Temporary People

by Deepak Unnikrishnan

  CHABTER THREE

  SARAMA

  IT’S QUITE SIMPLE REALLY; my family owes its existence to the forest demon, Surpanakha.

  My maternal great-grandmother, Parvathy Amma, was born in a village near Talikulam, Kerala.

  The word for great-grandmother in Malayalam is “muthassi.” She was the first woman to hold me, to bathe me, my first loved one to die. She decided on my name, Bhagyanathan. She would call me nothing else; she hated nicknames. “Bhagyanathan!” she would yell. When she called my name, she said it like one would address a king. When she said “Bhagyanathan,” you would almost expect to hear the rolling of chariots, the neighing of horses, the sound of footmen. I was her king.

  Muthassi was a renowned storyteller in my village and in her younger days used to be invited to participate in festivals all over Kerala. Her specialty was telling stories from the Ramayana.

  Some people have a voice made for stories, their vocal chords fashioned by Brahma himself. Muthassi’s voice was like that. Her pitch, unusual for a woman, was very low, a rumble, like the purr of a cat. Age added to its mystique. Her voice grabbed you, didn’t let you go; the stories poured into your veins and intoxicated your brain. You listened until she finished; you didn’t have a choice.

  But she was also a treasure trove of other tales, much darker ones, which she was always happy to share with me. Popping balls of rice into my mouth, she often warned me to beware of the snakes in our garden: “They transform into human form at night, eager to snatch game they slink into the netherworld.”

  I was around four years old when she started telling me stories from the Ramayana. She recited the epic to me out of sequence, concentrating more on the characters than the story itself. “Everybody,” she liked to say, “has a past that ought to be heard. The present is paralyzed without a past.”

  The scriptures I know come from her. I preferred listening to reading. I think she innately understood that.

  The night she decided I needed to know the story I am about to share, four crows cawed outside our house at twilight for over an hour. I had just turned ten. It was monsoon season but the rains still hadn’t come. I was listening to the radio when the power went out. As usual, she called out to me. She needed someone to talk to in the dark. My parents were to be back the following morning. I had been left in charge, the man of the house.

  I was still a small boy and struggling with the kerosene lamp, its heat kissing my thighs, when I walked into her room and asked if she needed anything.

  “Close the door, my dear,” she said slowly.

  “Blow out your lamp.”

  I did.

  The room smelled strongly of smoke and kerosene.

  “Give me your right arm,” she said.

  I did, and she began rubbing my fingers, one by one.

  When I was still a child, people noticed quickly that my palms and feet were frog-like, too big for the rest of my body. Some kids in the village hopped like frogs, pretended to be toads, or stuck their tongues out like lizards when they wanted to make it clear I couldn’t play with them. It didn’t bother me. I was built to be alone.

  Muthassi tugged my fingers, at weird angles, bending them in degrees I didn’t think possible. When she snapped my index finger off, breaking it like a twig, I stared. There was no pain. I was more alarmed than frightened, worried about Amma’s reaction when she noticed. Muthassi smiled kindly.

  “Don’t worry, little one, I will put it back. I wanted to check, that’s all,” she said.

  And before I knew it, she stuck my index finger back on. I stared at it, wiggling it a little bit to make sure it still did what it used to do.

  “Don’t be afraid now,” is what she told me gently before she calmly unscrewed her head, twisting it off like a bottle cap and placing it on her lap.

  “I would like to go outside, Bhagyanathan,” she decided all of a sudden. “It’s too hot here; let’s go by the pond, it’s cooler there. Carry Muthassi out.”

  I held Muthassi’s head carefully and walked out of the house towards the pond, a place I was forbidden to venture to by myself, especially at night.

  I placed Muthassi’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, 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 undertaking 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 Kishkindha 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 taskmaster. 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, and only an honorable warrior deserved a seat on the throne, deserved to bed Queen Tara. The parties who started the rumor were executed immediately.

  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 go to battle for the prince of Ayodhya, a prince he possibly did not even 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 me, 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 or 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 netherworld. Rakshashis may only be beasts, may only be beasts. It is a simplification, suggesting that those who navigate the netherworld can only possess organs 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 them to their very ends, not belittling or suppressing them. 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 beat wet clothe
s. 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. When Muthassi said, “The womb of Sarama, ‘The Old One,’ is where we believe our line begins,” it was the first time I had heard of the name. She 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 Mt. 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, Surpanakha’s grandmother. She remembered Tataka’s beauty. And she remembered the monster she mutated into, taller than a mountain, tusks sprouting out of 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 known since she was a baby, she could clearly see glimpses of her grandmother. 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 desire, 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,” she 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, unable 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.

  The ten-headed Ravana, tears of fury in his eyes, caressed his sister’s hair, held her body like she was little again, and ran after her older brothers in the forests, watched by Tataka, who doted on her grandchildren. He did this openly, in front of his courtiers and guards. But she would have none of it, composing herself quickly. Pity wasn’t what Surpanakha had come for. She refused to let Ravana drape her body with cloth. The pain would pass; her wounds would remain bare and undressed until she had her revenge.

  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 the 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 Surpanakha’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. Sarama 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-queen 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 was clear.

  The evening before the great battle between the two armies—one bestial, the other demonic—Sarama 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, she watched a grieving Surpanakha gently touching what was left of her nose, her ears, her butchered breasts.

  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 carrion fed to scavengers.

  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. Sarama 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 little, but, still spitting in Sarama’s face, screamed, “Not pity, old hag, not pity!”