The solitary Ashoka tree in the scorched vana jabbered away to Sita who listened patiently with her arms wrapped round its trunk. The ancestral voices of the surrounding forests joined the tree’s dirge.
From afar the deep-throated waves of Sethusamudram emitted a guttural chant, all outbreath. Tuning in to the mood of the reckless ocean, Sita could sense earthquakes in its dark belly that were waiting to manifest and tip the balance. The sea’s angry rumble did not augur well for events waiting to manifest in its indigo depths. The giant waves kept up their frenetic chorus. “Not a blade of grass will remain! Everything will be on fire!” They repeated these words again and again until the cautionary message entered the collective psyche of the five elements.
It was midnight and the night wanderers, the nishachara, paid their obeisance to Sita and quickly passed by without disturbing her. The night was warm, warmer than it should be at that time of the year. Sita noticed that the leaves of the Ashoka tree were not willing to open their stomata. The night air was heavy with noxious exhalations, the odours of charred vegetation and rotting human flesh from the battlefields where Rama and his army were battling the asura hordes of the obstinate Ravana.
Sita caressed the tree with her long, slender fingers in an attempt to calm the cascading waves of agony that the tree was emitting through its strong kinaesthetic field.
She understood the emotion. It was a collective fear channeled from the voices of the wilderness in the surrounding hills and forests.
Sita closed her eyes and meditated. The inevitable would anyway happen. The coronation at Ayodhya and the panorama of happy reunions of wife with husband, mothers with sons and brother with brother were all foregone conclusions which did not interest her. In her mind’s eye she saw a barren, lunar landscape where the five elements had withdrawn their creative potential. The blue-hued Rama would reach for the Brahmastra when he found Ravana’s severed heads growing back in hydra-like fashion. The mighty weapon would blaze forth with the luminosity of a thousand suns creating a landscape of erasure. However the drama would not end at that point since this was not the real climax – the decisive battle between good and evil, polarized as Rama and Ravana, sung and celebrated by future generations of humans in epic grandeur as the Ramayana. Even the lotus-eyed Rama was not aware of what lay beyond the immediate battlefields of Lanka. The true horror would descend after Rama’s sleep was ushered in by the hurricane-blast arrow of the Lord of Lanka. While the avatar slept, centuries would roll forward bringing to the forefront the powerful monster with a hundred heads — the Shatakanta Ravana. And she, as Prakriti, the material cause of the earth, would be forced to respond. Sita wondered if the bards would record this twist in the epic and devote a chapter to Sita’s intervention. Would the epic be called a Sitayana which would record her struggle to maintain a sense of balance? She had been through these ordeals as long as she could remember, defining and redefining the material conditions needed for survival on the planet.
Sita shuddered at the recollection of Indrajit’s deadly astra employed in the battlefield a few days ago. Future generations would invent a new name for it — radioactivity. Its dull green fire shrouded the earth for many miles extending beyond the battlefield before it targeted Lakshmana. Rama had thrown away his weapons in grief. The loyal Hanuman promptly abducted Ravana’s physician, Sushena, to extract the secret of the life-reviving Sanjeevini herb from him. However, when Hanuman arrived in the fragrant Valley of the Flowers, the herb refused to reveal itself to him. Its plant spirit, cool to touch like watery jade, appeared before Sita pleading for the boon of invisibility.
“Your dharma is to heal, O Sanjeevini. Then why do you go against your innate nature?” Sita had wondering asked the herb, marvelling at the way its presence was rejuvenating the Ashoka vana.
“I speak not in selfishness or an attitude of denial, mother. If the humans learn the secret of my innermost essence, they will use it for their own contorted ends. Mother Ritambari, the keeper of all harmony, you most know this!”
The plant spirit continued, “They will patent my jiva, extract my innards and meddle with my genetic coding. The rich and famous among them who can afford to buy me will live for a longer duration and chase the dream of immortality.”
Sita closed her eyes and reflected; the plant spirit was speaking the truth. Sita saw strangulated water bodies and denuded forests giving way to a barren, blasted urban wilderness. A new avatar of rakshasas roamed the earth exercising a powerful grid of control. These transgenic humanoids would colonize the earth like a swarm of locusts and secure their longevity in ugly, climate-controlled, steel citadels.
She smiled wearily at the plant spirit and said, “Your wish will be granted but fate has decreed you to play your role in the battlefield. You cannot escape from that!”
And true to her promise, the eagle-eyed Hanuman went blind while searching for the plant in the midst of the riot of colours in the Valley of Flowers. He closed his eyes and meditated on Rama. The solution to the problem came to him in a flash, as swift as a rama bana, an arrow from Rama’s bow. He uprooted the entire Dronagiri mountain and headed towards Lanka without for a moment noticing the gaping crater-like hole he had made in the febrile Himalayan terrain.
Leaning against the Ashoka tree, Sita witnessed the scene and foresuffered it all. Hanuman had set a new trend.
The tree had become a close friend ever since Ravana imprisoned her in the Ashoka vana, which in the good old days had been a leafy retreat resonant with the morning songs of Krauncha birds. The salubrious garden on the mountain top in which Ravana had imprisoned her had now been reduced to a dull brown patch of earth with a few trees that bravely resisted the onslaught of the raging war. The profuse rama bana flowers with their blood red blossoms had also disappeared. Ravana’s maidservants had wondered long at the exotic blooms which magically sprung up when Sita set foot in the vana. Looking at the configuration of petals, stamens and pistils that resembled a human being carrying a bow, they cried out, “Look don’t these flowers resemble her husband, Sri Rama?” They unanimously conferred the title, “Rama’s bow” on the exuberant blooms.
The tree brought her news from the world of humans and nature. She would listen very carefully to these little narratives coming from the tree because the authors and contributors were often other- than-humans. It was only the other day that the tree gave her the deer’s version of the story of Sita’s abduction.
“I wonder why Mother Sita allowed that poltroon of a Ravana to carry her away! She duped the world into thinking that she is an ordinary woman easily enamored by trivial things like a golden deer. She also gave us a bad name. After the epic is written, deer will always go down in human history as vain creatures who lead virtuous women astray. We will become the favourite targets of hunters who are already ill-disposed towards us.”
Sita would wince as she listened to these narratives. These gentle creatures had an insight into her true identity.
The deer was right. There was no logical explanation for the unfolding web of events. The stage was already set and the sky father gods requested her to step into the allotted role. She had tried reasoning with them but they gave her a catalogue of reasons to choose from old karmic links, thoughtless boons granted by male Gods, the secret mission of avatars, evolution arising from purification of the earth-bound life. It was a long list and Sita grew tired following the logic.
“Leave me out of all this!” she had cried, raising her hands in mock supplication.
They smiled at her and said, “Man’s destiny is bound to the earth’s. The gods who come down to the earth are not exempt from it. You wield the axle of dharma! Ritambari, you are the underlying order — the warp and weft of this universe. When you are the accommodating space of all that happens on earth, how can you ever think of excusing yourself from all its drama? Moreover, the ending will be happy. It will usher in an era of prosperity and development for men and women in the golden era of Rama’s rule, the Rama rajya!”
Sita had chosen not to respond to this tall talk. As she disappeared into the hammered golden light of the fading dusk, a Sky God called out mischievously, “The rain will fall regularly in the land of Rama. Now that should make you happy!”
Sita knew that it was time to assume a human form and enter limiting human time. She preferred being in the deep time of mountains and rivers in which the world was created afresh every moment. Embodied in a human form, Sita felt trapped in a world that was not created spontaneously like the silent lotus of incomparable beauty growing from the navel of the divine dreamer. It was a world of strange miscegenations fashioned by human demiurges who no longer believed in the quest for wholeness. As Shatakantha Ravana would later point out to her with a swagger, “Prakriti, you are dead or altered beyond recognition! You are not hidden so you do not need to be unveiled. Goddess no more, you are only a construction, movement and displacement. You are no longer the primordial mother, the dream of oneness, the teeming womb of the universe, the matrix, origin or the perennial site for replenishment.”
But she couldn’t let things fall apart. The Sky Gods were right, everything was hers. There was absolutely nothing to let go of. It was an amusing thought.
A gentle, prayerful voice interrupted her reverie.
“Mother! You know your power. How can you allow this to happen?”
Sita didn’t know quite how to handle the question. The old woman kneeling near the trunk of the Ashoka tree quivered with the intensity of her question.
“Goddess!” she cried out, “I recognized you from afar. These demonesses who guard this sacred grove are stupid! Don’t they know that they are trying to imprison one who is as free as the wind?”
Sita kept her silence. After all today was Vijayadashami, the day when Rama was destined to self-actualize his epic role. She had to wait in patience till the moment summoned her.
She gathered her long flowing tresses into a tight knot and buried her face in her knees pretending to drop into slumber.
“Goddess!” the persistent voice did not allow her to sleep.
Sita lifted her head and took a close look at the woman. Though crisscrossed by a hundred wrinkles, her face shone like polished ebony. She was surely a tribal from the neighbouring hills. But someone clearly distinguished! It was not the impressive gold loop that she wore as a nose ring that caught Sita’s eye but the clear eyes that glistened like precious gems in her furrowed face.
She continued in her throbbing voice, “You are the force in the wind, the wetness in water, the heat in the fire, the quickening of life in the soil, the vastness of space. How can you allow yourself to be imprisoned by these nitwits who don’t recognize you?”
Sita recognized her. It was Shabari, the Bhil ascetic, who plucked and tasted plum after plum before offering them to her beloved Sri Rama.
Sita hushed her and stole a nervous glance at Ravana’s female dakinis specially hired to guard the Ashoka vana. Luckily they were lost to the world. There had been a generous flow of strong liquors and good food after the bloody battle yesterday.
Sita beckoned the old woman to her stony seat.
“What brings you here to Ravana’s harsh kingdom, O wise mother!? Have you come to have a darshan of your beloved Sri Rama?”
Shabari fell silent for a moment and then asked, “When the child is in distress, whom does it go running to seeking solace?”
Sita gazed into the eyes of the old woman, as limpid as the waters of the Manasarovar lake in the early hours of the Brahmamuhurta. She knew why Shabari had come. In those calm patient eyes, Sita saw the agony of an entire community pushed to the fringes of civilization.
The old woman continued, “We gave our lands to water their cities. Now they have destroyed our homes. We have no where to go. Our forests are gone. They set fire to them to build their cities. We have become orphans! Will all this be set right after the grand moment when my Lord Sri Rama will take you back to Ayodhya in a triumphant procession?”
Sita patted the old woman affectionately and said, “All in good time, wise mother! There will be a new earth for you to rejoice in.”
Shabari trembled like a withered leaf and asked, “Is there going to be a mahapralaya? I can feel it in my bones. The new earth that you speak of can come only after a great deluge which will wash away the corruptions that fester on this earth?”
Sita replied with a smile, “You speak of the cleansing amniotic waters of life, wise mother Shabari! But the titillating part of the Ramayana story is always the test of fire — the agnipariksha.”
Sita’s face lit up with an inner fire as she uttered these words.
Shabari folded her hands and said, “Goddess, the past, present and future of the trichiliocosms cannot be concealed from you. Forgive Sri Rama for what he is going to demand from you. The God of Fire will hang his head with shame for having to witness you entering his holy flames!”
Sita laughed again. Shabari for a moment imagined that she saw a pair of dhamshtra, sharp fangs where pearly teeth should be.
Sita voice grew deep as she said, “Wise mother Shabari, the event you predict is the second Agnipariksha. The one I speak comes prior to that and is more exacting; it is a test in which I will have to delve deep into the poison fires to quench them. The bards in times to come will conveniently ignore this ordeal by fire.”
Shabari’s face wore an expression of deep understanding as she knelt down before Sita and said, “Please allow me to be by your side when this happens.”
“So be it!” said Sita as she set about preparing herself for the events of the day. She sat cross legged, her fingers touching the earth in a bhu sparsha mudra. She offered a silent prayer to the divinity within her burning like a flame. Closing her eyes, she told Shabari, “I have a lot of samskaras to burn before I meet Ravana. I am going into a yoga nidra. Hanuman will come here during the course of the day bringing the news that Rama is wounded in the battlefield. Tap me gently on my right shoulder, wise mother and do not be afraid to find me in altered form.”
Sita leaned against the Ashoka tree and plunged into the depths of her ancient, primordial mind. To Shabari she appeared asleep but Sita’s consciousness hovered around the razor sharp state of deep awareness. The sacred syllable on which she meditated took her through the contracting and expanding loops of the earth’s history in the last four and a half year billion years of evolution. Maid, mother and crone — Sita beheld the triple goddesses’ reflection in the clear waters of her mind. The changing kaleidoscope revealed her youthful body, ethereal and gaseous, that was enveloped in the radiant energy of the celestial bodies, distant stars and cosmic winds; the pattern changed to reveal a nebulous beauty gradually solidifying into the solid, green nurturing lap of the dazzling, diverse earth sangha; the pattern soon reorganized itself, changing colour and form to become a dry cupreous earth battered by deluging oceans and storm surges.
As she gazed deeper, Sita found these reflections blurring and throwing up a free vortex of whirring images – her original face. She watched with terrified fascination the panoramic play of evolution, whose essence was the bubbling karmic cocktail of life which oozed, mutated and spilled over in perpetual motion. The sacred pranava enveloped everything in this passion play. The play which was authored in both comic and tragic modes had actors from the council of all beings ranging from stardust to cyborgs And she as director, had issued cue cards to mark the entrances and exists of innumerable births, mass-extinctions, rebirths, catastrophes and other perennial becomings. She saw her own fruiting, evolving, decaying body with passionate dispassion and saluted her essence that flowed through bodied life forms uninterruptedly as the vital mystery of life. Sita arrived at a deep luminous calm in the midst of the spinning inner vortex where there was no fear.
She opened her eyes when she felt Shabari’s gentle tap on her shoulder. Her eyes first fell upon Hanuman’s puzzled face. His stood in his customary bent position, with tail lassoing the sun and hands folded in salutation but there was bewilderment in his eyes. Shabari looked more composed; Sita noticed that she was chanting a hymn to Kali.
“How is my lord?” asked Sita springing up her seat with a warrior-like gait.
Hanuman eyes brimmed with tears as he reported the events of the day in a choked voice, “My lord Sri Rama was struck unconscious by Ravana’s evil astra. The valiant Laksmana is paralysed. There is chaos in the battlefield. Ravana has gone into hiding and his elder brother, the monstrous Shatakanta Ravana, has taken charge. Nobody knows how to deal with him. He is neither a demon nor a human being. His body glints like burnished gold and his energy is indefatigable. Even the rakshasas give him a wide berth. His weapons are mighty, they say. Once directed towards their targets, they become hurricanes of fire and scorch everything around for miles and miles. The rumours are that…”
Sita raised her hand and bade Hanuman to stop.
“The fear I detect in your voice does not become you, O son of the wind! Even if the Ravana you speak of is Kalki the destroyer himself, I want to have an audience with him. Lead me to him!”
Hanuman fell on his knees and said, “Mother! Forgive this humble servant. My brains are addled and the strangeness of the world in which I find myself makes me behave in strange ways. But tell me this divine mother. Why do you look so fierce and why have you taken on this terrible form discarding all your beauty? I have often heard my Lord Sri Rama say that your beauty is superior to the idea of beauty itself. The reason poets in the country have run out of their stock of similes while attempting to describe you. Gentle mother, your compassionate face as gentle and fair as the sharad moon, why does it blaze in anger like a meteor? Your lotus-like eyes always demure and full of compassion, why are they blood-shot? Your bejewelled tresses, braided and coiled like the holy Adishesha on whom my lord rests in his ocean kingdom, are now let loose like a sheet of torrential rain. Your skin as soft and radiant as a kimsuka flower has become scaly and dark in hue. You appear to be the formidable Kali who dances her dread dance of creation in the glow of the burning corpses, creating life afresh from things that decay and rot. Who are you divine Mother? You appear to be my mother Sita and at the same time you appear not to be her!”
Sita raised her hand to put an end to Hanuman’s impassioned musings and proclaimed,
“Don’t bind me with the strangle rope of duality, Hanuman. Lead me to the battlefield.”
The battlefield resembled a still life painting. The air was heavy with the stench of death. A wake of rapacious vultures swooped down to inspect the mortalities but refused to eat the decaying flesh. Rama’s body was unscarred and it appeared that he was in a deep sleep. Loyal Lakshmana lay at his feet, his limbs frozen in a strange paralysis. Ravana’s asuric hordes had also fled the battlefield. The heavy brooding silence in the surrounding sentinel-like hills was complemented by the heaving gong-like clamour of the sea.
Sita moved in silence followed by Shabari and Hanuman utterly unmindful of the terrifying carnage all around.
Shortly there was a metallic whirring of wings and the smog-covered firmament parted to reveal a shining bronze citadel-like structure gravitating towards the battlefield with great speed.
“The war is going to begin and Ravana will appreciate meeting me alone. Why don’t both of you take refuge in that enclave near the rampart and watch the proceedings?” said Sita feeling the rush of adrenaline in her veins.
The citadel on wheels was trying to land. Sita started waking toward it and was greeted by a shower of arrows disgorged from a tiny aperture in its gleaming structure.
Hanuman roared with anger and would have pounced on the unseen bowman but for Shabari’s restraining hand.
“Remove the notion that your Mother Sita has to be protected. Can’t you see that she revels in putting on disguises? Now she has taken her original cosmic form to fight the war with Ravana, who is again only an appearance. When she is the raw clay out of which everything is baked in this earth, can there be any question of winning or subduing her, O son of the Wind?”
Realising the wisdom in Shabari’s words, Hanuman restrained himself.
The continuous shower of arrows caused rivulets of blood to flow from Sita’s dark-hued body. Laughing boisterously she advanced towards the enemy her large, defiant eyes whirring in circles. Bellowing loud, she stripped the corpses of their flesh and made a garland for herself out of the skulls. The bones she picked clean and fashioned them into anklets. Her harsh laughter reverberated fearsomely in all directions. With lolling tongue she shook the blood droplets dripping from her arm and the moment they touched the earth they became rakta bijikas, seeds of blood which spawned innumerable other copies of her dread form. The bijikas roamed the battlefield feeding on the mortalities left untouched by the vultures. The field was wiped clean in a matter of seconds. Sita laughed again. Her voice was as aggressive as the ocean at the time of Pralaya.
The door of the citadel opened and Ravana emerged carefully making sure that his hundred heads were not unduly traumatized while crawling out of the narrow exit door. Ravana looked human. His powerful muscular body was devoid of any armour plate. He stood tall at eight feet and focused his hundred pairs of eyes unblinkingly at Sita. There was no anger, no rapaciousness or combustive emotions lurking in those depths.
“What brings you here Ravana?” thundered Sita preparing herself for the final onslaught.
Ravana stretched himself and advanced a couple of steps with a steady gait. He addressed Sita in a deep metallic timbre, “Sita in costume dress! Cut the crap, lady! You can’t scare me with your show of blood and gore. I don’t know fear. Even if you want to convince me that you are a goddess you will fail because I don’t understand what devotion is, can’t figure out what it is to tremble with fear and awe before the holy of holies. Of if you think I am kinky and will be turned on by a woman with blood-stained fangs, there too you don’t score a point, because I don’t need women. I don’t have sex instincts. Well, you must wonder as to what brought us together?Well it is business! Let us talk business. I need you—to be more specific, your resources, not the sundry baubles that you have but precious stuff like thorium and uranium — the crown jewels of your treasure chest. Treasures you have tucked away from my panoptic surveillance by the sheer virtue of your illusory powers that hide and camouflage the material of your gross world. I need to grasp your few remaining mysteries. I need to ravish you lady!”
Sita set aside her anger and looked intently at the young man in front of her. It was difficult to brand him evil since he didn’t have a concept of dharma. As distant and icy as the comets, he was a creature of vacuum bored with the outmoded paradigms of good and evil. She had come ready to slay a demon but this creature didn’t deserve the honour of that rite.
Ravana nodded his hundred heads in affirmation. He had tapped into her field of mental energy and knew what she was thinking.
“That’s right lady!” he said, “Don’t waste time in trying to kill me. I am a telomerase miracle. My cells will never grow old and moreover my genome mapping is so perfect that my body can never be subjected to decay like the putrid flesh of these poor critters lying all around. I am no kin to that old dotard, Ravana who lusts after you.”
“Then why are you here, o hundred-headed monster?” demanded Sita baring her fangs.
“It is a matter of sheer convenience lady. And mind you, don’t call me a hundred-headed monster. My hundred heads can process, store and weave in information pertaining to several galaxies. My sudden entry into your archaic time was spurred by sudden serendipitous retrieval of one precious nugget of information sitting inside an optical jukebox which was connected to my sixty ninth central processing cranial unit. And yes, although I cannot feel emotions, I felt an unrecognized drive in me to see you who are considered to be the master fictive construct of our times — the primordial mother whose milk nourished our ancestor races who were free from genetic tinkering. Perhaps it was all about seeing you as an interactive mirror, as an ambiguous Other against which I both recognize and measure myself.”
Sita chuckled and said, “You are in the infancy of consciousness, O Ravana! Bounded in your monadic illusion of separateness you forget that you are one in essence with me. Like the millions of creatures who have sprung from my lap, you too are a holograph of the universe with my maternal signature etched on your core. Your genetically altered being is nothing but a new wave which breaks on the shores of manifestation; the ocean remains ever itself.”
Ravana’s response was brusque and minimal. “You forget that the self-replicating cells in my body were generated by computers. You can be no mother, midwife or wet nurse to hyper-evolved beings like me. I am running short of time. You have an hour to willingly submit yourself to my probes. If not, I am afraid I will have to use my sophisticated weapons which will scorch everything on this land in nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit flame. You will die, so will your so-called two million plus species. As for me I have acquired lifespan escape velocity. My lightning swift citadel is immune to all frailties of your flesh and it can transport me to a distant planet which I can colonize and mould according to my needs.”
Before Ravana could complete reciting from his inventory of threats, a bolt of lightning descended like Indra’s vajra setting the entire landscape on fire.
Ravana did some quick computations and the powerful geo-surveillance optoelectronic rods embedded in his heads alerted him to the situation.
“Lady, you are finished!” he proclaimed without excitement or trepidation, “Underwater Methyl hydrate has been ignited. Triggered by volcanic activity in the ocean bed. More than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of this gas has been released. Your all-too human children are to be blamed for this. They have been pushing the buttons over the centuries. This gas will raise the planet’s temperature by at least 13 degrees Fahrenheit, according to my calculations. So in addition to fires, you will have floods courtesy ice caps melting. Messy scenario! Isn’t it? The time has come when you can prove to me now that you are the essence. Step into these hellish fires and quench them. If you do so, I will acknowledge you as the sole creatrix and magna mater. ”
The hungry flames were fast devouring everything. Sita knew that it was time to act.
She gave the unperturbed Ravana a piercing look and quietly asked, “Are you challenging me to undergo a test of fire?”
The demon laughed and mirthless tears rolled down his hundred cheeks.
“I am dead serious! But for the fact that I can never be dead” he said enjoying his word-play.
Sita summoned the seven-tongued Agni, who rose from the waters of the seething cauldron of the Sethusamudram. The Rig Vedic seer who named him the “grandson of the waters” — Aapam Napat, after witnessing flames which surfaced from oil seepages in water was prophetic.
Red-faced Agni who was seated in his bejewelled chariot had the cold detached look of an executioner. The fiery horses that yoked his chariot revelled in the uncontrolled dance of flames that enveloped the whole place.
“Why did you summon me O Prakriti? Don’t you behold my divine design in these calamities that will summon this earth to its end?
“O Chosen priest of the gods, oblation bearer, radiant one, dispeller of darkness, is it not your dharma to protect this earth?” asked Sita her face all ablaze with anger.
“O daughter of Janaka, don’t you recognize that I come as a destroyer at this point in your history when everything has come full circle. In these times of pralaya, even water takes on my dread form and destruction becomes my dharma. So don’t expect me to rescue you or furnish a testimony for your nurturing powers!”
Sita’s dark-hued face took on the hard brilliance of a diamond. Her voice rose above above the hiss of the sulphurous ocean and the crackling of the wavelets of fire.
“ O vain God of Fire! Apocalyptic scenarios don’t threaten my imagination. Know me as the regulatory force of this universe. Know that I have maintained the temperature on this earth’s surface for hundred of millions of yugas despite Surya increasing his heat and the vayu mandala changing its composition. Know that I am the force that stabilizes the salinity in the great oceans. If I had allowed the salt concentration to rise, the seas would have long been emptied of life. If I had allowed the prana in the oxygen levels of the vayu mandala to drop below a certain level, large animals and flying insects would not have found the energy to survive and if I had allowed the levels to increase slightly, trees, herbs and all vegetation would have started burning. Everything on this planet, including you, O Shining Fire God, has evolved inside my life systems. Whenever something tries to harm the rest of life, the rest of the system will undo or balance it any way it can.”
Having uttering these words, Sita closed her eyes and plunged into the burning ocean. The black waves tossed her body with violent motion; Hanuman and Shabari watched in concern as she became a tiny speck that disappeared into the seething furnace of waters. However the waters parted in a matter of seconds to reveal a Sita whose dimensions challenged the arc of vision. The sun and moon were her eyes; the firmament her resplendent face, the flowing rivers her tresses, Mount Kailash and Mount Meru her breasts, the spreading deserts of the world her loins, the minerals and ores her limbs of insuperable strength and the surviving species of the plant kingdom her green raiment. A lotus of incomparable beauty grew out of her navel. A radiant smile bloomed on her full lips as she emptied the dark contents of the flaming ocean into her throat.
Agni prostrated before the blue-throated goddess and transformed himself into the digestive fire in her that destroyed the poison she had imbibed from the ocean.
Ravana made a clumsy move to salute her. Fumbling awkwardly he retrieved a byte of memory stored in his hundredth head under the file name “The Great Oral Traditions of Planet Earth” and intoned:
May those born of thee, O Earth,
Be for our welfare, free from sickness and waste.
Wakeful through a long life, we shall become bearers of tribute to thee.
Sita smiled, acknowledging the ancient lines from the Prithvi Sukta.
The ocean lost its fury and anointed her feet with its chrysoberyl waters. The drama was over and the danger past. As Sita resumed her human dimensions, the ocean king parted his waters to reveal the bridge of stones painstakingly laid by Rama and his monkey friends.
Sita smiled in anticipation of the small drama which awaited her. The gentle rain which the heavens were sprinkling would revive Rama and bring the ten-headed Ravana back from hiding. Lotus-eyed Rama would later proclaim that he fought the war not to save her but to protect dharma. Struggling to camouflage the anguish in his soul, he would declare before all and sundry, “Sita, let not the world insinuate that Sri Rama’s wife is unchaste, having spent ten long months in the palace of Ravana! Let Agni deva pronounce your purity! Only then can you return to Ayodhya as my queen.”
And Agni, who would hasten to be a witness in the ordeal dictated by Rama, would again learn a lesson or two about her incendiary potential. Scorched by the fire of her chastity, Agni would be forced to shift shape into a shower of delicate jasmine flowers.
Sita laughed aloud.
The epic twist amused her.
Fire ordeals, myopic husbands and queer rakshasas were, after all, signposts in this epic journey of disintegration from the one to the many and the returning impulse of reintegration from the many to the one. Bards recreating the epic in different times and places would express concern about humankind’s straying away from the ancient, fundamental relationship to the centre. As antidote to the sense of disconnect in the human psyche, they would compose paeans to the unconditional love that would heal the primal wounding of an unresolved past. The wise among them would recognize the Ramayana heroine as the all-pervading center and also as their own body. The less enlightened would search for her in the periphery fields heavily marked by duality, hyperseparated as good and evil. All representations and misrepresentations about her would, nevertheless, lead to the implanting of a source seed in human consciousness and for the first time, the children of Prajapati would understand the interrelationship of parts and interdependence of systems.
This was her hypothesis. Sita wondered if it could be included in the alternative Ramayana traditions under the title Sita’s hypothesis in a new chapter called Prithivi Khanda — the earth song. The Phala Shruti, the accrued merit for the listener, would be many years of abundant dwelling in the hallowed Rama rajya where the rains fell on time and everyone lived in peace and harmony.
Sita’s laughter echoed in the hills and valleys of Ravana’s kingdom. Hearing it, Ashoka, the sorrowless tree, rejoiced and the crimson rama bana flowers emerged from their long underworld sleep.
SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. She was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University where she took a course in advanced fiction writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Zuban’s 21 under 40, Penguin's First Proof and South Asian Review. She is currrently working on her first novel.
From afar the deep-throated waves of Sethusamudram emitted a guttural chant, all outbreath. Tuning in to the mood of the reckless ocean, Sita could sense earthquakes in its dark belly that were waiting to manifest and tip the balance. The sea’s angry rumble did not augur well for events waiting to manifest in its indigo depths. The giant waves kept up their frenetic chorus. “Not a blade of grass will remain! Everything will be on fire!” They repeated these words again and again until the cautionary message entered the collective psyche of the five elements.
It was midnight and the night wanderers, the nishachara, paid their obeisance to Sita and quickly passed by without disturbing her. The night was warm, warmer than it should be at that time of the year. Sita noticed that the leaves of the Ashoka tree were not willing to open their stomata. The night air was heavy with noxious exhalations, the odours of charred vegetation and rotting human flesh from the battlefields where Rama and his army were battling the asura hordes of the obstinate Ravana.
Sita caressed the tree with her long, slender fingers in an attempt to calm the cascading waves of agony that the tree was emitting through its strong kinaesthetic field.
She understood the emotion. It was a collective fear channeled from the voices of the wilderness in the surrounding hills and forests.
Sita closed her eyes and meditated. The inevitable would anyway happen. The coronation at Ayodhya and the panorama of happy reunions of wife with husband, mothers with sons and brother with brother were all foregone conclusions which did not interest her. In her mind’s eye she saw a barren, lunar landscape where the five elements had withdrawn their creative potential. The blue-hued Rama would reach for the Brahmastra when he found Ravana’s severed heads growing back in hydra-like fashion. The mighty weapon would blaze forth with the luminosity of a thousand suns creating a landscape of erasure. However the drama would not end at that point since this was not the real climax – the decisive battle between good and evil, polarized as Rama and Ravana, sung and celebrated by future generations of humans in epic grandeur as the Ramayana. Even the lotus-eyed Rama was not aware of what lay beyond the immediate battlefields of Lanka. The true horror would descend after Rama’s sleep was ushered in by the hurricane-blast arrow of the Lord of Lanka. While the avatar slept, centuries would roll forward bringing to the forefront the powerful monster with a hundred heads — the Shatakanta Ravana. And she, as Prakriti, the material cause of the earth, would be forced to respond. Sita wondered if the bards would record this twist in the epic and devote a chapter to Sita’s intervention. Would the epic be called a Sitayana which would record her struggle to maintain a sense of balance? She had been through these ordeals as long as she could remember, defining and redefining the material conditions needed for survival on the planet.
Sita shuddered at the recollection of Indrajit’s deadly astra employed in the battlefield a few days ago. Future generations would invent a new name for it — radioactivity. Its dull green fire shrouded the earth for many miles extending beyond the battlefield before it targeted Lakshmana. Rama had thrown away his weapons in grief. The loyal Hanuman promptly abducted Ravana’s physician, Sushena, to extract the secret of the life-reviving Sanjeevini herb from him. However, when Hanuman arrived in the fragrant Valley of the Flowers, the herb refused to reveal itself to him. Its plant spirit, cool to touch like watery jade, appeared before Sita pleading for the boon of invisibility.
“Your dharma is to heal, O Sanjeevini. Then why do you go against your innate nature?” Sita had wondering asked the herb, marvelling at the way its presence was rejuvenating the Ashoka vana.
“I speak not in selfishness or an attitude of denial, mother. If the humans learn the secret of my innermost essence, they will use it for their own contorted ends. Mother Ritambari, the keeper of all harmony, you most know this!”
The plant spirit continued, “They will patent my jiva, extract my innards and meddle with my genetic coding. The rich and famous among them who can afford to buy me will live for a longer duration and chase the dream of immortality.”
Sita closed her eyes and reflected; the plant spirit was speaking the truth. Sita saw strangulated water bodies and denuded forests giving way to a barren, blasted urban wilderness. A new avatar of rakshasas roamed the earth exercising a powerful grid of control. These transgenic humanoids would colonize the earth like a swarm of locusts and secure their longevity in ugly, climate-controlled, steel citadels.
She smiled wearily at the plant spirit and said, “Your wish will be granted but fate has decreed you to play your role in the battlefield. You cannot escape from that!”
And true to her promise, the eagle-eyed Hanuman went blind while searching for the plant in the midst of the riot of colours in the Valley of Flowers. He closed his eyes and meditated on Rama. The solution to the problem came to him in a flash, as swift as a rama bana, an arrow from Rama’s bow. He uprooted the entire Dronagiri mountain and headed towards Lanka without for a moment noticing the gaping crater-like hole he had made in the febrile Himalayan terrain.
Leaning against the Ashoka tree, Sita witnessed the scene and foresuffered it all. Hanuman had set a new trend.
The tree had become a close friend ever since Ravana imprisoned her in the Ashoka vana, which in the good old days had been a leafy retreat resonant with the morning songs of Krauncha birds. The salubrious garden on the mountain top in which Ravana had imprisoned her had now been reduced to a dull brown patch of earth with a few trees that bravely resisted the onslaught of the raging war. The profuse rama bana flowers with their blood red blossoms had also disappeared. Ravana’s maidservants had wondered long at the exotic blooms which magically sprung up when Sita set foot in the vana. Looking at the configuration of petals, stamens and pistils that resembled a human being carrying a bow, they cried out, “Look don’t these flowers resemble her husband, Sri Rama?” They unanimously conferred the title, “Rama’s bow” on the exuberant blooms.
The tree brought her news from the world of humans and nature. She would listen very carefully to these little narratives coming from the tree because the authors and contributors were often other- than-humans. It was only the other day that the tree gave her the deer’s version of the story of Sita’s abduction.
“I wonder why Mother Sita allowed that poltroon of a Ravana to carry her away! She duped the world into thinking that she is an ordinary woman easily enamored by trivial things like a golden deer. She also gave us a bad name. After the epic is written, deer will always go down in human history as vain creatures who lead virtuous women astray. We will become the favourite targets of hunters who are already ill-disposed towards us.”
Sita would wince as she listened to these narratives. These gentle creatures had an insight into her true identity.
The deer was right. There was no logical explanation for the unfolding web of events. The stage was already set and the sky father gods requested her to step into the allotted role. She had tried reasoning with them but they gave her a catalogue of reasons to choose from old karmic links, thoughtless boons granted by male Gods, the secret mission of avatars, evolution arising from purification of the earth-bound life. It was a long list and Sita grew tired following the logic.
“Leave me out of all this!” she had cried, raising her hands in mock supplication.
They smiled at her and said, “Man’s destiny is bound to the earth’s. The gods who come down to the earth are not exempt from it. You wield the axle of dharma! Ritambari, you are the underlying order — the warp and weft of this universe. When you are the accommodating space of all that happens on earth, how can you ever think of excusing yourself from all its drama? Moreover, the ending will be happy. It will usher in an era of prosperity and development for men and women in the golden era of Rama’s rule, the Rama rajya!”
Sita had chosen not to respond to this tall talk. As she disappeared into the hammered golden light of the fading dusk, a Sky God called out mischievously, “The rain will fall regularly in the land of Rama. Now that should make you happy!”
Sita knew that it was time to assume a human form and enter limiting human time. She preferred being in the deep time of mountains and rivers in which the world was created afresh every moment. Embodied in a human form, Sita felt trapped in a world that was not created spontaneously like the silent lotus of incomparable beauty growing from the navel of the divine dreamer. It was a world of strange miscegenations fashioned by human demiurges who no longer believed in the quest for wholeness. As Shatakantha Ravana would later point out to her with a swagger, “Prakriti, you are dead or altered beyond recognition! You are not hidden so you do not need to be unveiled. Goddess no more, you are only a construction, movement and displacement. You are no longer the primordial mother, the dream of oneness, the teeming womb of the universe, the matrix, origin or the perennial site for replenishment.”
But she couldn’t let things fall apart. The Sky Gods were right, everything was hers. There was absolutely nothing to let go of. It was an amusing thought.
A gentle, prayerful voice interrupted her reverie.
“Mother! You know your power. How can you allow this to happen?”
Sita didn’t know quite how to handle the question. The old woman kneeling near the trunk of the Ashoka tree quivered with the intensity of her question.
“Goddess!” she cried out, “I recognized you from afar. These demonesses who guard this sacred grove are stupid! Don’t they know that they are trying to imprison one who is as free as the wind?”
Sita kept her silence. After all today was Vijayadashami, the day when Rama was destined to self-actualize his epic role. She had to wait in patience till the moment summoned her.
She gathered her long flowing tresses into a tight knot and buried her face in her knees pretending to drop into slumber.
“Goddess!” the persistent voice did not allow her to sleep.
Sita lifted her head and took a close look at the woman. Though crisscrossed by a hundred wrinkles, her face shone like polished ebony. She was surely a tribal from the neighbouring hills. But someone clearly distinguished! It was not the impressive gold loop that she wore as a nose ring that caught Sita’s eye but the clear eyes that glistened like precious gems in her furrowed face.
She continued in her throbbing voice, “You are the force in the wind, the wetness in water, the heat in the fire, the quickening of life in the soil, the vastness of space. How can you allow yourself to be imprisoned by these nitwits who don’t recognize you?”
Sita recognized her. It was Shabari, the Bhil ascetic, who plucked and tasted plum after plum before offering them to her beloved Sri Rama.
Sita hushed her and stole a nervous glance at Ravana’s female dakinis specially hired to guard the Ashoka vana. Luckily they were lost to the world. There had been a generous flow of strong liquors and good food after the bloody battle yesterday.
Sita beckoned the old woman to her stony seat.
“What brings you here to Ravana’s harsh kingdom, O wise mother!? Have you come to have a darshan of your beloved Sri Rama?”
Shabari fell silent for a moment and then asked, “When the child is in distress, whom does it go running to seeking solace?”
Sita gazed into the eyes of the old woman, as limpid as the waters of the Manasarovar lake in the early hours of the Brahmamuhurta. She knew why Shabari had come. In those calm patient eyes, Sita saw the agony of an entire community pushed to the fringes of civilization.
The old woman continued, “We gave our lands to water their cities. Now they have destroyed our homes. We have no where to go. Our forests are gone. They set fire to them to build their cities. We have become orphans! Will all this be set right after the grand moment when my Lord Sri Rama will take you back to Ayodhya in a triumphant procession?”
Sita patted the old woman affectionately and said, “All in good time, wise mother! There will be a new earth for you to rejoice in.”
Shabari trembled like a withered leaf and asked, “Is there going to be a mahapralaya? I can feel it in my bones. The new earth that you speak of can come only after a great deluge which will wash away the corruptions that fester on this earth?”
Sita replied with a smile, “You speak of the cleansing amniotic waters of life, wise mother Shabari! But the titillating part of the Ramayana story is always the test of fire — the agnipariksha.”
Sita’s face lit up with an inner fire as she uttered these words.
Shabari folded her hands and said, “Goddess, the past, present and future of the trichiliocosms cannot be concealed from you. Forgive Sri Rama for what he is going to demand from you. The God of Fire will hang his head with shame for having to witness you entering his holy flames!”
Sita laughed again. Shabari for a moment imagined that she saw a pair of dhamshtra, sharp fangs where pearly teeth should be.
Sita voice grew deep as she said, “Wise mother Shabari, the event you predict is the second Agnipariksha. The one I speak comes prior to that and is more exacting; it is a test in which I will have to delve deep into the poison fires to quench them. The bards in times to come will conveniently ignore this ordeal by fire.”
Shabari’s face wore an expression of deep understanding as she knelt down before Sita and said, “Please allow me to be by your side when this happens.”
“So be it!” said Sita as she set about preparing herself for the events of the day. She sat cross legged, her fingers touching the earth in a bhu sparsha mudra. She offered a silent prayer to the divinity within her burning like a flame. Closing her eyes, she told Shabari, “I have a lot of samskaras to burn before I meet Ravana. I am going into a yoga nidra. Hanuman will come here during the course of the day bringing the news that Rama is wounded in the battlefield. Tap me gently on my right shoulder, wise mother and do not be afraid to find me in altered form.”
Sita leaned against the Ashoka tree and plunged into the depths of her ancient, primordial mind. To Shabari she appeared asleep but Sita’s consciousness hovered around the razor sharp state of deep awareness. The sacred syllable on which she meditated took her through the contracting and expanding loops of the earth’s history in the last four and a half year billion years of evolution. Maid, mother and crone — Sita beheld the triple goddesses’ reflection in the clear waters of her mind. The changing kaleidoscope revealed her youthful body, ethereal and gaseous, that was enveloped in the radiant energy of the celestial bodies, distant stars and cosmic winds; the pattern changed to reveal a nebulous beauty gradually solidifying into the solid, green nurturing lap of the dazzling, diverse earth sangha; the pattern soon reorganized itself, changing colour and form to become a dry cupreous earth battered by deluging oceans and storm surges.
As she gazed deeper, Sita found these reflections blurring and throwing up a free vortex of whirring images – her original face. She watched with terrified fascination the panoramic play of evolution, whose essence was the bubbling karmic cocktail of life which oozed, mutated and spilled over in perpetual motion. The sacred pranava enveloped everything in this passion play. The play which was authored in both comic and tragic modes had actors from the council of all beings ranging from stardust to cyborgs And she as director, had issued cue cards to mark the entrances and exists of innumerable births, mass-extinctions, rebirths, catastrophes and other perennial becomings. She saw her own fruiting, evolving, decaying body with passionate dispassion and saluted her essence that flowed through bodied life forms uninterruptedly as the vital mystery of life. Sita arrived at a deep luminous calm in the midst of the spinning inner vortex where there was no fear.
She opened her eyes when she felt Shabari’s gentle tap on her shoulder. Her eyes first fell upon Hanuman’s puzzled face. His stood in his customary bent position, with tail lassoing the sun and hands folded in salutation but there was bewilderment in his eyes. Shabari looked more composed; Sita noticed that she was chanting a hymn to Kali.
“How is my lord?” asked Sita springing up her seat with a warrior-like gait.
Hanuman eyes brimmed with tears as he reported the events of the day in a choked voice, “My lord Sri Rama was struck unconscious by Ravana’s evil astra. The valiant Laksmana is paralysed. There is chaos in the battlefield. Ravana has gone into hiding and his elder brother, the monstrous Shatakanta Ravana, has taken charge. Nobody knows how to deal with him. He is neither a demon nor a human being. His body glints like burnished gold and his energy is indefatigable. Even the rakshasas give him a wide berth. His weapons are mighty, they say. Once directed towards their targets, they become hurricanes of fire and scorch everything around for miles and miles. The rumours are that…”
Sita raised her hand and bade Hanuman to stop.
“The fear I detect in your voice does not become you, O son of the wind! Even if the Ravana you speak of is Kalki the destroyer himself, I want to have an audience with him. Lead me to him!”
Hanuman fell on his knees and said, “Mother! Forgive this humble servant. My brains are addled and the strangeness of the world in which I find myself makes me behave in strange ways. But tell me this divine mother. Why do you look so fierce and why have you taken on this terrible form discarding all your beauty? I have often heard my Lord Sri Rama say that your beauty is superior to the idea of beauty itself. The reason poets in the country have run out of their stock of similes while attempting to describe you. Gentle mother, your compassionate face as gentle and fair as the sharad moon, why does it blaze in anger like a meteor? Your lotus-like eyes always demure and full of compassion, why are they blood-shot? Your bejewelled tresses, braided and coiled like the holy Adishesha on whom my lord rests in his ocean kingdom, are now let loose like a sheet of torrential rain. Your skin as soft and radiant as a kimsuka flower has become scaly and dark in hue. You appear to be the formidable Kali who dances her dread dance of creation in the glow of the burning corpses, creating life afresh from things that decay and rot. Who are you divine Mother? You appear to be my mother Sita and at the same time you appear not to be her!”
Sita raised her hand to put an end to Hanuman’s impassioned musings and proclaimed,
“Don’t bind me with the strangle rope of duality, Hanuman. Lead me to the battlefield.”
The battlefield resembled a still life painting. The air was heavy with the stench of death. A wake of rapacious vultures swooped down to inspect the mortalities but refused to eat the decaying flesh. Rama’s body was unscarred and it appeared that he was in a deep sleep. Loyal Lakshmana lay at his feet, his limbs frozen in a strange paralysis. Ravana’s asuric hordes had also fled the battlefield. The heavy brooding silence in the surrounding sentinel-like hills was complemented by the heaving gong-like clamour of the sea.
Sita moved in silence followed by Shabari and Hanuman utterly unmindful of the terrifying carnage all around.
Shortly there was a metallic whirring of wings and the smog-covered firmament parted to reveal a shining bronze citadel-like structure gravitating towards the battlefield with great speed.
“The war is going to begin and Ravana will appreciate meeting me alone. Why don’t both of you take refuge in that enclave near the rampart and watch the proceedings?” said Sita feeling the rush of adrenaline in her veins.
The citadel on wheels was trying to land. Sita started waking toward it and was greeted by a shower of arrows disgorged from a tiny aperture in its gleaming structure.
Hanuman roared with anger and would have pounced on the unseen bowman but for Shabari’s restraining hand.
“Remove the notion that your Mother Sita has to be protected. Can’t you see that she revels in putting on disguises? Now she has taken her original cosmic form to fight the war with Ravana, who is again only an appearance. When she is the raw clay out of which everything is baked in this earth, can there be any question of winning or subduing her, O son of the Wind?”
Realising the wisdom in Shabari’s words, Hanuman restrained himself.
The continuous shower of arrows caused rivulets of blood to flow from Sita’s dark-hued body. Laughing boisterously she advanced towards the enemy her large, defiant eyes whirring in circles. Bellowing loud, she stripped the corpses of their flesh and made a garland for herself out of the skulls. The bones she picked clean and fashioned them into anklets. Her harsh laughter reverberated fearsomely in all directions. With lolling tongue she shook the blood droplets dripping from her arm and the moment they touched the earth they became rakta bijikas, seeds of blood which spawned innumerable other copies of her dread form. The bijikas roamed the battlefield feeding on the mortalities left untouched by the vultures. The field was wiped clean in a matter of seconds. Sita laughed again. Her voice was as aggressive as the ocean at the time of Pralaya.
The door of the citadel opened and Ravana emerged carefully making sure that his hundred heads were not unduly traumatized while crawling out of the narrow exit door. Ravana looked human. His powerful muscular body was devoid of any armour plate. He stood tall at eight feet and focused his hundred pairs of eyes unblinkingly at Sita. There was no anger, no rapaciousness or combustive emotions lurking in those depths.
“What brings you here Ravana?” thundered Sita preparing herself for the final onslaught.
Ravana stretched himself and advanced a couple of steps with a steady gait. He addressed Sita in a deep metallic timbre, “Sita in costume dress! Cut the crap, lady! You can’t scare me with your show of blood and gore. I don’t know fear. Even if you want to convince me that you are a goddess you will fail because I don’t understand what devotion is, can’t figure out what it is to tremble with fear and awe before the holy of holies. Of if you think I am kinky and will be turned on by a woman with blood-stained fangs, there too you don’t score a point, because I don’t need women. I don’t have sex instincts. Well, you must wonder as to what brought us together?Well it is business! Let us talk business. I need you—to be more specific, your resources, not the sundry baubles that you have but precious stuff like thorium and uranium — the crown jewels of your treasure chest. Treasures you have tucked away from my panoptic surveillance by the sheer virtue of your illusory powers that hide and camouflage the material of your gross world. I need to grasp your few remaining mysteries. I need to ravish you lady!”
Sita set aside her anger and looked intently at the young man in front of her. It was difficult to brand him evil since he didn’t have a concept of dharma. As distant and icy as the comets, he was a creature of vacuum bored with the outmoded paradigms of good and evil. She had come ready to slay a demon but this creature didn’t deserve the honour of that rite.
Ravana nodded his hundred heads in affirmation. He had tapped into her field of mental energy and knew what she was thinking.
“That’s right lady!” he said, “Don’t waste time in trying to kill me. I am a telomerase miracle. My cells will never grow old and moreover my genome mapping is so perfect that my body can never be subjected to decay like the putrid flesh of these poor critters lying all around. I am no kin to that old dotard, Ravana who lusts after you.”
“Then why are you here, o hundred-headed monster?” demanded Sita baring her fangs.
“It is a matter of sheer convenience lady. And mind you, don’t call me a hundred-headed monster. My hundred heads can process, store and weave in information pertaining to several galaxies. My sudden entry into your archaic time was spurred by sudden serendipitous retrieval of one precious nugget of information sitting inside an optical jukebox which was connected to my sixty ninth central processing cranial unit. And yes, although I cannot feel emotions, I felt an unrecognized drive in me to see you who are considered to be the master fictive construct of our times — the primordial mother whose milk nourished our ancestor races who were free from genetic tinkering. Perhaps it was all about seeing you as an interactive mirror, as an ambiguous Other against which I both recognize and measure myself.”
Sita chuckled and said, “You are in the infancy of consciousness, O Ravana! Bounded in your monadic illusion of separateness you forget that you are one in essence with me. Like the millions of creatures who have sprung from my lap, you too are a holograph of the universe with my maternal signature etched on your core. Your genetically altered being is nothing but a new wave which breaks on the shores of manifestation; the ocean remains ever itself.”
Ravana’s response was brusque and minimal. “You forget that the self-replicating cells in my body were generated by computers. You can be no mother, midwife or wet nurse to hyper-evolved beings like me. I am running short of time. You have an hour to willingly submit yourself to my probes. If not, I am afraid I will have to use my sophisticated weapons which will scorch everything on this land in nearly 2000 degrees Fahrenheit flame. You will die, so will your so-called two million plus species. As for me I have acquired lifespan escape velocity. My lightning swift citadel is immune to all frailties of your flesh and it can transport me to a distant planet which I can colonize and mould according to my needs.”
Before Ravana could complete reciting from his inventory of threats, a bolt of lightning descended like Indra’s vajra setting the entire landscape on fire.
Ravana did some quick computations and the powerful geo-surveillance optoelectronic rods embedded in his heads alerted him to the situation.
“Lady, you are finished!” he proclaimed without excitement or trepidation, “Underwater Methyl hydrate has been ignited. Triggered by volcanic activity in the ocean bed. More than 100,000 trillion cubic feet of this gas has been released. Your all-too human children are to be blamed for this. They have been pushing the buttons over the centuries. This gas will raise the planet’s temperature by at least 13 degrees Fahrenheit, according to my calculations. So in addition to fires, you will have floods courtesy ice caps melting. Messy scenario! Isn’t it? The time has come when you can prove to me now that you are the essence. Step into these hellish fires and quench them. If you do so, I will acknowledge you as the sole creatrix and magna mater. ”
The hungry flames were fast devouring everything. Sita knew that it was time to act.
She gave the unperturbed Ravana a piercing look and quietly asked, “Are you challenging me to undergo a test of fire?”
The demon laughed and mirthless tears rolled down his hundred cheeks.
“I am dead serious! But for the fact that I can never be dead” he said enjoying his word-play.
Sita summoned the seven-tongued Agni, who rose from the waters of the seething cauldron of the Sethusamudram. The Rig Vedic seer who named him the “grandson of the waters” — Aapam Napat, after witnessing flames which surfaced from oil seepages in water was prophetic.
Red-faced Agni who was seated in his bejewelled chariot had the cold detached look of an executioner. The fiery horses that yoked his chariot revelled in the uncontrolled dance of flames that enveloped the whole place.
“Why did you summon me O Prakriti? Don’t you behold my divine design in these calamities that will summon this earth to its end?
“O Chosen priest of the gods, oblation bearer, radiant one, dispeller of darkness, is it not your dharma to protect this earth?” asked Sita her face all ablaze with anger.
“O daughter of Janaka, don’t you recognize that I come as a destroyer at this point in your history when everything has come full circle. In these times of pralaya, even water takes on my dread form and destruction becomes my dharma. So don’t expect me to rescue you or furnish a testimony for your nurturing powers!”
Sita’s dark-hued face took on the hard brilliance of a diamond. Her voice rose above above the hiss of the sulphurous ocean and the crackling of the wavelets of fire.
“ O vain God of Fire! Apocalyptic scenarios don’t threaten my imagination. Know me as the regulatory force of this universe. Know that I have maintained the temperature on this earth’s surface for hundred of millions of yugas despite Surya increasing his heat and the vayu mandala changing its composition. Know that I am the force that stabilizes the salinity in the great oceans. If I had allowed the salt concentration to rise, the seas would have long been emptied of life. If I had allowed the prana in the oxygen levels of the vayu mandala to drop below a certain level, large animals and flying insects would not have found the energy to survive and if I had allowed the levels to increase slightly, trees, herbs and all vegetation would have started burning. Everything on this planet, including you, O Shining Fire God, has evolved inside my life systems. Whenever something tries to harm the rest of life, the rest of the system will undo or balance it any way it can.”
Having uttering these words, Sita closed her eyes and plunged into the burning ocean. The black waves tossed her body with violent motion; Hanuman and Shabari watched in concern as she became a tiny speck that disappeared into the seething furnace of waters. However the waters parted in a matter of seconds to reveal a Sita whose dimensions challenged the arc of vision. The sun and moon were her eyes; the firmament her resplendent face, the flowing rivers her tresses, Mount Kailash and Mount Meru her breasts, the spreading deserts of the world her loins, the minerals and ores her limbs of insuperable strength and the surviving species of the plant kingdom her green raiment. A lotus of incomparable beauty grew out of her navel. A radiant smile bloomed on her full lips as she emptied the dark contents of the flaming ocean into her throat.
Agni prostrated before the blue-throated goddess and transformed himself into the digestive fire in her that destroyed the poison she had imbibed from the ocean.
Ravana made a clumsy move to salute her. Fumbling awkwardly he retrieved a byte of memory stored in his hundredth head under the file name “The Great Oral Traditions of Planet Earth” and intoned:
May those born of thee, O Earth,
Be for our welfare, free from sickness and waste.
Wakeful through a long life, we shall become bearers of tribute to thee.
Sita smiled, acknowledging the ancient lines from the Prithvi Sukta.
The ocean lost its fury and anointed her feet with its chrysoberyl waters. The drama was over and the danger past. As Sita resumed her human dimensions, the ocean king parted his waters to reveal the bridge of stones painstakingly laid by Rama and his monkey friends.
Sita smiled in anticipation of the small drama which awaited her. The gentle rain which the heavens were sprinkling would revive Rama and bring the ten-headed Ravana back from hiding. Lotus-eyed Rama would later proclaim that he fought the war not to save her but to protect dharma. Struggling to camouflage the anguish in his soul, he would declare before all and sundry, “Sita, let not the world insinuate that Sri Rama’s wife is unchaste, having spent ten long months in the palace of Ravana! Let Agni deva pronounce your purity! Only then can you return to Ayodhya as my queen.”
And Agni, who would hasten to be a witness in the ordeal dictated by Rama, would again learn a lesson or two about her incendiary potential. Scorched by the fire of her chastity, Agni would be forced to shift shape into a shower of delicate jasmine flowers.
Sita laughed aloud.
The epic twist amused her.
Fire ordeals, myopic husbands and queer rakshasas were, after all, signposts in this epic journey of disintegration from the one to the many and the returning impulse of reintegration from the many to the one. Bards recreating the epic in different times and places would express concern about humankind’s straying away from the ancient, fundamental relationship to the centre. As antidote to the sense of disconnect in the human psyche, they would compose paeans to the unconditional love that would heal the primal wounding of an unresolved past. The wise among them would recognize the Ramayana heroine as the all-pervading center and also as their own body. The less enlightened would search for her in the periphery fields heavily marked by duality, hyperseparated as good and evil. All representations and misrepresentations about her would, nevertheless, lead to the implanting of a source seed in human consciousness and for the first time, the children of Prajapati would understand the interrelationship of parts and interdependence of systems.
This was her hypothesis. Sita wondered if it could be included in the alternative Ramayana traditions under the title Sita’s hypothesis in a new chapter called Prithivi Khanda — the earth song. The Phala Shruti, the accrued merit for the listener, would be many years of abundant dwelling in the hallowed Rama rajya where the rains fell on time and everyone lived in peace and harmony.
Sita’s laughter echoed in the hills and valleys of Ravana’s kingdom. Hearing it, Ashoka, the sorrowless tree, rejoiced and the crimson rama bana flowers emerged from their long underworld sleep.
SWARNALATHA RANGARAJAN is an Associate Professor at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras, India. She was a Fulbright visiting scholar at Harvard University where she took a course in advanced fiction writing. Her short fiction has appeared in Zuban’s 21 under 40, Penguin's First Proof and South Asian Review. She is currrently working on her first novel.
