Sita's Ascent (6 page)

Valmiki could see Sita getting
exasperated and that might mean putting up with an irritable woman in the hermitage,
which could mean a really bad day for composition. He would constantly have to stay
out of her way to keep his mind calm so that it would chime with the rhythm and
metre for his poem. Valmiki had discovered early enough in life that passive
resistance requires greater energy than confrontation. He had noticed that when
women get exasperated they keep clearing things out or rearranging them, and this
could entail the jangling sounds of pots and pans. He needed the heap of palm leaves
in the chaotic order they seemed to be in to make the connections for his
forthcoming poem. He was terrified almost like a child that Sita might get into a
fit of clearing the chaos and stack all his palm leaves, written on or not, and he
would completely lose the pattern of what he had in mind.

‘No problem, Sita, leave Lava
with me and we will pass the time. You go and do what you have to,’ said
Valmiki rather strategically as Sita lowered Lava on to his lap.

Sita left the hermitage with a bundle of
clothes and a long pouch of the sweet-smelling but bitter reetha soap nuts. Valmiki
saw her stop at the entrance to the hermitage, put the bundle down and retie her
long hair into a topknot—something she always did before leaving and
returning to the hermitage. To Valmiki, it seemed that she was conducting a little
ritual, the way classical performers do before entering the dimension of imagined
and heightened reality; of closure on one space before embarking into another. She
always bit her lip and looked thoughtful, almost as if she would have to slip into
another role as she left the hermitage or returned to it. Who was she when she went
to do these tasks? An attendant at the hermitage? An abandoned wife and mother who
was taking refuge? An exiled queen? Or a resourceful woman who lived as comfortably
at the hermitage—with her companions doing the chores in
rotation—as she would as a queen in a palace with an army of servants?

Lava had started tapping his toy rattle
on Valmiki’s knee. ‘Tut-tut-tut,’ Valmiki started and
the child joined in the beat. ‘Tat-tat-tvam asi,’ said Valmiki
clapping his hands and the child repeated, ‘Ta-ta-tamaswee
…’ The game was good and Lava was engaged; slowly his eyes
glazed and, with his hand in midair grasping the rattle, he fell fast asleep.
Valmiki decided not to move him but lay him on the deerskin mat beside him. Valmiki
watched him closely, and then he was struck by a phrase, which grew into a poem:

What mother could resist giving
her child this sleep
Kissed by the dappled sun
Amidst the fragrance of
shimmering neem leaves
And the percussion of wind riding through that tall
bamboo grove?
What clouds may appear and awaken her dread of future
fears?
Would this playful rattle now
Rear its head in a martial or
meditative spear?
The dribble from his lips now from a nourishing
feed
Could turn to cold blood as he lay
In permanent sleep on a distant
battlefield.
For now this ocean of rest is deep
Even the poets cannot
fill this child’s ears with blessings
The way her love knows
beyond sense and sound …

And it wasn’t quite the way it
had flashed in his mind’s eye. So he closed his eyes and tried to
concentrate on the seed of what the phrase was trying to say. He didn’t
want to analyse it or question it. Just live it—a mother would wish her
child innocence. The sleep that comes with it visits only a child. A mother would do
anything to shield her child from even the thought of danger … and with
each word he slipped into a world of images accompanied by the sound of ocean waves
so he could see clearer with his inner eye. He caught every hue, tone and colour of
the sensation of a child’s sleep, its quality watched by a mother. He
heard the music in the sigh from the mother’s breast and opened his eyes,
driven to write the composition.

Instantly his enthusiasm left him. He
froze. He rubbed his eyes. What was the dream? The mother’s sigh in his
musings or what he was confronting just now? Valmiki slapped his face and pulled his
beard. He was awake. His blood was warm. He stared again. Lava was not lying asleep.
He was not there
. He was not anywhere. The sun had
shifted. Was it really that long that Valmiki had been ‘away’?
‘If a blink of Brahma is an eon of time,’ he thought with a
great sense of futility. ‘Aiyiyo, Narayana! What good is my knowledge,
realization, composition …’ he began to scold himself loudly.
‘Here was a child created by man and woman, in flesh and blood. Its mother
placed the child in my care. I put it there and was playing with it and now
it’s missing from under my very own nose! Maybe I shouldn’t call
Lava “it”!’

He was close to tears, he felt so
helpless. He couldn’t help thinking how all this was going to affect Sita.
‘What all I have put her through in the Ramayana. Firstly, I did not give
her an ordinary birth, so that she would be extra-ordinarily human. The one joy I
gave her was Rama and their love. But before she could enjoy the privacy of her
home, she accompanied Rama into exile. Then there was that abduction—how
strong she was to have withstood the wiles of Ravana. At last Hanuman brought her
comfort, and then … oh! Why is fiction truer than life? The humiliation of
the fire test! That too she endured and was by then willing to leave the stage of
private acts and public men. But I needed Sita to return to Ayodhya with Rama for
the long-awaited coronation. What would life be like in the ordinary court, I
thought, after all the epic struggles? And then, without my even dreaming it Sita
became pregnant, and then Rama, secretly, exiled her.

‘She has stayed on with me
because she feels she has nowhere else to go. While she’s been here she
has taken care of everything; the one thing she had asked me to do was to look after
Lava and what do I do? Go into a spell of composing! Aiyiyo! Where did this child
go? How could he wander off when he was asleep? Which wild and stealthy creature has
taken this child off for its meal? What a curse my intense concentration can be!
That’s why they called me
Valmiki
—the one who cannot be shaken—such that even an
anthill has grown on top of him while he is lost in meditation. What good are these
titles when a life is lost, and another life will be dead while
living?’

He berated himself because he did not
have the courage to see if there were signs of Lava being dragged away or, indeed,
having been mutilated. How strange that his life as a ferocious highwayman and
murderer, before he came to tell and write Ramayana, had completely washed away from
him. For that he was ever thankful. The eternity of the imagination, the power of
words, the meeting with Narada who had touched his soul. But what should he do
now?

Words. Their power. It struck him.
Another epiphany. He sat under a banyan tree. He sat on a deerskin. At an
arm’s length was the sacred kusa grass that had enabled many a disciple to
enter deeper channels of meditation. This was the defining moment. Valmiki the
creator distilled his humility, his intention to alleviate the burden of
Sita’s sorrow and the power of his imagination that he believed was a
heightened truth. He stretched out his arm and plucked a single blade of kusa grass.
Closing his eyes, he touched the wellspring of his knowledge and love. In the
illumined lotus of his spirit centre he saw a steady flame shining. As his inner
sight grew sharper he saw a male child who looked like Lava.
‘Lava,’ he said out loud. When he opened his eyes there was
Lava.

Only, it was not Lava. It was an avatar
of Lava created by Valmiki’s imagination. Valmiki was enthralled. He
realized how women felt when they gave birth and beheld their creation. He chuckled
and started to play with this wonderful creation. And the creation responded as any
lively child would.

‘Maharaj! Maharaj!’
It was Sita calling out. ‘Please help me, I cannot carry this bundle as
well.’ And when Valmiki looked in the direction of the voice, Sita was
standing with the bundle on the ground, and coiling her hair into a knot with Lava
pulling her by her hand.

Sita and Valmiki looked at each other,
then at Lava and the child beside Valmiki. Both were astounded. The two boys began
to play. Valmiki leapt towards Lava and hugged him. ‘Where did you vanish,
my little one! I was so worried about you. I thought a tiger may have come and taken
you away. I’m so happy you are safe.’ Lava giggled as
Valmiki’s thick, knotted beard tickled him.

‘But whose child is
this?’ inquired Sita who was by turns enchanted, surprised and intrigued
at the resemblance to Lava.

Valmiki must have been in a parallel
universe of reality following the tribulations of being an author before Sita
arrived on the scene at the hermitage. ‘Who? Oh, that! Him? Oh yes! Sita,
what can I say …’ and he began to tell her. ‘But now
that Lava is here, I can send him back into nothingness,’ said Valmiki
hesitantly, attempting to be conclusive. ‘Into nothingness? Just like
that? What is this, Maharaj? A game? Is life just a toy for some inventor? Now that
you have created him he must stay. And we must hear his voice, just as he will
become part of our story.’ Valmiki could hear in Sita’s voice
genuine anguish at the notion of any kind of power over life—real or
imagined.

A piercing squeal interrupted Valmiki
and Sita’s musings. Lava had gripped his new playmate’s thigh
with one hand and was in a wrestler’s lock. The playmate squelched a
handful of Lava’s buttock and cried out, ‘Koossa!’
Lava let go his grip. He too let go and they rolled and tumbled and laughed. Sita
repeated with great delight: ‘Lava and Kusa!’

Valmiki now spent time being a little
more alert to the things around him. With Lava and Kusa there were multiple
questions that had to be answered instantly. Valmiki, as a poet, saw the boys as
phrases, sounds, sentences budding from an image and slowly he started to see them
as Sita did. Here were two young boys, in flesh and blood, who unravelled
life’s potential in every passing moment. If Lava was more interested in
following Valmiki around and capturing sounds and exercising his lung power in
reciting the improvised slokas, then Kusa would stay close to the women, using his
tiny hands to be initiated into making herbal paste and sniffing the combination of
ingredients. Kusa delighted in squelching
and combining many
unguents to daub himself. His various stages of anointment were received with
Urmilla’s ‘Aeyee! That was meant for dry and wrinkled
skin!’ or ‘No, no, that’s not to be eaten,
it’s for healing eye infections!’ and concluded with washing and
drying, accompanied by hugs and a chorus of endearments. He had a tactility that
Sita found herself being drawn towards, even if he was not her own flesh and
blood.

One day Lava was out with Valmiki and
Urmilla to learn how to make handheld catapults to knock guavas down from very high
branches as the parrots had ravaged the fruit on the lower ones. Sita was in the
kitchen. She had carefully swept with her hands the dry lentils that had spilled on
the mud floor when she was measuring them to cook dal. She was on her haunches and
was flicking a few lentils from her fingernails when Kusa, who was playing with the
chapatti dough, asked, ‘Amma, how were you born?’ Sita blinked.
‘Of course, yesterday was the boy’s birthday, celebrated
together with Lava’s.’ Sita had told them the story of how they
were born, being economical with the truth as Lava and Kusa had come to regard
themselves as identical and inseparable twins. While they looked identical, their
emerging personalities emphasized different aspects of longing and fulfilment,
endurance and resourcefulness that were also known to be strong aspects of Sita.

As she was wondering how to answer Kusa,
so many memories came tumbling back to her that she could not make out which were
real and which imagined. But within the shafts of the images she remembered, within
each one of them, she realized there was a story that had to be told, and a story
that had to be handed down to the boys as a chronicle of their origins. What was the
story that she remembered about herself that she could tell Kusa? What was the story
she would want to be remembered by?

She could feel herself squeeze through
that narrow doorway of the past into another time. She screwed up her eyes as if to
see clearly in the haze of the half-light. A woman stood in the doorway. When the
woman turned, her diamond earrings and nose studs flashed like suns against her dark
skin. The gold threads from her pomegranate-pink silk sari gleamed like the
sun’s reflection on a rippling river. Her voice was deep and bellyful and
resonated from her nose. It was Mandodari. Ravana’s queen and wife. For
quite a while Sita sat, forgetting herself as she watched Mandodari tell Kusa a
story.

‘A long time ago a holy but
poor man lived in a little thatched hut on an abandoned field. He used to wake every
morning and bathe in a pond and pray to Vishnu, the great sustainer of life. Many
people used to come to sit by him during the day and through his silence he was able
to heal their family troubles. Vishnu, too, saw that this man
did not crave anything in life except to help others. “How would he go
about getting his food?” thought Vishnu, and decided that instead of the
man having to go and seek alms or work to earn money, why not gift him a cow. Not
just an ordinary cow but a holy cow. The man could carry on his work, and whether
the cow went out to graze or not, it would give him a limitless supply of milk. The
man collected the milk in a pot and sometimes he shared it with those who came to
him to be healed. The poor man knew that this gift could have come only from Vishnu.
So, as he thanked Vishnu while praying, he suddenly thought of Vishnu’s
wife Lakshmi, and hoped she would be born on earth as someone’s
daughter.

‘At that very moment, he saw
the clouds burst with a
Twaannngh!
in the sky. He could
not see, but it was Ravana storming through the sky in his aerial chariot.

‘Ravana was on a mission of
“blood collecting” from holy men. This was a game, at first
designed for his amusement. The rule was to seek out and spy on people who were
considered holy. Then, with beguiling charm, Ravana would take on different
disguises to question these people at a solitary moment about the nature of
“Good”. He had stunningly complex arguments. What was the need
to be good or ethical? Why were a conscience and ethics always associated with
“good”? What if we did not
want to be good?
Why did we have to have a sense of judgement? If life was about celebrating, why
were there so many morals to keep us chained like prisoners when we could be free?
If someone committed a wrong and fled the place, could anyone catch up with him?
What on earth was a conscience? Why have one if it made you doubt everything you
did? Why should one respect women? Weren’t they all the
same—sisters, wives, daughters, etc.? Why should we look after people who
were disabled or care for children? Weakness should be put down, and why should the
experience of an elder, who had no physical strength left, be considered? What did
they have to teach us about life—nothing but regret.

‘He defeated his opponents
with well-illustrated and subtle arguments against good in human nature. He got a
buzz in playing this game, and winning. Of course, he was always in disguise as a
vulnerable contender, so he caught people unawares. But when a few people challenged
him about the need to question one’s actions and take responsibility for
those actions, it stopped being a game. There was no buzz for Ravana when he
wasn’t winning. He soon discovered that one way of accounting for his
successes was by collecting the blood of anyone who contested him, and labelling it
“holy”. The blood was preserved in several pots in his
palace.

‘On one such occasion, while
he was lurking around the hut of the man with the holy cow—who had gone to
the pond for his bath and prayers—Ravana found the pot of freshly drawn
holy milk and stole it. Just for the sake of creating chaos.

‘Ravana returned triumphant to
his palace with the stolen pot. Then he mixed the blood from his other pots into it.
Ravana called me, his queen, Mandodari, to hide the pot with the mixture of blood
and milk (that had by now turned pink), and warned me that it contained poison. I
knew the game he had begun to play had now turned into something exceedingly
sinister.

‘When Ravana left on yet
another mission, I discovered through my secret intelligence services what he had
done. I was disgusted by this behaviour. It made me wonder—why was I such
a prisoner to all the silks, jewellery, feasts, slaves, servants, palaces and much
more? Ravana had said he provided me with these to prove how well he looked after
me, and how powerful his wealth made me. I was very proud to be his queen. But his
power had gone so much to his head he could not see sense. I felt smaller than an
ant that could be crushed under his foot. I was like anyone else in his
life—he would tease and tease and tease till your heart and mind would
explode. He was in total control. The way a frog is held in a snake’s
jaws—neither dead nor with the hope of life—just dying.

‘When I learnt about the
blood collecting
of the holy men who had challenged his
arguments, I wondered what would become of me? I was a mere woman, his
wife—I could disappear and no one would know what really happened to me or
be able to tell my story.

‘He had gone away from the
palace for some months to test a new range of deadly weapons. I prayed in secret. I
prayed and prayed that someone should teach him such a lesson that—if he
lived—he would never forget.

‘As the days passed I grew
afraid that there was nothing in the world that could defeat him; when even the gods
were afraid, what chance did any animal or human have?

‘Then it struck me like a
thunderbolt! I prayed that a goddess be born on earth as a woman, and that she
should defeat him. I prayed on behalf of all womankind.

‘By now, I was so disgusted by
the thoughts I was thinking, I wanted to finish myself. So I drank the blood
mixture. Nothing happened.

‘Meanwhile, I think the wishes
of the holy man, who had prayed that Lakshmi be born on earth, came true. I heard,
across the ocean, in the kingdom of Mithila, King Janaka was ploughing a field. He
saw something glistening in the distance. As he approached the spot he noticed a
crystal cradle that was wedged between the furrows of the earth, and there was a
baby girl in it. She looked radiant.
He held the child close to
his face as if she were an answer to a long-forgotten prayer and took her home to
his queen. As she was found in the furrows of the earth, the child was named
Sita.

‘All this happened in the
flash of an instant when Lakshmi vanished from Devaloka, when Narada cursed the maid
of honour, when there was a
Twaannngh
that sounded like
it came from a cloudburst. Lakshmi had fulfilled a poor holy man’s prayer
that she be born as a human on earth. The devas, viewing this sight from Devaloka,
sighed with relief.

‘The following years I sent
out various spirits and spies to feed me with the hope that such a woman had indeed
been born. They gave me news and I found hope.’

Sita was loved dearly by her royal
parents. As she was an only child, Urmilla was adopted as her sister. Sita was quick
to make friends, and she treated them as her equals. She would have bouts of fiery
temper, especially if someone had been deceitful. But she had a quick wit, a sense
of humour that endeared her to everyone because she could bend any sorrow with a
lightness of word or touch, without being insensitive or careless. Her nature was
fed by fire. She had an unquenchable desire to live, and celebrate life in all its
tints and hues.

King Janaka had a prosperous kingdom
that rivalled Dasaratha’s. But it was not as vast as Kosala, which had a
natural gift of three rivers flowing around it, making it extremely fertile. Mithila
depended on trade with other kingdoms and also knew the significance of strong
regional relationships, rather than standing apart in isolation. This enabled the
citizens of Mithila to feel safe. A healthy economy and a sense of security often
make people feel they can take time out on holidays, or spend time planning
elaborate rituals, like naming ceremonies for babies, ceremonies on becoming a
teenager, or just travelling and enjoying the countryside away from life in
court.

Janaka insisted on holidays for three
reasons. Firstly, it connected people who lived and worked at court to experience
the pace of rural life; secondly, it enabled courtiers to discover the requirements
of villagers in an unofficial capacity. The third reason was that while on holiday,
one could plan for the future. For Janaka, holidays helped him think clearly, away
from the pressures of a daily schedule of meetings. It was sheer joy being in the
company of his wife, his daughter, Sita, and their friends.

Janaka had an orchard with fruit trees
at the back of the holiday resort palace. He kept a limited number of servants
there; this enabled him to be himself and prepare for his final ashrama, that is,
retirement, when he would have to do the daily chores himself.

He would pray to Shiva with a sincere
heart, every day without fail. One afternoon he noticed a giant iron bow half buried
in the earth, standing up to the height of a banana tree! It was inscribed:
‘Janaka, a gift of love—Shiva.’

‘What in heaven’s
name was the use for a bow, that too this size, in a vegetable garden when one was
on holiday! For Karma’s sake,’ thought Janaka, ‘I have
no intention, inclination or time to show any neighbouring kingdom how mighty
Mithila is!’