the moon waxing
into its third quarter. As the horse galloped onward,
its mane
flying, it seemed to light up the dark night. In the forest by Ayodhya, parrots,
kingfishers, peacocks had all settled for the night. The owls kept watch, and even
the daytime birds stirred in their nests as they sensed a change. A tiger stalked by
a pool and a cheetah awoke on its delicately balanced perch.

The horse came, steadily galloping by
the edge of the forest, brushing its mane against the low boughs of trees, when
someone leapt on its back. Lava began riding the horse, first grabbing tufts of its
mane. A whistle, and Kusa jumped from a low branch and ran alongside the horse as it
galloped. He heaved himself up with the sheer exhilaration of the moment and sat
astride it, behind Lava. They rode with freedom and happiness, never having known
such power, communion or speed. At thirteen years of age they had dared to walk
through the forest in the dark as they knew the language of their wild habitat and
had befriended it. They rode the horse skirting the edge of the forest until they
came close to the hermitage. They slowed the horse to a canter and then to a
walk.

Valmiki had dozed off and his steady
snoring whistled through the hermitage, circling it with a halo of restfulness. Sita
awoke suddenly and dabbed the perspiration on her forehead with her sari. She had
slept very peacefully and wondered why she had woken so abruptly. She heard Valmiki
snoring, Urmilla muttering ingredients for a recipe
in her
sleep, then a soft thud. It was heavier than a fruit dropping at night, or the hoof
of a goat. Then she heard the frenzied neigh of the horse.

From the moment the Ashwamedha horse
disappeared under the shadow of the form that had leapt on its back, a code of
whistles twittered between spies and messengers and relayed the information to the
control tower at Ayodhya:
Ashwamedha captured; Rama challenged
.

Valmiki opened his eyes and wondered if
what he was seeing now—the white Ashwamedha captured by Lava and
Kusa—was a dream, or whether the seven boys he had seen so clearly taking
flight as seven swans, when his eyes were closed in sleep, was a dream.

‘Ma!’ Lava grinned,
enchanted. ‘Look what was coming our way!’ He led the horse to
Sita as she stood up.

‘There was no struggle, Ma, he
came as if he belonged to us. He is ours now!’ Kusa said, stroking the
horse whose hot breath was cooling down. Its flesh quivered as Kusa smoothed the
foaming sweat with his bare hands.

‘This is such a beautiful
creature, Ma. Please bless it as I want to gift it to you,’ said Lava as
he walked towards her.

Valmiki feared Sita was in shock. For
both of them the first image that flashed in their minds, evoking a sense of defeat,
was that the boys had not been schooled properly. The second image was a signal of
fear as Sita saw her
sons so radiant in their
‘conquest’ in this moment. She knew it would not last long. She
could not say how, but her mother’s intuition knew that Rama would not
take this lightly.

‘When … did this
happen?’ she found herself asking. The beauty of the boys, the horse,
their sense of completeness and its ephemerality made her eyes swim. Valmiki saw her
face from the corner of his eye. Sita gripped her right wrist with her left hand as
it moved towards her pounding heart. Urmilla, who had crept beside her unnoticed,
placed her hand on Sita’s shoulder to steady her from falling into a
spiral of self-doubt. Valmiki could sense the churning within Sita. Whatever she
felt for Rama all those years ago and the way she had overcome the feeling of exile
were now being turned upside down. Impulses of messages were flitting through her
mind. ‘Rama had never seen Lava; who was Kusa to him? After all, this was
the Ashwamedha, and with his sense of duty, Rama would do everything that the
ancestral rites and his people demanded of his authority.’

‘Ma! We have not stolen
anything. Why are you looking at us as if we have?’ Lava had that look as
he and Sita remembered the time he had picked out eggs from the sparrows’
nest. She had to explain what the act of ‘stealing’ meant in the
forest. ‘Many things are here for us to eat, to take. But this nest is a
home, and you are snatching away
the bird’s family;
it’s like fate stealing away our chances.’ The words had stuck
because he saw the pain in her eyes as she made him return the eggs to the nest.

‘It was so natural …
and it was running wild and free,’ agreed Kusa, his teeth shining white as
his smiling face caught the moonlight. He threw his head back in delight while
gazing at the full height of the horse.

Valmiki did not want to interrupt any
perspective or prism of the truth that was emerging; he was watching it unravel the
way new leaves unfold in the warmth of the sun’s rays. Urmilla knew that
every strand of love, security, reasoning, confidence and responsibility in bringing
up the boys was being tested. In the hermitage, in this forest, only Sita, Urmilla
and Valmiki knew what the rules of society were, because they had lived in one. With
the strange collision of their fates, they had brought the boys up in this
wilderness with no assurances of what the future would bring. Sita had sent news of
Lava’s birth to Ayodhya, and it had been received with silence. The only
way forward at that time seemed to have been to bring the boys up with no indication
of their royalty, while enabling them to develop the presence of mind they needed to
become masters of their future.

The horse’s flesh twitched as
it began shifting its weight from hoof to hoof. Both Lava and Kusa held on to its
mane. Lava would not break his gaze in the direction of
Sita.
Kusa whispered into the horse’s ear as it dived its head down to shake its
mane free. Each strand looked like a luminous moonbeam from where Sita, Valmiki and
Urmilla stood. They could not ignore the sound of branches being brushed, twigs
snapping, leaves squelching and the uneasy quiet of animals stalking as an unknown
wave moved through the forest.

On hearing the news of the
Ashwamedha’s capture, Rama took on the challenge and rode out to the post
that the messengers had signalled. He was accompanied by an entourage of his best
soldiers, some on horseback and others on foot. Rama halted at the entrance to the
hermitage, not knowing it was there. The tall branches formed an archway to the
clearing, and the dazzling moonlight made only Lava, Kusa and the white horse
visible.

‘It would be wise to return
that horse to its owner,’ he said calmly. For Sita, Rama’s voice
still had that rumbling sweetness and calm authority that was never threatening,
while its intention was not fully revealed to the listener.

‘
We
found this horse, and he is ours now,’ said the boys
turning to him, unruffled.

‘I can see that you found this
horse, but this horse belongs to a ritual. You cannot stop its course. If you do,
then the shastra says you must fight with me because I sent the horse out. It is
clearly a mistake as you did not intend to harm anyone or indeed this beautiful
creature.’

‘Can you not see that this
horse has now ended its journey and wants to be here?’ said Lava, as Kusa
cajoled the horse to eat grass out of his hand. The horse nuzzled comfortably
against them.

‘Ended its journey?’
Rama smiled and his soldiers took a step further out from under the low branches. He
raised his arm as a signal for them to step back. ‘We all have rules by
which our lives and the lives of others are kept in harmony. Otherwise we would be
like the elements—constantly interrupted by the force of our energy which
we cannot contain.’

‘We are human,’ Lava
said with a degree of impatience.

‘We too are made up of the
elements,’ Kusa added with his winning smile.

‘But there is an order and a
sequence in the elements—when water rises clouds are formed; in time the
thunder rolls and the rain falls,’ Rama continued, almost enchanted by the
possibility of a discussion on cause and effect in the soft light.

‘Why not speak plainly, even
if you are on such a high horse!’ said Lava. In spite of his stubborn hold
on the Ashwamedha, Lava was engaged by this stranger who spoke to him in a voice
that bathed everything in the cool moonlight.