Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana
Page 22
I didn’t think too much was out of the ordinary as I held Muthassi’s’ head carefully and walked out of the house towards the pond, a place I was forbidden to venture out by myself, especially at night.
I placed Muthashi’s head on the flat stones where Amma did our washing, facing the black and slimy water, which would turn green again at dawn. In the darkness, the pond looked like cobra skin.
“Water is significant to us,” she began, her eyes drifting towards the pond, “one of our ancestors, The Male, crossed into Lanka over water.”
“This creature, a monkey, we are almost certain,” Muthassi said, “was a soldier in the Monkey King Sugriva’s army, first working under the supervision of Nala and Neel, famed builders without whom the construction of The Floating Bridge would have been impossible. He, our ancestor, along with others, slaved night and day on this massive under taking until his muscles hurt, until his body refused to cooperate.”
At night, he tended to blisters swollen with pus. It was tough work.
A significant number of monkeys and bears from the kingdom of Kishkinda had died building the bridge. Many collapsed out of exhaustion, some forgetting to eat or drink, perishing on the job. They were driven hard, not allowed to venture home, forced to sleep near the construction site.
Sugriva was a hard task master. Yet in his eagerness to repay the debt he owed Rama, Sugriva often forgot his soldiers were mortal. Some of them didn’t appreciate the treatment and began to bitch and gossip. The situation took a serious turn when rumors started circulating about Sugriva’s chicanery in getting rid of Vali, his elder brother. Without Ram, Sugriva would still be on the run from Vali, the grapevine opined—an honorable warrior wouldn’t have resorted to treachery in battle; only an honorable warrior deserved a seat on the throne, deserved to bed Queen Tara. The following day, the parties who started the rumor were executed.
I picture this creature often, The Male, marching with other beasts, forced to deal with the drudgeries of war, crossing into an alien land to do battle for the prince of Ayodhya, a prince he possibly did not speak to, and I begin to wonder whether the air started to smell of war as soon as he walked over the bridge with other comrades in arms, whether giant vultures circled in the foreground, waiting to feast, and whether my ancestor felt fear.
But the story of my family’s lineage does not begin with Rama looking out to sea, imagining the tip of the land that held his young bride captive, as monkeys and bears busied themselves hauling stones to get the bridge built quickly. It doesn’t even begin when The Male, a biped like I, marched onwards to Lanka. Our history begins with the humiliation of Surpanakha.
The women in our family, Muthassi shared, could be traced back to a long line of demons. These were women granted numerous boons by the lords of the netherworld and the gods in heaven, rakshashis with power, who were feared, who made mortals realize they were mortal, women who were shape shifters, unafraid of the sound of forests and of being alone with spirits who refused to be born again after their bodies were fire-lit on pyres.
In my great grandmother’s words, “The Female of our race was one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, many-headed, short, fat, squat, tall, alive, hideous, glorious—so alive! We were so swollen with life, with glut, that we frightened those who barely lived.”
“The word demon is tainted,” Muthassi lamented, “riddled with hyperbole, caked in fear. Demon only implies evil, beings from the nether world. Rakshashis may only be beasts, may only be beasts. It is a simplification, alluding that those who navigate the netherworld can only possess organs as dark as soot. The truth, my child, is that our ancestors were women who did what they wanted, for whom dharma meant accepting their urges, following it to the very end, not belittling it by suppressing it. Our women tested the gods, made them wish they were half-god, half-demon, down to our level, one foot knee-deep in vice and pleasure, the other foot still tentatively holding on to Mount Meru.”
Muthassi’s head pivoted to face me, moving like a little clay bowl on the flat stones where Amma smashed wet clothes. Her hair, a mop of dirty white curls the color of gnawed bone, danced in the breeze. She stared at me for a long time, as Amma’s great grandmother may have done when she told this very tale.
“Bhagyanathan,” she finally said, “our women folk made mistakes. But sometimes we wanted to make them. We learned by being!”
She calmed down after that outburst, her head rocking a little from side to side from all the fuss.
It was then she spoke her name. Muthassi said: “The womb of Sarama, the Old One, is where we believe our line begins.” It was the first time I had heard the name. Muthassi had never mentioned her before.
Among the rakshashis entrusted to guard Sita at the palace groves, Sarama was as old as the trees themselves, Muthassi said. She was from a time when our women folk were constantly abused by the mortals, hunted like vermin, pinned to trees and sacrificed at will and without warning. It was why they turned to the gods, performing penance, sacrificing. The gods, pleased, granted them many boons. But over time, even the gods grew envious of their power, of their grasp on the underworld, and started scheming and turning against them, wary of the consequences if the rakshashas decided to invade Mount Meru.
“This war between the netherworld and the heavens lasted eons,” Muthassi said. “It has not ended.”
Sarama, our ancestor, was old enough to remember Tataka, Sur-panakha’s grandmother. She remembered Tataka’s beauty. And she remembered the monster she mutated into, taller than a mountain, tusks sprouting out her nose like daggers, wearing the skulls of the ones she killed, a body of pure hate.
“Agastya turned her into the beast she became,” Muthassi said, “he killed her husband; in turn, she tried to kill Agastya. Only the forests could home that rage. It was her turf.”
In Surpanakha, Tataka’s beloved granddaughter, whom Sarama had seen since she was a baby, she could clearly see glimpses of her grand mother. A beautiful child, like Tataka, Surpanakha’s spirit belonged in the forest, where she was most free, becoming one with the land, living, sleeping, hunting, mating. It was her home as much as it had been her grandmother’s.
Many years later, after the war, the Old One still shuddered when she recalled the state of Surpanakha’s mutilation. What Lakshmana’s blade had done! Oh, what it had done!
“There are texts that write lies about her form,” Muthassi seethed. “It is as though the scribes are afraid to be truthful. They write her skin is polluted, calling it foul, bloating her physique, making her out to be a monster so vile she putrefied anything she touched. They lie!”
“She was beautiful,” Muthassi said, “a beauty that could drive men and women mad.”
“She knew fully well every inch of her body; her form evoked de sire, possibly frightening the young God-king and his brother equally. Frightening scribes to have their quills lie so boldly.”
“Surpanakha was not Sita,” Muthassi admitted, “but Sita could never have been Surpanakha.”
“They write that she was brutal,” Muthassi said, giving me a wry smile. “Her brutality lay only in the manner she acknowledged and chased her desire.”
“She refused to suppress her wants,” Muthassi concluded.
She paid for such audacity, marching through Ravana’s palace doors with sliced breasts, no ears and a disfigured nose. Ravana’s guards, men used to the bedlam of war, stood by, stunned into silence, letting her pass. She would not crouch, she did not whimper, she was defiant, walking bare-bosomed into Ravana’s court; she met everyone’s eye. When she spoke, the courtiers and the ministers turned their faces away, un able to look. She was visibly in pain. But they heard her; they heard the screams, of rage, of hurt, of vengeance. And when the king himself jumped from his throne to comfort his mutilated sister, the siblings, reunited for the first time since the troubling circumstances of her husband Dushtabuddhi’s death, embraced in anguish. And wept.
Our ancestor Sarama awoke from her slumber to the sound of a ten-headed scream that filled the air with dread, a scream Muthassi mimicked, her mouth opening as wide as the hole that swallowed Sita, so wide that her head became all mouth. It was a terrible scream.
In the village, those who heard that guttural cry that night woke and began to pray; animals whimpered; woodland spirits stopped moving. The gloom was exactly as it had been when the leaves of Lanka turned gray, birds falling from the sky refusing to fly, and the trees beginning to bleed.
Ravana had made up his mind, Muthassi said; he would avenge Sur-panakha’s humiliation. His prize would be Sita. There would be war. There would be war. There would be war.
Sarama found Sita a silly creature to fight a war over. She was beautiful certainly, but Sarama had seen different kinds of beauty in her time, beauty that possessed you, turned you inside-out, forced you to be impatient. Sita’s beauty almost made her untouchable, too pure, too good, too right. Sarama spurned such beauty, it made her uneasy. Maybe that is why Ravana desired Sita, she felt. He wanted to pollute her, to consume her, to make her more real.
Still, as the Old One, our ancestor, helped keep watch over the young princess of Ayodhya, the would-be girl-queen began to intrigue her.
She paid close attention as Sita fought Ravana practically every day, refusing to be intimidated by his advances. Even when the rakshashis tried to scare her into relenting, shaking the earth, turning the sky foul and ominous, threatening to eat her alive, theatrics that made most mortals quiver and piss, she held firm. Sarama smelled fear in the young Sita, but she also admired her audacity, her will. Sarama could tell Sita would never submit to Ravana’s lust. If he tried to touch her, Sarama knew, Sita, the daughter of Janaka, would rage against her tormentor, scratch him, maim him, pull out tufts of hair from any of his ten heads, until her body no longer pulsed. Samara respected that rage, a rage she didn’t believe Sita, a would-be girl queen, possessed at first, the sort of rage that only became evident when Rama refused to take her back when the war had ended. Because she respected such rage, when Ravana threw Rama’s decapitated head near Sita’s feet, Sarama told the would-be girl that it was an illusion, that Rama was still safe, and that his forces were crossing into Lanka.
Muthassi pivoted her head towards the pond again, staring at the water, taking some time before moving on to the next phase in the tale. It was important to her that everything be clear.
The evening before the great battle between the two armies, one bes tial, the other demonic, Samara found Surpanakha sitting by the gardens where Ravana held Sita captive. Surpanakha avoided the forlorn-looking Sita, preferring to sit by herself. They would meet later, after the war, after Rama’s death. For now, they both stared silently into the open, deep in thought.
The other rakshashis had been afraid to approach Surpanakha. They left her alone, to stew in her rage. But Sarama was braver. She was also concerned, inching her way to the mutilated lady, where she watched a grieving Surpanakha gently touching what was left of her nose, her ears, her butchered breast.
Surpanakha felt the rawness of the wounds, imagining the sight she had become. She wouldn’t look into a mirror just yet. She couldn’t. She had almost caught a glimpse of her new state when she drank water from a stream. She would wait until the war was over, the mortals who did this to her slain. Then she would take the corpse of Rama, fling it at his young widow and dance pitilessly and mercilessly over the dead man, like Kali. She would delight in watching Sita as she did this. Then, in quiet, she would sneak Rama’s remains away, cremating his body, extinguishing it in fire, as Yama, The Lord of Death, would wait patiently on his buffalo, his giant club resting on the ungulate’s belly.
Sita’s plight would be different. Surpanakha would scheme to keep the princess alive for thousands of years, refusing to let her die, breaking her heart as many times as it could be broken.
Lakhsmana’s bones and entrails, she would wear, his flesh fed as carrion.
When Sarama, the Old One, our ancestor, finally reached Surpanakha, she was holding her bloodied breasts, trembling. There were tears. Sarama also realized flies had laid eggs in her open wounds, and the larvae would soon hatch. Samara reached out to touch her. Gently. Surpanakha seized the gnarled hand, ready to tear it off the person who dared disturb her. When she saw who it was, she calmed down a lit tle, but still spitting in Sarama’s face, screamed “Not pity, old hag, not pity!”
Sarama, understanding, knelt low, pressed her palms to Surpanakha’s feet and whispered, “It isn’t pity, child, your wounds must be tended to. Let me. Let the old one through. I knew Tataka, I knew Tataka.”
At the mention of her grandmother’s name, Surpanakha relented, al lowing herself to be touched and held. And there they sat, the two of them, Sarama tenderly washing Surpanakha’s wounds and picked out larvae, as Surpanakha, tired and overwhelmed, fell asleep. The following morning, when the two armies rode out to battle, the beginning of war, Sarama searched for Surpanakha. She had slipped away. The two would never meet again.
When Ravana was finally slain, the war over, our ancestor Sarama stepped out of the palace grounds and walked towards the battlefield, followed by concerned wives and children, family of the missing soldiers in Ravana’s army.
The battlefield reeked of the dead, stinking of dried blood, piss, shit, men, demons, monkeys, bears, pachyderms, horses, and giant birds. The wounded lay everywhere, waiting to die or be rescued—rakshashas called out for help, dying monkeys and bears pleaded for water, while other beasts of war, elephants with no trunks and crushed legs, the horses with broken backs, the raptors with torn beaks and burnt wings, squirmed, struggling to breathe. And amidst the wreckage were anxious wives and children, picking through the rubble, calling out and hunting for loved ones, frantic to find bodies to burn or salvage, as the four-eyed dogs of Yama prowled the dead zone with ease.
Into this mayhem walked victorious Rama, followed by his brother Lakshmana, the new king of Lanka, Vibhishana, the Monkey King Sug-riva and Hanuman, whose tail lit Lanka for days.
Grateful for their support and relieved with victory, a visibly tired Rama, close to tears, invited the bears and giant vultures who participated in battle to feast on the carrion, their deserved spoils of war.
“As the soldiers celebrated,” said Muthassi, “Rama and the others started making their way to the palace gates. For Sita.”
“But all is never as it seems,” warned Muthassi. “Behind the scenes lived the uglier underbelly of war, unscrupulous soldiers from Rama’s army who scoured the conquered land like parasites, interested in loot and women, the dirtier spoils of war.”
But virtuous warriors also fought on Rama’s side. Many, although injured themselves, offered to help set pyres for the dead, finding sages and priests to perform the last rites quickly. Some opted to sit with the children of dead rakshashas, while their mothers searched for their fathers. Others, they didn’t care, they pillaged, raped.
Even Sarama became prey to such wanton feasting, grabbed by a soldier from Sugriva’s camp, bent with rage, The Male, our ancestor, ferociously and brutally violating her on the very battlefield where moments ago, Ravana’s ten heads scanned for Rama, his heart still healthy with life and blood.
Sarama watched the creature forcing himself on her, dirtied from war, raging because of it. She paid attention to his hands, callused from bridge building, tired of killing, tired from killing. She felt pity. An
d then she remembered the war, Surpanakha’s mutilation, Ravana’s insistence on punishing the brothers by punishing the young princess, what hubris had done to Lanka. Pinned down, spread legs rubbing red earth, armor scraping old skin, Sarama breathed in decay, heard maggots. She had genuinely wanted to believe that after the loss of so much life, victory belonged to a just lord leading a disciplined army. It was difficult to be certain anymore. On the battlefield, nothing was fair, not even God. And right there, as the creature shuddered inside her, spilling his seed into her old womb, she howled with rage, screaming with such force that she tore a hole in the monkey’s chest, exposing his heart. Sarama reached in, and held his beating red organ in the palm of her hand as it continued to pump blood. The monkey, The Male, our ancestor, alarmed, looked at Sarama, his body still trembling.
Looking him in the eye, Sarama slowly crushed his heart.
In the celebratory din, no one noticed. Nearby, giant vultures tore through an elephant as it waited to die.
She picked herself up quickly, forgetting in her haste to wipe the mud, spittle and blood off her body. She would deal with the shock later. For now, she headed for the palace gates. She needed to be there. In the garden. When Rama received Sita. She needed to see the end to all this madness.
Sarama felt a sense of dread when Rama didn’t meet Sita immediately. Even Vibhishana seemed embarrassed when he greeted the lady on Rama’s behalf, requesting her to bathe and bedecked in her finery. Her lord would see her then.
And when they walked her out, and Rama stood in front of his wife like a guest, a stranger, Sarama sighed. Surpanakha’s revenge was complete. Rama had shunned Sita publicly. Neither would fully recover from the hurt. Ayodhya would never let them forget it.
Sarama understood quite well why Rama did what he did. As she waited for Sita to appear in public, even she heard and recoiled from the spite with which soldiers from Rama’s own army, men, monkeys, bears, and other half-beasts he had commanded only a few hours ago, discussed the young princess’ lost virtue. When a group of them were shushed, the gossiping would stop, only for the cackling would resume soon after. In Ayodhya too, it would be the same. Yet when Sita stepped into the lit pyre, not a sound was made. You could only hear burning. The crackle of embers. The burning of virtue and the fury it brings.