Sita's Ascent (4 page)

‘You do know we are leaving
tomorrow?’ Rama came forward to calm Lakshmana as he had done for all the
years he had known him.

‘No, Rama. I cannot understand
you. You who have understood the essence of the
Upanishads
, who seek the truth in all things? Rama, it was you who
taught me that Brahman is in everything. Not just the eye but in what
makes one see. Not just the strength in one’s arms
and legs but the impulse that makes them move. Not just the thinking of our thoughts
but the essence of how we make them dark or bright. Not just the heart as a vital
organ but as one that contains a luminous flower; to know that it holds the eternal
self, which is the size of a thumb. You know the subtle currents of the
seventy-three nerves that rest at sleep to wake in the finite world. You know the
difference between dreaming and waking, and the wakeful eternal. All this, in the
darkest times, you have breathed in words more eloquent than song. All this is
contained in you. With my eyes and heart I have seen and lived and believed this of
you. Even Hanuman held that the love Sita and you have for each other is beyond all
things finite, the embodiment of all ideals. That love kept us wakeful during our
exile to what is good and what leads to evil. Rama, listen to me. Above all, people
know that you see Brahman, shining like a million sunsets when you meditate. You are
the embodiment of Brahman, like a profound artist touched by the genius of play and
awakening, who can see the birth of new life in dead wood. Why are you falling prey
to rumour? You are above this!’

‘This is not rumour. It is
about challenging power with principle. If I don’t put myself through this
test, how will everyone know that we are all subject to the principle.
Can’t you see, we are all bound by the rules?

‘Even the infinite is
contained in the finite. If we are to bring about change then we have to take the
first step. People will learn to see the truth. Ideals at all cost must be held
high. Did we not endure so much because we believed in unravelling the ultimate
potential of what makes the human divine? Whoever we are, sacrifice is
inevitable.’

‘But you cannot wash away what
everyone is thinking and does not dare to say. It’s impossible. Will your
action not prove that Sita is guilty? And Sita? Does she know she is at the centre
of this?’

‘She is central to everything.
She will understand,’ said Rama conclusively.

When Rama returned to his apartments,
Sita was asleep. He lay down beside her. She stirred and in her sleep murmured his
name. He held her close, placing his hand on her belly. The foetus was kicking. Rama
cupped his hand, holding on to the movement of life before birth; consciousness of
what was unconscious. Sita was his. How could he ever doubt that? Ravana created his
delusions, but Sita could never be swayed. Of that Rama was certain. Whatever the
price, all he wanted was for his people to see her the way she really was.

Valmiki had taken to sweeping of late.
Sweeping around his hut, and then in a circle defining the hermitage. He swept the
clearing in front of the huts that was for visiting ascetics. In the centre of the
clearing was a step-high square, and another angled square on top of it making a
base in the shape of an eight-point star for lighting the fire. Branches, logs,
twigs, dried leaves were all stacked beyond the circle, to the right. A wooden
cauldron and terracotta pots and pitchers were beside the stack. Two goats and a cow
and her calf sat at the far end facing the back of the dwellings.

Valmiki swept leaves, seeds, crushed
fruit, bird droppings, peacock feathers, snail shells, snake skins, weeds, worms,
anything that his broom—made from a
brush of thorny
leaves and twigs tied to a branch—could find in its path.

He swept through tangled thoughts,
ideas, dilemmas, predicaments, half-heard stories in his head. He brushed patterns
on the earth that swirled in concentric circles, looking like giant fingerprints. He
whispered in musical sounds and fragments of poems, muttered eulogies, coined
aphorisms, composed mantras, tapped percussive variations on the broomstick and
swept his mind free of alien thoughts. What kept seeping through the cracks of his
mind, through the creative fissures, were the ideas for characters who would be
written into his stories.

As Valmiki swept, he populated his
imagination with people. Characters who were real, historical, legendary and
imagined. He tugged through the tangled, hair-splitting dilemma of what was more
important in telling a story—character or plot? He was now dealing with
real emotions, lives, people whose stories, even if it was not their intention,
inspired other lives, generations, histories—over centuries, across
continents. He placed them in struggles that were domestic, personal and spiritual,
as well as political, because he felt it was his characters’ due. But it
wasn’t just right action that his characters had to think about. It was
also the tangled web of emotions they had to comb through. Valmiki discovered that
the adventure of life was
not about unravelling destiny; it was
about unravelling the constellation of thoughts, emotions and will.

Then there was the one unaccounted
thing—grace. Whether or not one believed in what was commonly known as
god, there was still grace. A consciousness that was memory and beyond, primeval and
eternal, computed and random, accidental but structured. On the sides of a human
forehead sat its temples. Concealed from the outside, these temples were portals to
that intense experience which connected daily impressions and information from the
sense organs to knowledge. These connections flowed in a current that danced in
light from an eternal source, refracted like the rainbow from a prism and flowed
into other sources. The sensation was not of repetition. It was a swirling,
shimmering pool for the inner eye that buoyed in the centre of the chest. At the
core of the human, this consciousness, or grace, was a luminous flower. To see it,
touch it, be it, was to be immortal. When the nanosecond of total connectivity had
passed, a wave of longing to once again belong to ‘that’ would
surge.

Valmiki often asked himself what this
feeling of great beauty and the longing to belong was about. During his wanderings
between cities and forests, he would see temples.
Who are they
for?
The answer was a name, a god.
Had anyone seen
god?
No; god in the form of a woman
or man or child
or animal appeared in a dream and told people what to seek or do.

In cities and towns the stones were in
the shape of a human, worshipped as god. And, as he wandered on, there were hunters,
travellers, villagers, tribals who would, on seeing stone lingams sprouting from the
earth, wash them, adorn them with flowers, leaves, vermilion and offer them love.
Among forest people, there were no great incantations, but a cry that ululated from
the heart. Words were passed on, each becoming a sign to unlock the door to the
portal going deeper within where everything was connected. Darkness could be seen
being forced away, and a chink of light would emerge from it like a sabre. It was a
sure sign, like a number, a symbol of pure mathematics that connected the gross with
the subtle within a second. Valmiki had gone through the experience of inhabiting
that nanosecond of allness. Coming out of it meant encountering the world with its
variety, its gods, with or without gender, multiplicity, words, languages, caste,
divisions, subdivisions, categories, qualities, difference. Many hermits and
ascetics, who had experienced this allness, chose not to return. They wanted more
and more of that immersion.

Valmiki remembered, all too clearly, his
past as a highwayman before he became a poet. The test that Narada had put him
through about the fragility of human
relationships was severe
but revealing. It was the first thing he could recall to offer Sita some comfort
from that first shock of abandonment she felt when Lakshmana rode away with
Rama’s order for her exile. Valmiki was merely an ascetic; he knew the
labyrinth of human love and bitterness, the tactile bonds that gently enmesh the
individual and the nagging hangover of a belief that there was freedom on the
horizon. He had turned inward in the quest for that freedom.

How much of this Valmiki had touched and
tasted, struggled and danced with, cried and shouted about with song. Now he was at
a loss. He was the one who had chosen to traverse both worlds—of human
longing and the longing for cosmic allness. He wanted to write that story of
infinite possibilities within a lifetime.

His characters had taken over. They had
been born. They were flesh and blood. They travelled with the speed of light.
Valmiki gave them situations, but they took on actions driven by their impulses. Did
he want to portray them or did he want to get under their skin and tell the story
from their point of view? He was in a dilemma.

Suddenly, he saw a woman approaching.
Although her hair was shorn and she was wrapped in white, like a disciple out on a
mission to seek a guru, her body, as it moved, still had impressions of a woman who
was beautiful and knew a courtly life. She carried a staff and an earthen
pot for collecting alms. Her skin still shone; there was
nothing of the withered ascetic about her, but she had the look of desperation that
gave her the intensity of a ritual performer. She had not yet caught sight of
Valmiki. And he wasn’t aware he was staring at her. She was the prey not
of a man but an artist. He was taking in everything about her and trying to piece
together a life story, reflecting on the gulf between her appearance and its
reality.

What the woman saw was a large shadow,
loose hair, with an extension from its body which, in her fright, she could not
recognize as a broomstick. She could not see Valmiki’s face clearly but
his gaze pierced like a laser through her veil of inattentiveness and she became
suddenly aware of his presence. She screamed and fell face down. Sita rushed out of
her dwelling, with another female hermit and when they turned the
intruder’s body, limp but breathing, Sita too screamed.

Sita wept, kissed the eyebrows of the
woman on the ground, laughed, wept again, wiped her nose and the saliva from her
lips as she cried open-mouthed. ‘Urmi, Urmi, Urmi …’
she repeated like a child with a rag doll, rocking the intruder’s body and
then breaking into an incantatory chant, which flowed into a lament and then burst
into a celebratory song. Valmiki was stunned, as was the attendant. For a moment he
wondered whether after all this time, Sita could endure no more and was giving way
to
hallucinations. Sita looked up. ‘This is my Urmi,
my sister, friend, Lakshmana’s wife, my sister-in-law!’ As she
uttered the words, so many reels of memories flickered before her eyes, as if she
were seeing their lives flash past.

‘Urmi, wake up ma, please
… don’t leave me! You are my home, my hope … please
open your eyes. You found us, how can you not see us now …
please,’ Sita pleaded. The attendant brought some water and Sita sprinkled
it on the woman. It was Urmilla. But what had happened to her hair, her jewellery,
her way of dressing like a younger queen? Valmiki brought a paste of
pungent-smelling leaves and, rubbing it in his palms, cupped it over
Urmilla’s nose. Muscles twitched around her eyebrows, her eyes watered
and, sneezing, she catapulted into consciousness. The first face she saw was
Valmiki’s and before she could convulse in horror again, she heard Sita:
‘Oh! Urmi, my darling Urmi! My Urmi!’ Valmiki and the attendant
withdrew with a feeling of immense satisfaction that a life had been saved and that
two sisters were reunited.

It was good to see Sita so happy. After
she got over the shock of being banished—that was the formal court order,
but she really had been abandoned—each hour Valmiki watched her chipping
away at her grief for the sake of the life not yet born. Sometimes she would give in
to the burden of grief. There was no death, so there was no body, no tangible object
that had been lost. In her
heart and head swirled an ocean of
remembrances strung on love, struggle, endeavour and faith, but now it was doubt
that dismembered so many images from the past. Like the time when Rama would gaze at
the full moon he would always hold her and say: ‘This is our wishing
point. How many lives and loves the moon has seen; we will see a thousand and one
full moons together—our love as radiant and timeless.’ That
would have accounted for sixty years of married life. But they had barely seen
fifteen years together; and while the moon continued its radiance in its orbit, a
ring of coldness and silence encircled her heart.

She wanted to pour in thoughts about
Rama into her empty heart. She wanted to create a fingerprint that stretched like a
mural of parenthood across the blank canvas of the newborn’s
consciousness. When she tried and made some headway, she would immediately start to
question herself if it were a lie. She wanted this child to be alerted to truth, the
rawness of nature; not the forest but the vicious coldness of the human mind. With
the sudden appearance of Urmilla, that cold orbit of silence within Sita broke
open.

Even though it had been a few weeks,
Urmi and Sita felt they had been apart for years. There was so much catching up to
do. Valmiki was relieved as the time for the childbirth was approaching. He had
known of childbirths when he had a home, as a highwayman in the forest. But
it seemed as if women did this naturally. He wavered at what
kind of assistance he could provide, but now that Urmilla was here all those
apprehensions lifted and he decided to make lodgings for both women.

Sita waited till Urmilla had recovered
from her journey. She kept stroking her shaven head and wondered why Urmilla had cut
off her long, long hair.

‘I waited for Lakshmana to
return,’ began Urmilla, ‘and on the day he was to return, Rama
sent me a message saying he was delayed. Seemed strange to send me a message, but
some delegation had come, so I thought Rama was caught up in that and without you
there, he would be looking into the arrangements in greater detail.

‘The next day passed and the
same thing happened. I was worried because I wanted to know if something had
happened to you and Lakshmana on the journey. When I tried to see Rama, it was
impossible. He surrounded himself with his guards, and soon I noticed there were
more guards around our house. I was constantly questioned about where I was going
and when I would return. It was for my safety, they said, without any further
explanations. By the fourth day there were armed guards. If I mentioned
Lakshmana’s name, it was as if he were a legend. Revered but never spoken
of. I tried to question the servants, and they were soon put on different shifts or
dismissed. There was no way out for me. I had to leave
because I
thought I would go mad. What had happened to Lakshmana? To you and, indeed, to Rama?
I thought if I left from the front of the house, I would be followed. I
didn’t know where to go any more. At first I thought I would go and seek
Rama out. But it seemed as if the guards had been ordered to protect him from
me!

‘There was just one of my
trusted servants left. I feigned sickness and a sprained back. So the servant
brought the old gnarled masseuse. We began evening massage treatments and broths
steamed and stank up the house through every room. To get to that condition, since I
was being inspected each day, I had to do several things: starve, get diarrhoea, be
convincingly weak, conserve enough energy so I could be alert to any chance of
escape. I had prepared myself that any evening could be the one. But the shift of
the guards was never regular or timed. One night, three weeks ago, I cut my hair and
exchanged clothes with the old woman; I carried her in a bundle on my back past the
guards and out of the house. That whole night I walked dressed as a bhikshu, begging
alms and travelling, meandering, mingling among pilgrims, sleeping anywhere and not
daring to ask directions to Valmiki’s hermitage. I edged my way
out.’