Sita's Ascent (3 page)

Sita led Rama to his place. The banana
leaf had been spread on the gold platter. The first morsel of lentils and rice
drizzled with pure ghee was offered to the gods. The crows across the courtyard
cawed with delight, acknowledging that they, who were visiting as the spirits of the
ancestors, had been fed, and now the living could continue with their meal. The
temple bells began their orbit of sound. Rama sat and as Sita served him the curried
yam and plantain, she said, ‘The salt seller came by today. She told me a
fine story.’

‘Let me guess,’ said
Rama as he dipped his finger in the yam sauce and licked it. ‘Was it about
how one day people will have to pay for salt?’

‘You don’t say! Are
we coming to that? Cheh! What a day that will be when we have to pay for
what’s in our blood! No, no, thank god it was nothing like that. It was
about a woman who had been blessed by Surya and had a vision that she must tell the
story to everyone.’

‘Why? Didn’t she
want to keep that vision to herself?’

‘Naturally, possessing a
woman’s generosity, she wanted to share it with everyone.’

‘Did anyone listen?’
Rama asked as he drew the rice to the centre of the leaf plate awaiting the next
course.

Sita now served him spinach. Pouring
tamarind soup on his rice she said, ‘Of course not. Finally, she found a
pregnant salt seller who said she would listen, but fell off
to sleep.’

‘This is getting increasingly
believable,’ said Rama as he reached out for a poppadom and cracked
it.

‘But then a voice from within
the womb said, “I will listen.” So the old woman sang a
song:

‘Listen to this song, and
its good luck will follow you—
You will turn ruined ghost towns into
bustling cities;
Where there are dry cotton fields you
will fill its branches with pearls,
You will return lost treasures buried
under the sea to the shore
And you will even bring the dead back to
life.’

‘What an extraordinary claim.
A very ambitious challenge. I hope we aren’t setting those sights for our
little one!’ Rama’s eyes danced as he spoke.

‘Oh, Rama! Forever teasing me.
But after all the fuss, a girl was born, a king met her and as the prophecy unfolded
…’

‘So, what is the point of the
story?’ said Rama with affection, as he delicately slurped his creamy
dessert.

‘Simply that the ritual of
telling is a wish. It gives hope. Hope is what every human being thrives on whether
they are wretched or rich. Stories, apart from giving hope, must be told and shared
so everyone can try to understand the
experience of life from
another point of view,’ replied Sita matter-of-factly.

‘Wonderfully put!’
Rama drank the cool water laced with sarsaparilla.

Just as he finished his last course and
washed his hands in the gold finger bowl, Sita brought out the sweetened fennel. A
minister came in, very apologetic, and explained that Rama had to tend to a court
matter urgently that afternoon.

Rama returned in the late afternoon to
the Assembly Hall. Urmilla was gathering the special herbs and bark from the
courtyard that she had left to dry in the sun for a new supply of ointments for
Sita. She could see Rama leaving the palace, winding his way from the pond full of
lotuses towards the Grand Assembly Hall. Lakshmana was off on a mission to meet the
hunters who brought news of changes in the migratory patterns of birds, so Rama was
by himself. Urmilla noticed that over the last few days he looked more the Rama she
had once known. He was getting used to the thought of a child in their midst, Sita
had told her. Rama knelt and held his hands out to a male swan that came gliding at
some speed, summoned by a king. The smell of clay wafted in the air as the afternoon
breeze rose from the river. There was a moment of stillness to know that this could
well be a happy time before jubilations, celebrations and all the anticipatory
preparations for the birth of the royal.

By the time the cows returned to their
herds, the dust was rising. Urmilla was standing in her garden on the western side
that faced the palace garden pond. She marvelled at the way the lotuses opened with
the first fingers of light at sunrise and gradually began to fold before sunset. The
sun was turning crimson and the grove on the far western side of her compound wall
looked dark with the foray of the banyan tree’s branches. The bank sloped
and her attention was diverted by the sunset, when she heard two men talking. One of
them was clearly distressed.

She edged closer to the wall and could
see an old man pleading with a youth, ‘Please, take my daughter
back.’ Urmilla could tell by their dialect that they were dhobis,
washermen.

‘Why did she leave in the
first place?’ hissed the young man. ‘Does she not know once she
steps into my house, that is her place?’

‘I beg you, forgive her, she
is still a child at heart,’ the father continued.

‘Well, a child is afraid of
the dark. But she walked out in the middle of the night.’

‘What could she do? You beat
her so hard, she was bleeding, she was afraid …’

‘That I would kill her! Yes, I
wish I had. At least I would have saved my honour! What will people
say—she walked out like a prostitute!’

‘Oh, please,
please.’ The old man could stand no longer. He knelt and said,
‘Don’t say that, we brought her up with the utmost care. She
looks upon Sitadevi as her protector!’ He broke down, choked by grief.

The son-in-law snarled. ‘Well,
I believe in honour in the old way, not like our king. Just look at him. What face
does he have among men? He just took his wife back after she had been kept by Ravana
for more than a year! Who knows what happened there? Get out of my way, you old
fool!’ And the old man stumbled, splayed face down, crying in the darkness
and the wet mud. A dislodged stone scurried into the water with a splash.

Urmilla felt a pang of pity for the old
man. Disgusted by the son-in-law’s attitude, she returned to her
apartments, resolving to seek the fellow out and knock some sense into his head. She
was incensed. So these rumours were still flying about? Rumour and public opinion
were faceless enemies, she thought. She would talk it over with Lakshmana. How could
she tell Rama and Sita? She decided she would wait till Sita returned from her visit
to the hermitage. Sita’s trip was planned for the next day and Lakshmana
was to escort her to the forest.

By the time Sita and Lakshmana left for
the forest, Urmilla had begun to get her servants to interrogate all the dhobis in
the area. She had to be discreet. She asked them to find out how many
dhobis’ daughters had been
married over the last few
months.

Because of this, she missed her daily
routine of visiting Sita with soaked almonds and having their daily chat.
‘It won’t be long, Sita will be back by Dasami. There will be so
much to catch up on. Meanwhile, Lakshmana will bring me news about her,’
she consoled herself. As the still night progressed, she kept reliving the scene she
had witnessed in the fading light the day before. What she did not know was that
someone else had been there too. She had only heard the splash of water.

Her lids were heavy, but, during all
these years, she had begun to dream with her eyes wide open. She composed poetry
about waiting. She had begun a way of communicating with Lakshmana through her
spirit. In that arc of fourteen years, when both were exiled from each other, he too
communicated with her. But tonight sleep descended, and there was silence.

Rama lost his foothold. A stone had got
dislodged and Rama could not break its fall. It bounced. With the sheer volition of
its speed matched by its weight, the force of gravity and the downward slope of the
bank, the stone made a splash—the way actions create consequences.

Rama had stopped by the grove of
fragrant mango trees as he would whenever there was an opportunity to watch the
sunset. The place was unchanged since the time he and his brothers used to swing
from the branches as Dasaratha, their father, watched over them. Like a sports
instructor, their father would assess which son had stronger arms while swinging
from the branches, who was more nimble-footed, running along a high branch like a
tightrope walker, and then invent new games. After the climbing, jumping,
rolling and chasing, the boys would be led by Dasaratha to sit
on the bank and watch what he called ‘the miracle of each and every
day’, the sunset. Once he held Rama close and said, ‘Look how
the sun is sinking in the west. When you see that big ball of red nearly half gone,
then wish with all your heart for the thing you want, and it will come true. You
know why? Because that is the fire point, the purest moment. The sun is fire; you
will never know anything more intense and pure than that!’ Rama, whose
name signified ‘moving towards’, remembered it, not for his
father’s romantic science, but for the moment when, like at the close of
day all things point to night, he felt that closeness with his brothers, his life
being swathed by the love and guardianship of an admirable father and accomplished
king. Returning to the grove, often without Sita, was a remembrance of things past,
when life was founded on the magic of innocence and wonder. Standing there, with the
ghosts of the past reconciled, watching the sunset was an elixir for daily renewal.
Even if things went wrong, he found new resolve by gazing at these sunsets. The
blaze of light before it was consumed by night brought hope that the sun would rise
the next day, and what was left incomplete could be put right. Every sunset was
different. Some days it was wide and clear and the fireball descending from gold to
crimson to deep red would simmer with its heat waves as it slipped into the
horizon. In that instant, the light changed the landscape.
First illuminating every object, then, as the blaze faded, lighting the trees,
buildings, livestock, people, everything seemed to be sculpted of ebony. On other
days, clouds splayed the light across all directions and became iconic of the power
that gave life. Its light touched everything; it was the symbol of royalty. To Rama,
in his wheel of life—a continuous play of unanticipated
shocks—the sun was the only constant. Gazing at the sun he would recall
the strands of poems from the
Isha Upanishad
:

The face of the truth is hidden
by thy golden orb, O sun.
That do thou remove, in order
that I who am devoted to truth may behold its glory.
O Nourisher, only seer,
controller of all—O illumining sun, fountain of life for all
creatures—withhold thy light, gather together thy rays. May I behold
through thy grace thy most blessed form.
The Being that dwells
therein—even that Being am I.

Sita had been planning her trip to the
forest for the next morning and the household was in preparation for months since
she had announced it. It was her way of offering thanks to the friends in the forest
and to Valmiki before she gave birth, as she knew her life would take a different
turn when she came back. She would settle into the role
of a
mother, wife and queen. Rama, too, felt it was a good idea. Sita’s mother
had died of grief on hearing about Sita’s abduction, muttering in her last
breath, ‘What will people say?’ Now Valmiki and the forest were
Sita’s family. Rama understood her need for parental warmth.

The evening before Sita’s
departure he couldn’t resist stopping by the grove on his way from court.
The sun was setting and this time he really had something to wish for. Not so much
to wish for as to be grateful for. Sita was back in his life, and each day dissolved
one more layer of caution and reserve till hopefully, one day, they would return to
their former selves, and the trust they shared when they married would be restored.
After fourteen years they were going to have a child. All those years in exile, they
had entwined themselves in each other’s thoughts and could not tell each
other apart. But the year that Sita was abducted, so many new worlds came into
existence. Rama met Hanuman and that friendship shaped tangible worlds, like armies,
but also intangible ones like courage and unfailing service.

That was when Rama heard voices. He drew
back under the shade of a tree. The father-in-law and son-in-law were too involved
in their argument to notice they were being watched. Rama was about to intervene,
not as a king handing out justice, but as a mediator, enabling each party to see the
other’s point of view and arriving
at a reconciliation
before a solution. It had won him a place in the hearts of everyone he had met in
his years of exile. He found it was the best way of knowing a case and understanding
his people even after he returned to court and was crowned king.

But at the mention of Sita, a cold pang
of fear clutched his heart. The son-in-law’s snarl kept ringing in his
head: ‘Well, I believe in honour in the old way, not like our king
… He just took his wife back after she had been kept by Ravana for more
than a year! Who knows what happened there?’ Rama’s legs were
like stone pillars, his arms heavy boulders and his tongue a frozen river. A part of
him became a wild beast, ready to bash the young man into a pulp. Not kill him,
because the ensuing silence would only magnify the words the murdered man had
uttered, as they would remain suspended in the air. Another part of Rama was baying
like a wounded animal at the sight of its mate gorged by other animals. Every fibre
in Rama’s body tingled with rage as he stretched and tightened the fabric
of rationality, like damp leather on the ring of a drum. He kept tapping and toning
his mind with discursive thoughts of ethics, purpose, governance, tradition and the
state, including the collective good. No mantras alleviated the pain screaming in
and tearing at his heart.

What the son-in-law said hung like spit
in the air and the old man, broken by the ammunition of words, was
splayed on the bank beating his fists as his tears and saliva
mixed with the mud. Rama walked away and the stone tumbled from its nest of roots.
It splashed and formed widening rings as it plunged to the bottom of the
palace’s lotus pond. Each of the three men had reached their thresholds of
endurance. In the scheme of things to come, what began as a domestic quarrel in a
washerman’s hut outside the palace would create ever-widening rings of
influence in the royal household, in turn affecting the course of history.

Rama returned to his palace trembling.
He went straight to his map room, avoiding the main entrance. He sent word through
his trusted courtier for Lakshmana to meet him immediately. He knew this was
difficult as Lakshmana was on a secret-service mission with hunters, who acted as
the king’s spies, and there was no way of contacting him until he returned
at night. Dismissing all his servants Rama decided to be alone. He would wait.
However long that took. He knew what it meant to wait. He also knew that when
waiting, one’s thoughts and feelings rushed like a river, breaking the
banks and shifting the vantage points of a landscape.

He began unfurling the scrolls of new
maps that defined the boundaries of his kingdom and those of his neighbours. So far
there had been no disputes, and it was due to the diligence of Bharata who, over the
years of Rama’s
exile, had served the kingdom and the
domestic needs of its people with great attention to detail. Thoughts of expansion,
even through trade, were not part of Bharata’s scheme. In fact, Bharata
had no ambition to rule and had done so only on Rama’s insistence. On his
return and after the coronation, Rama was advised that in the foreseeable future
there would be shortages of natural and other resources within the kingdom. Unless
there was some kind of expansion of territories that provided those resources,
Ayodhya would become dependent; a dependent kingdom is vulnerable to attack. The
lines on the map were blurring. Rama’s dilemma was now concrete: should he
focus on the external demands of the state before he weeded out the internal
discontent among his people? Both made the kingdom, his state, vulnerable.

He had always believed that the state
and the individual functioned like the human heart—a circulation system of
codes formed by people’s consent and well communicated at all
levels—where each enabled the other to perform at optimum level. What was
in the minds of individuals eventually influenced collective action. It came to be
written ‘to each according to his ability’—that was
the building block of the social constitution. The principle was a good one. Based
on the human anatomy, limbs and organs dispersed functions that were carried out as
a unified action of the body.

A thought was an atom. It fuelled energy
that could be used either way—for darkness or light. He had experienced it
during exile, wandering and meeting all kinds of people. He knew his people and
their circumstances. They entrusted him to uphold not only what was materially
beneficial to them but also the spiritual goal and purpose in life—that
which made life bearable amidst vicissitudes. Rama believed in an open channel of
communication with his people, not so much to please them as to contextualize the
legislation of each individual’s dharma—or right action. What
nourished the individual would replenish the state. Rama had brought about
considerable change from his father’s time—the most significant
of which was reserving the love and honour of one wife.

Hearing the washerman hurl such abuse in
the name of Sita both dismayed and enraged him. Had she not proved her mettle in
that trial by fire? Did he not arrange it so everyone could see with their own eyes
what he knew her to be? And how much had been at stake—including the
prospect of losing her completely—when he had uttered those words. They
had sounded so strange on his tongue: ‘Sita! Ravana is dead. You are free
to go now.’ And then the horror lurched again. Was Ravana really dead? How
he still continued to cause havoc! Ravana was a great creator of illusions. What if
these shards of doubt were also his creation? These thoughts like fine crystals of
poison were
foreign to Rama, but, unnoticed by him, they
dissolved in his mind. And now Sita was with child. Was that an illusion as well?
Was Ravana hovering to see that if not in life, then by his death he could separate
Rama and Sita? How intense must be the power of his love for Sita.

Rama knew that Sita never uttered the
name Ravana. He had accepted her silence as her way of recovering from that
traumatic captivity. He knew from the depth of his being that Sita was true to him,
as Rama knew he was true to her. They were two bodies entwined around one soul. Did
he not see how her eyes blazed when for one brief instant she stood apart from him
at the trial of fire—that she would give up her life were she to be
separated from his belief in her? Did she not say ‘Ra and Ma were the only
two syllables I knew in all my time in captivity; it was all my breath uttered when
I inhaled, exhaled and inhaled again; it was Rama who kept me alive’? Then
why was this shadow still looming over them?

That day when he found Sita beside her
dowry chest, he saw the look in her eyes; she could feel the hurt that overwhelmed
him for one blinding moment. She had been about to speak, but he turned to go. Even
then he had heard her say ‘Rama …’, caught
mid-sentence, and he hadn’t stayed to listen. Now the moment had passed,
and he had decided on a different course of action.

Sita was tinkling the little bell for
the evening aarti.
The musical instruments were being tuned, and
Rama could hear the drum throbbing like a heartbeat. He calmly strode past the
columns and entered the hall as everyone faced the ancestral deities and Sita waved
the lamps. The air was thick with the fragrance of sandalwood. The lead sang in
perfect pitch and rhythm. She led and the chorus followed, all hearts and minds
singing in unison. Rama and Sita looked at each other for one moment as the subjects
thanked the ancestral gods for their king and their queen. Sita smiled such a
heavenly smile; a warm wave of love and reassurance washed over him.

After the evening meal Rama spent some
time with Sita who told him about the allocation of gifts for the journey. He then
returned to his map room before retiring. Lakshmana was waiting. The attendants knew
that when the brothers met, they had to be left alone. When the last footfall was
heard fading away, Lakshmana pulled out the palm-leaf message he had received and
looked at Rama, ‘What does this mean?’