SITA’S SISTER (35 page)

‘Why did you not let us know that you had planned and acted out this entire drama of Ram’s exile?’ she asked gently.

The queen kept quiet, the silence broken by her soft sobs. ‘You knew his exile was preordained and yet you willed it to happen and orchestrated it to look like you had banished him for your greed and for preserving your son’s rights. But it was just the opposite. You were actually protecting Ram. And in this masquerade, all you earned was not the goodwill but the wrath and hatred of everyone—even your husband and son! Why? Why did you and your father keep silent?’

‘Because that was how it was to be. It is such a long story,’ sighed the queen. ‘From the day I married the king, I knew what was in store for me. Our family priest, Sage Ratna, had told me that my husband would die of grief for his son. After his death, the throne was to remain unoccupied for fourteen years or else the misfortune would be carried on to the heir resulting in his subsequent death too. I did not believe it earlier but the king once mentioned his curse to me and therefore, to save the family and the Raghu dynasty, I had to play out this entire charade, ensuring no one sat on the throne for this period. Guru Vasishtha knew about this as well and that’s why he was the one who suggested to place Ram’s wooden sandals on the throne.’

Urmila was shocked.

‘He knew as well? And yet he allowed it all to happen and kept us in the dark?’

She recalled that it was the guru who had suggested Bharat be regent of the king and place Ram’s sandals on the throne. She also recalled how weakly Kaikeyi had persuaded Ram to return to Ayodhya—she had not wanted him there whatsoever.

‘He had to, don’t you see? He believed it too. It all had to happen in such a way that things fell into place exactly as fate had ordained…and it did.’

‘And you witnessed the entire saga—even watching your husband die, knowing all along?’

‘Yes,’ sighed Kaikeyi, releasing a long, ragged breath. ‘I had to. And I wept silent tears. I was forced to see the man I loved most, die—slowly and suffering—in front of me! But that was as unavoidable as the curse he had to live with.’

‘But he died hating you till his last breath!’ exclaimed Urmila in horror. ‘Why did you not let him know this truth in his last hours so that he could have died in peace?’

‘Would he have believed me?’ she asked wearily. ‘I had completely broken his trust in me. And Urmila, it had taken a lot of effort and guile to convince that I was serious about those two boons for myself—I ranted, raved, raged! He could not believe it, his utmost faith in me telling him that I could not be so ruthless, so loathsome…but I managed to do so eventually with all the cruellest, taunting words I could utter and after that, there was no looking back. I had to sacrifice him, our love, our everything for the future. All I wanted was to save Ram’s life and so with all my strength, my moral courage, my self-despication, I extracted the two boons from my trusting, unsuspecting husband and saw to it that Ram was banished—away from the throne and away from further misfortune or possible death.’

Urmila was dazed. ‘But did you not put Bharat in danger when you demanded he be the crown prince?’

‘No, dear, I knew Bharat would never accept Ram’s throne; he would never usurp his brother’s inheritance.’

Urmila listened with mounting respect and admiration for the woman sitting in front of her, who had earned herself a stigma for a lifetime to save her family. But she also said it with such burning conviction that Urmila was assailed with a sudden dart of fear.

‘How can you be so sure? It all might have gone wrong, or can still go wrong…’ she said fearfully.

Kaikeyi shook her head slowly. ‘That’s what I thought too but when my father came up with the same request but in another manner, I knew all of us were hurtling towards the same end…it was going to happen and I was to be the perpetrator.’

‘What did your father actually say?’ asked Urmila curiously though from the letter she had got a faint idea what the plan between the father and the daughter had been.

‘As you know, my father had this rare gift of being able to decipher the talk between birds, insects and animals but he could not reveal it to anyone for it would mean death for him,’ explained Kaikeyi. ‘My mother learnt it the hard way and got thrown out from the palace, the kingdom and our lives,’ she recalled bitterly. ‘I grew up with this legendary reality and I knew it to be true, for my father spent days in the woods and jungles, eavesdropping on the conversation of the creatures there. And from them he heard that the forests were in imminent danger due to the cruelty and atrocities of the powerful Ravan on the sages performing their yagna in the forests.’

‘Ravan!’ Urmila exclaimed.

‘Do you know him?’ the queen asked testily, looking equally surprised.

‘Yes, somewhat, he was present for Sita’s swayamvar and created a terrible scene when he could not lift the Shiv bow and marry Sita,’ she shuddered as she recalled his softly leering voice, the way he had looked at her lasciviously.

‘So, it’s all true…and soon going to come true…’ the queen murmured softly.

‘What?’ asked Urmila in fear and rising exasperation.

‘My father got to know from their talk that there was only one person who could stop Ravan and eventually kill him—and that person was Ram.’

Urmila’s breath caught in her throat. It all sounded weird, unreal, fantastic. Ram was destined to kill Ravan during his exile?

‘Your father explained all this in that letter. But did he not tell you this before?’ she asked, puzzled.

‘No, he could never let me know the exact details as the moment he did it, he would die. All he told me was to set up some sort of a plan to get Ram out of the palace and banish him to the forest to accomplish his mission. That is all he told me and I followed his instructions, trusting him explicitly…not that it came easy!’ reminisced the older woman. ‘I initially thought he was protecting Bharat’s interests to make him king and I fought with him on that. But he begged me that it was otherwise and implored me to save Ram and the family and the world out there in the forests. He could never give me the details, fearing his own death. He finally did—in that letter—after getting to know how the family, all of Ayodhya and even Bharat had turned against me. That is why he wrote that last letter explaining and making me understand the truth, for which he eventually died, as he knew he would.’

Her mother-in-law suddenly seemed to have aged, shrivelled in front of her, in this short while. Her shoulders sagged, as if tired of carrying the burden of the secret. ‘Mother, you lost your father, your husband and even the love and respect of your son and the world at large. But if you had explained all this to the king, would he not have agreed as well? Why this tragic charade?’

‘The king would never have let Ram go to the forest. Never,’ she reiterated vehemently. ‘He could not live without him even for a single day; how would he have the courage to send him to Dandaka to kill the demons and asuras residing there? Last time, he obliged because he feared he would anger Guru Vishwamitra when he took Ram and Lakshman to kill Taraka. I had to do it; it was the only way out. It was when the predictions of Sage Ratna and my father started coinciding, that I realised that Ram’s exile was preordained and that I had to be the catalyst to precipitate the event,’ said Kaikeyi, touching her twisted little finger, as torn and broken as her.

‘You are still bearing the brunt of the misfortune and have willingly embraced infamy. And yet you don’t want to reveal the truth to the family?’

‘They wouldn’t believe me either!’ smiled the queen sadly. ‘You precociously opened the letter and read it, that’s why you are giving me the benefit of the doubt but who all do I explain to? What do I say? It is just too bizzare and unbelievable. And if I was the one to help it happen, so be it. And more importantly, the idea was to keep all this a secret. No one was to know about this.’

‘And Manthara? Did she know?’

‘Of course not!’ scoffed the queen. ‘But she was playing her own game, parallel to mine but both overlapped at the occasion of Ram’s coronation. I had to stop it and Manthara, by bringing up the two boons, helped me out inadvertently. I played along, while she thought she was playing on my insecurities…which she did, actually!’ she shrugged. ‘Manthara always thought she knew me too well but she never guessed either, fortunately. She, unwittingly, showed me the way.’

‘And gloated that she had got what she wanted. She wanted you to be the queen mother to strenghten her own position in the palace,’ added Urmila.

‘But I could not deny her, she was like my mother,’ sighed Kaikeyi. ‘She nursed me, tended me, did everything for me. I never doubted her love for me—she meant well, but solely for me. She was too possessive and protective and I suspect my father sent her with me, after marriage, knowing full well her wily character and her blind love for me. He knew she would do the needful.’

‘That is?’

‘Work on my weaknesses so that I would be ready for the day when I had to throw the son I loved most out of the kingdom. I now realize, as Manthara did too, that I had two flaws that I could never overcome—my stubborn ego and my intense insecurity of being abandoned, courtesy my mother who left me when I was six,’ recounted Kaikeyi, her face twisting into a bitter smile. ‘I was never allowed to forget that by my father. But while it made me cling to him more, it also planted a deep distrust for him in particular and men in general and I grew up with the fear that men left their wives on the weakest pretext…and all these years I lived in the fear that I would lose the love of my husband—either to Kausalya or Sumitra. Or both.’

Urmila felt a small stab of guilt: she had experienced that feeling before. That tearing, irrevocable terror of losing the man you love.

‘I realize now how she wonderfully strung me along right from the very first day here in the palace,’ narrated the older woman. ‘Kausalya was shown to me as my rival—the elder queen whom the king so obviously had deep respect for. She was his chief queen, not me despite all my beauty, youth, love and devotion. And soon, as one year lapsed into another, I could not give him the son he so badly wanted and I realized the bitter truth—that he had married me just to have a son, nothing else,’ she recalled, her voice hollow. ‘And here, Kausalya had an advantage—she had mothered Shanta—she could beget a child, unlike me. When he got Sumitra, his third queen, home, he confirmed my worst fears. I had never felt so humiliated and demeaned. With that realization, I also understood what Kausalya must have suffered when I was brought in as a bride. But my ego had been bruised; and now with the three of us, I had to be his chief queen, to survive with dignity in this palace or I would be relegated to nothingness. It was when I saved his life at the battlefield, that was to be turning point in my life. I was his forever after that—and I have never looked back since…till I broke his heart when I asked him for the two boons in this very room. It was the day I lost everything,’ she said sadly. ‘But while I asked for the impossible, I got to know the true nature of those whom I loved dearly. My husband’s love turned to ashes and hate. So did Bharat’s. But my Ram was the only one who never uttered a single bitter word against me when I was his offender, forgiving me for my crime with his gentle smile. Yes, he is God, for no man can be so good!’ she said proudly. ‘And, finally, Manthara. I never imagined that someone whom I loved and trusted from childhood, would give me advice that would bring about my downfall. She was espousing for herself, and not for my cause. And while her poisonous words washed over my head, I found myself actually believing her! And a thought struck me—could Manthara have poisoned my mind if there was no fault in me? No greed, no folly, no jealousy, no vanity? The villainy must have always been latent in my heart.

‘No, Mother, you were above all this! You might have felt it, identified with it but yet swept it away to listen to your conscience,’ refuted Urmila. ‘For a higher good.’

Urmila was drowning in a flood of emotions—sorrow, wonder, awe, respect for the elegant, beautiful woman sitting next to her, her face buried in her hands. She saw her in all her shades, muted over the canvas of time—as the tempestuous princess in love, the vivacious bride, the fearful, insecure wife, the ambitious, powerful queen, the fair, loving mother, the maligned widow and finally, the courageous, selfless lady who had braved the contempt of her family and the world. Seeing her thus, Urmila decided that she would reveal this terrible truth of this wonderful woman, at least to the family. They owed this woman that; they should forever be indebted to her.

‘I cannot forgive myself for all that has happened,’ said the queen, leaning tiredly against the chair. ‘And it is when I see you that my heart bleeds the most. I snatched everything from you—your hope, happiness, youth…forgive me, dear, if you can.’

Urmila was horrified. ‘I should be saying that…how shall I pardon myself for all those unkind, disrespectful words I said to you?’ she cried, with a shake of her head. ‘How will the family ever take back all that they said?’

‘That is why, it is best they don’t know; let it be. Let me live my curse too,’ she said. ‘As a child I had blackened the face of a sage while he was in meditation, and naturally angry, he had cursed me that I would suffer similarly, and here I am, living with my reputation—blackened and tarnished forever. You can’t change that, Urmila. My destiny is at hand.’

‘Don’t, Ma, are we to be so helpless? Bound, pulled and pushed by the tug of the strings held in Fate’s fingers?’ she asked desperately. ‘That we have preordained destinies and no choices? Don’t we make these choices ourselves, Mother?’

‘I was a free-willed skeptic like you, Urmila. I had scoffed at Guru Ratna, my father, and even the king. I used to ask him why he was so scared of the curse of the blind father by which he would die of grief for his son when he had no son?!’ said Kaikeyi, her eyes dull and distant. ‘I tried to assure him that he was lucky he had no son and the curse would never come true…but it did. Everything in my life has happened as predicted…things will happen as they are meant to happen. It is best we don’t know about it beforehand. Man is always eager to see his future, but that irrational curiosity never does him any good. Whatever has to happen, will happen’ And saying that she carefully placed the letter close to the flickering flame of the oil lamp and watched it slowly catch fire, curling painfully as the flames licked it hungrily, finally crumpling into fine ash to scatter on the marble floor at her feet. Much like her own life.