Sita's Ascent (13 page)

‘The horse belongs to my
kingdom. It is part of a great sacrifice. You have stopped its course. That is a
challenge.’

‘We will fight for the
horse.’

‘You both are engaging in
fantastical and unachievable claims and I do not wish to cause you harm. Besides, I
can only fight an equal. Neither of you is close to me in age, and indeed, in the
middle of the night, I cannot fight two wilful boys who have spent their lives in
the forest.’

‘Who do you think you
are?’ Lava said. Sita stood still in the dark without breathing. Rama
could not have been aware of her, Valmiki or Urmilla sheltering in the cavernous
shade of the tall trees.

‘And who, may I ask, are
you?’ said Rama.

Lava began: ‘I was born at the
first stroke of that hour past midnight when darkness moves towards daylight. They
said of my birth that Brahma visited and wrote his name on my forehead. I cannot
take this as praise as I am a guest of those who brought me into the world, bloody,
screaming and fighting on a full-moon night.

‘My lessons stood for my
father, and my teacher gave me a world where I could learn to read with my breath,
my tongue, my eyes, my inner eye, my touch, taste and smell.

‘My teacher’s
Teacher taught me

how to shape friendship from anger,

peace from haste,

going slow while travelling with
speed,

learning silence from the dance of the
trees

and singing with the insects to test an
opinion.

‘My closest companion is here,
my brother, and his heartbeat and mine are one.

‘We both were placed in the
forest, our kingdom of reason where we learnt what is cruelty and what justice, and
the language of beings that do not share our tongue.

‘All this we could not have
done without the one who filled my ears with the first story of how life came to be.
So, listen to the story of my beginnings, as neither age nor status, kin or clan,
can lay claim to true ancestry.

‘My mother is spirit and
earth. Her eyes shine like stars and when she left her girlhood she carried that
light into her husband’s home. My father, from her account, was a man who
embodied compassion; and truth was the one jewel he wore when he lived a life of
prosperity. When fortune’s wayward winds began to blow, my father held on
to truth as an anchor in the stormy sea of unimaginable events. My mother did not
just witness his misfortune but decided to travel with him and give him courage.
“After all,” she often said, “what is the point of
love if it cannot weather all seasons?”’

Rama had been listening as a patient
bystander. His mind was open to listening—as a king he would hold an
audience and listen to news and grievances before pronouncing his verdict or
decreeing a law. He was enchanted by the musicality of the boy’s voice.
The poetry of Lava’s language seemed unusual for a forest-dweller.
Rama was impressed by the boy’s indignation at having
to prove that the horse now belonged to him and his brother. It was evident they
would challenge Rama. The boy seemed to have an interesting story but his ancestry
would never be equal to the lineage of a king, so Rama was relieved on the
boy’s behalf that he need never fight him.

It was when he heard ‘what was
the point of love …’ that something rippled through Rama. It
seemed to echo words from a very deep yet unforgotten chamber in his heart. Rama
decided to listen more intently to the boy and discover what was happening to him as
the story unravelled.

‘And what kind of misfortune
was it that befell them?’ Rama asked, in spite of himself.

‘My father, she says, was a
man who knew what was expected of him, and he followed the path of honour and truth.
When the time came for him, soon after they were married, to take charge of the
whole family, he was sent away with no reason except that his father wanted it so.
As his father lay dying, unable to speak except through the words of another, my
mother insisted she travel with my father to the lands where he was decreed to roam
nameless. He did not wish her to suffer hardship but she would not be reasoned with,
because, as she continues to say, “what is the point of love if it cannot
weather all seasons?”

‘Thirteen years they spent
travelling across lands, meeting people who came to them with their stories.
Wherever they went they were welcomed because they lived simply and found ways of
easing the burden of other peoples’ lives, in spite of having their own.
One day, my mother, by yet another unfortunate storm of fate, was snatched away from
their life as travellers to another country against her will. She was held captive
and, against all odds, my father, with the help of his dearest friend and his
brother, rescued my mother and overthrew the inglorious king who had oppressed his
own people, and thus restored their peace.

‘My father and mother returned
to their family home and, following a warm welcome, my father took on the business
of his people. I started growing within my mother. My father, kind, compassionate,
heroic and honest as he was, delighted in the future. Again, by some unseen
mischief, my mother was sent away, never to return to her home, her
husband’s heart, again.

‘So great was her grief,
greater than when she had been imprisoned in another land, that she could have ended
her life …’

Rama knew this was beyond analogy or
metaphor—it was his story. All his life he had seen beyond the immediate
moment, always in preparation, always generous and conscious of what he owed others.
It usually turned out
to be the business of doing the right
thing. Anyone who was a part of himself, like Sita, Lakshmana and Hanuman, was
treated by him the way he treated himself—a sense of selfhood with a sense
of self-abnegation. Sita had given him a sense of his self in the physical world and
all that was in it.

Over the years, after he had banished
her and Lakshmana had not returned, he was in a void of hearing counsel. The only
body he knew was the state. But now, his life was told in a story by the boy,
unmistakably his son.

Rama got down from his horse, so gently
that neither of the boys felt it necessary to be on guard, and knelt close to
Lava.

‘But she knew,’ Lava
continued, ‘that life is a chain of energy. Letting herself live and give
birth to me were not merely endurance. She had ascended beyond the chains of name,
birth, caste, clan—she is the one who gave me light.’ Lava
paused. Rama took the boy’s right hand and placed it on his own head. All
he could utter was ‘Sita, Sita … Sita’ with long-lost
joy.

Valmiki and Urmilla were awed by
Lava’s rendering of his mother’s life, with Kusa’s
accompaniment, from what he had gathered over the years. They were relieved that
they would not have to intervene in any struggle to save the boys’ lives.
The boys had come of age.

They stretched out their arms to support
Sita. The warm breeze made everything come to life. The leaves shivered and there
was a stream of light where she stood. There was no pain or need for reconciliation.
Sita had ascended time cycles. She turned to face the footfall that was behind her.
‘All would be well for a while,’ she thought and cried out,
‘Hanuman!’

‘[A] novella is often
restricted to a single episode or event, leading to an unexpected turning point
[wendepunkt]’

Professor John Mullan
¹

Sita’s Ascent
is, in
the form of a novella, a retelling of Sita’s story and a reimagining of
the idea of woman as goddess. Three things inspired me in this undertaking: the
first was the fascination with a literary form that would best tell a
woman’s story—as when others tell us about something that
happened to someone we know. The second was the
inspiration that
is Sita—an exiled queen, an expectant mother abandoned and left alone,
undaunted by the extraordinary circumstances that are thrust upon her by the husband
she continues to love. Thirdly, the function of memory as a metaphor for
‘re-membering’ a dismembered story because it is told to us
infrequently and in parts, and for experiencing culture through its epic
characters.

I will start with the third point.
Memory is a powerful tool that makes reflection possible by recalling through this
process of rejoining with the past. A.K. Ramanujan’s essay ‘The
Ring of Memory’ demonstrates this with inimitable clarity while relooking
at Kalidasa’s
Sakuntala
.

King Dushyanta, after rejecting
Sakuntala when she arrives at his court, regains his memory as a result of seeing
the lost ring that eventually dispels the curse of the angry muni.
Dushyanta’s repentance facilitates a process of remembrance; a
re-membering of dismembered memory. Sakuntala’s absence is made present by
his longing that is recounted in the poetry, not solely about her physical
attributes but also the essence of her
being
that afforded him
companionship in the alien world of the forest where he first met her, and as his
soulmate.

Sakuntala’s and King
Dushyanta’s longing and loss are metaphoric of exile. Memory is sharpened
by longing. I experienced this exile in re-membering and retelling Ramayana in
spaces and cultures that knew little or
nothing of the
epic’s origin or sensibilities. Familiarizing myself with the characters
as real people
acted as a trigger of cultural memory. A retelling gives
us new insights that could, and should be allowed to, make meaning of what is valued
across cultures, in spite of different traditions.

Sita’s Ascent
for me
began as a pause; a remembering of the epic with a new idea of who Sita is. Like
many, I have often wondered what happens when a character goes beyond the realm of
the author’s imagination. I wanted to re-member Sita’s essence
through a reconstruction of events that were outside the familiar in the epic. In
Sita’s Ascent
, I have endeavoured to enter into the future of
someone from an epic tradition, who continues, through change, to haunt our
imagination.

In performance storytelling, I have
worked on the prequel—Rama’s story. I have always been struck by
a folk rendition of the episode when Rama is going into exile. He pleads with Sita
not to come to the forest. To this she replies, ‘Rama, in all versions of
the Ramayana, Sita has gone to the forest. Without Sita, there
is
no
Ramayana.’
²
Sita is central to the plot.

For me, it is this idea of Sita as a
character who is
conscious of her choices in spite of what
happens to her, and the circumstances under which she is placed (by authors and
storytellers), that is a trigger. This makes her empathetic, inventive and
resourceful—she is able to ride out the terror that strikes her.

The second thing: Sita as inspiration.
For me, the ‘idea’ of Sita is for all time. The idea enables a
matrix so that when I place her across several time zones and continents, she ends
up lighting the way even when she is violently abandoned.

In
Sita’s Ascent
, the
character challenges the author, as well as the reader, to follow a narrative
through the remembrances of the people with whom she lived in the time of the epic.
But this story is not merely about the perspectives of other people on Sita. I
attempt to create a new story, a fiction, by drawing upon an age-old familiarity
with the different characters in the epic.

Thus far, our popular imagination has
been filled with a Ramayana story and its direct association with Deepavali or
Diwali in some parts of India. The many representations of the epic that have
originated in India assume that the story is solely Indian. I make a case and
celebrate that this is not so. It is true that the third and fourth generation
Indian diaspora across the world continue to keep the epic alive mostly with the
story of Rama and Sita. Of special interest to me are the South East Asian versions
that have the effect
of sliding doors—dealing with the
familiar in an unfamiliar way, affording greater depth to both character and
action.

I have drawn on Sita and her situations
from diverse sources. These helped me to see her as everywoman, epic hero and
goddess.

My search for a multidimensional Sita
began as an exploration for a character who goes beyond Valmiki. In doing so, Sita
continues to be the familiar character we know, while she goes on to create a new
plot line. In
Yuganta
, Iravati Karve had set the framework for first-person
narratives. Here too the omniscient author is made redundant. The protagonist
invites the reader to follow a narrative spoken in the voice of other characters
that she has come in contact with. It is akin to an exchange of tales, possibly
gossip, or, as attributed to the origin of storytellers and their tales,
‘this is how the story came my way, and this is how I see
it’.

The origin of a character is often seen
to have little relevance to the unfolding of a story. I found that in many cultures
parents tell their children about how they were born, what their strengths were. It
would be interesting if a child were to reverse that process and inquire about the
story of the mother. So, in the chapter ‘Mandodari’, I have
combined narratives about Sita’s origins and birth—or migrations
of spirit and body—from an English translation of the Sanskrit
Adbhuta
Ramayana
and from
the Thai
Ramakian
in Garrett
Kam’s Ramayana in
The Arts of Asia
.

Lakshmana’s end is influenced
by the
Kirtivasa Ramayana
from Bengal. The laughter of Lakshmana, as a
result of Nidra’s visit, is inspired from an account in ‘A
Ramayana of Their Own: Women’s Oral Narrative in Telugu’ by
Velcheru Narayana Rao in
Many Ramayanas
. Urmilla’s role as a
midwife who describes Sita’s labour here has been directly influenced by
the traditional songs that sing of women, particularly Kausalya, giving birth.

While many Ramayanas have been
researched and presented and published, my interest as a storyteller lay in being
inspired by these sources that acted as a catalyst in writing the story of Sita,
beyond Ramayana. The exploration of these sources shaped my direct experience of
storytelling—identifying with a story and making meaning of the past by
seeing it as a metaphor for the present.

As part of world literature,
Sita’s courage is indomitable and takes on epic dimensions in the
emotional and geographical landscapes she traverses. We rarely see her in the safe
interiors of palaces for very long; wilderness and abandon is where she
triumphs.

This came to me while preparing Ramayana
in two different stages and contexts. The first, Deepavali in India.
It was celebrated both at home and in whichever city, town or
outpost my father’s military posting had located us during the 1960s.
Amamma, my maternal grandmother visited us during the season, and always took the
trouble to bring the wooden dolls of Tirupathi, dressing them up for the
Pattabhishekaham coronation, and stage the story of Rama and Sita. As an oral poet
her compositions in Telugu were lyrical and her improvisations, theatrical. In her
telling, Sita embodied the narrative of the canonized version, but her
interpolations added a human dimension to Sita’s character. Her Sita had
the spirit of Agni, or fire, which was very liberating for Amamma as a storyteller
and indeed for her generation. Sita’s DNA of fire could be expressed in a
myriad emotions that ranged from irritation to love, rage against injustice to
fortitude and compassion. A range of emotions any sixteen-year-old young woman could
relate to till she was thirty, in response to her life and the choices she made that
created new challenges for her. It was this that made Sita awe-inspiring for me.

The second, 1988 in England. The
Victoria and Albert Museum had an exhibition of Ramayana that was touring Cartwright
Hall, Bradford. These were sixteenth-century Mughal miniatures. As a student who had
just arrived from India to pursue a PhD at The Workshop Theatre, department of drama
in the School of English, University of Leeds, I met the curator Dr Nima Smith with
some
enthusiasm. Over our shared interest in postcolonial
literature, I was invited to give a lecture on the Hindu epic. I was with an English
colleague from my department who then proceeded to ask, ‘And, what is
Ramayana?’ It was an incredible moment like the Big Bang in my career of
storytelling. Unknown to myself, I had a cultural gene that was from that moment
propelled into a cross-fertilization of histories of ideas. Context was imperative
for retelling.

The story of Rama and Sita and their
adventures has always been a tale told and listened to in India. Having heard
Ramayana from the age of three, I had never felt the need to categorize the
ethnicity, culture, religion or nationality of the spaces and audiences when I heard
it in different places. In fact, when I was leaving Madras for Leeds to study,
Ramanand Sagar’s
Ramayana
, the TV series, had set a world record
in viewership. For the first time, everything came to a standstill—public
transport, daily routines, visits—during the time the weekly
thirty-five-minute episode was on. Hindus and non-Hindus were gripped by the
dramatization and the epic brought India under its spell in its televised
avatar.

I suddenly realized my entire context
was different—Ramayana was a symbol; its characters functioned as points
of reference in any professional, public or domestic situation while I was in India.
Here, in Leeds, let alone
England, it was unknown, unloved, and
discussed fairly clinically among curators and scholars of archived South Asian
collections. As a reflex, I thought the best place to start explaining to my
colleague was to mention that the epic was compelling as it had possibly inspired
some of the characters for George Lucas’s
Star Wars
(1977).
³
It was sheer postcolonial reflex to bridge cultural gulfs with cinema, and that
too, with Hollywood.

I did a twenty-minute overview of the
popular version of the Ramayana to explain why there were Mughal miniatures from the
ateliers of Persian schools about a Hindu epic, collated by English
collectors—I had crossed the desert of my mind in assuming that Ramayana
was owned exclusively by India; India was only its birthplace. The migration of the
story, the cross-fertilization of versions, the myriad manifestations through oral
and written literature, the forms of dissemination in performing and visual arts and
crafts had indeed made it a world story. The linearity of the story and those who
had reinvented it in their writings through the ages had made it the first novel in
world literature. When I finished, my colleague said, ‘Instead of the
lecture, why not
tell
the story?’ And that’s just what
I did, with the miniatures functioning as a traditional scroll.

On my arrival in Leeds, writer and
essayist Caryl Phillips had suggested a writing exercise—to think of all
the things that struck me as new and different before I got used to them. It could
have been public transport, escalators, dialects of English. The question
‘What is Ramayana?’ had that effect on me, of seeing the
familiar from an unfamiliar viewpoint. This was the epic that had been seasoned by
Amamma’s recitals, that had inspired the Indian independence movement,
that boosted the
economy during Hindu festivals, that was
embedded in political and social contexts and one that had kept the oral tradition
of performance alive throughout the world.