And now, I pass it on to you. If you desire, and only if, then read this book. I believe if you are ready to read it, the tale will call out to you, as it did to me. If that happens, you are in for a great treat. Know that the version of the Ramayana retold within these pages is a living, breathing, new-born avatar of the tale itself. Told by a living author in a living idiom. It is my humbleattempt to do for this great story what writers down the ages have done with it in their times.
Maazi naroti
In closing, I’d like to quote briefly from two venerable authors who have walked similar paths.
The first is K.M. Munshi whose Krishnavatara series remains a benchmark of the genre of modern retellings of ancient tales. These lines are from Munshi’s own Introduction to the Bharatiya Vidya Bhavan edition of 1972:
In the course of this adventure, I had often to depart from legend and myth, for such a reconstruction by a modern author must necessarily involve the exercise of whatever little imagination he has. I trust He will forgive me for the liberty I am taking, but I must write of Him as I see Him in my imagination.
I could not have said it better.
Yuganta, Iravati Karve’s landmark Sahitya Akademi Award-winning study of the Mahabharata, packs more valuable insights into its slender 220-page pocket-sized edition (Disha) than any ten encyclopaedias. In arguably the finest essay of the book, ‘Draupadi’, she includes this footnote:
‘The discussion up to this point is based on the critical edition of the Mahabharata. What follows is my naroti [naroti = a dry coconut shell, i.e. a worthless thing. The word ‘naroti’ was first used in this sense by the poet Eknath].’
In the free musings of Karve’s mind, we learn more about Vyasa’s formidable epic than from most encyclopaedic theses. For only from free thought can come truly progressive ideas.
In that spirit, I urge readers to consider my dried coconut shell reworking of the Ramayana in the same spirit.
If anything in the following pages pleases you, thank those great forebears in whose giant footsteps I placed my own small feet.
If any parts displease you, then please blame them on my inadequate talents, not on the tale.
ASHOK K. BANKER
Mumbai
April 2005
PRARAMBH
ONE
‘Rama …’
He twisted on the straw pallet, battling nightmares. A merciless giant tightened her grip on his heart, squeezing harder … harder …
He thrashed, his naked torso flayed by invisible lashes. Sweat beaded on his muscled limbs, dripping through the crushed darbha blades on to the mud floor of the hut, staining it the dark vermilion hue of heart-blood.
Beside him, Lakshman slept deeply, too deeply, unnaturally still, curled like a Sanskrit symbol. His chest barely rose and fell, his body’s rhythm slowed to the verge of stasis.
‘Rama …’
Softly, like a gandharva whispering a coy secret.
Rama moaned, burying his face within the darbha pallet. Reeds of straw scratched his face, pricking his tightly shut eyelids. He fought invisible phantoms. Lakshman slept on, his breath ragged, heartbeat irregular, on the knife edge between dreams and eternal dreamlessness.
Still softly, but with a sense of growing urgency.
‘Rama …’
He grew still, then utterly motionless, remaining that way for a long frozen moment. A vein pulsed steadily on his neck, the only sign of life. Beside him, Lakshman’s breathing stopped too, his fluttering pupils slowing behind his eyelids, growing deathly still.
Rama opened his eyes. They glowed icy blue, their inhuman light reflected off the curved glass of a lantern suspended from the thatched roof.
Slowly, like a swan rising up from the surface of a lake, he got to his feet. On the floor, Lakshman resumed breathing with a harsh intake of breath.
Rama went to the open doorway of the hut, stood limned against the faintly lighter darkness of the doorway a moment, then stepped outside.
The ashram lay quietly asleep. At the far end of the sprawling compound, in the northernmost hut, brahmacharya acolytes tended the sacred yagna fire, keeping the chain of mantra recitation unbroken. Except for them, Siddh-ashrama was deserted and still, the rest of its hundred and six male occupants deeply asleep. They all dreamed the same shared nightmare that Lakshman was now dreaming. In an hour or two, the compound would swell with the noises of a hundred Brahmins, sadhus, rishis and brahmacharyas, going about the daily chores of a forest retreat. But for now, it may as will have been a graveyard.
Not a soul saw Rama emerge from the southernmost hut, pause a moment as if listening to some unheard voice, then turn to walk away from the ashram, through the vegetable grove and bamboo thicket that lay behind; and then, several hundred yards later, enter the deep, forbidding Vatsa jungle. The darkness parted like black velvet folds, enveloping the slender form, then closed around him. No sign remained of his passing.
In the hut, Lakshman’s breathing resumed a natural sleep pattern. His pupils began swirling behind closed lids again. He descended into the arms of familiar nightmares.
She was waiting for him in the darkness beneath a peepal tree. Silvery moonlight shrouded her like an enormous gauze veil. Her hair and eyes were raven black, her skin the shade of chalk. She stood amongst the wild peepal tendrils, singing softly in the still, silent jungle. A pair of lions nuzzled at her hand, feeding docilely on the savouries she held in her palm. He looked closely and saw that they were tiny squirming beings, perhaps an inch high apiece. He could hear them screaming tinnily. She fed them into the whiskered mouths of the lions. The beasts licked spots of blood off her milky fair hands.
She was naked, clothed only in the moonlight. There was something about that which disturbed him; it disturbed him more than the other things, but he could not understand why for several moments. Then it came to him: Holi purnima was eight nights ago. The moon couldn’t possibly be this bright and full tonight. It bothered him more than anything else about this dreamlike scenario.
She raised her head, as if noticing him only now, and smiled. Her teeth were as white as the pearls gifted to his father last winter by southern fishermen, pearls gleaned from the depths of the Banglar ocean. They gleamed dangerously in the moonlight. The lions parted their jaws sleepily, mirroring her smile. Their fangs were flecked with blood. In the maw of one, Rama could see the half-chewed bodies of those little beings– what were they?–still wriggling feebly. The lion growled softly and snapped its jaws shut, jerking its head as it swallowed down the remnants. Her tongue was black as coal, Rama saw. Her teeth, despite their pearly whiteness, were jagged and misshapen. It was a terrible smile, filled with the dark promise of certain destruction. A smile foretelling the end of all creation.
She gestured, calling to him.
He took a step forward. Then stopped.
She smiled.
‘Do not fear me. If I wished to harm you, the lions would know. They know everything that has been, and everything that will be.’
In perfect unison, the lions lowered themselves to the ground, resting their great heads on their paws, whiskers frisking her bare feet. He saw that each lion was old, beyond the measure of human reckoning. Almost as old as time itself.
‘Yes,’ she said. ‘And almost as old as I. For we three are one. Now come. There is something I wish you to see.’
He remained where he was for another moment. Then he looked up at the moon pointedly.
She laughed. A tinkling laugh, like the tiny silver bells of a woman’s anklet. Her belly shook, and a bright orange bird with yard-long yellow and green plumage emerged beak-first from her navel. It flew up screaming and was lost in the treetops. A chilli-green feather drifted down slowly, bobbing.
‘Do you fear the moon? You, Rama Chandra? He Who Has The Face Of The Moon Himself?’
He waited.
She inclined her head, exposing the delicate line of her long slender neck to the wash of moonlight. ‘This is true. It
should not be a full moon tonight. Awamas is almost upon us. Yet I wished to have light by which to see you more clearly. Does it trouble you? I should change it back if it pleases you.’
She raised her hand, prepared to reduce the moon to a sliver. He shook his head slowly. Then he shrugged.
She lowered her hand, then held it out to him, beckoning again. ‘Come then. You have nothing to fear from me. I do not hate all men. Only those who … but that does not concern us, here and now. Come.’
When he still didn’t respond, she lost her smile. Her eyes so dark in the shadows of the peepal boughs, flashed. Their light was the light of distant stars that have long since burned to white dust yet remain suspended in the trap of time and space for millennia uncounted; it was like looking into the heart of the sun at noonday.
‘Who are you?’ he asked.
She remained motionless. The lion to her left began to growl softly, its tail stiffening in warning. Rama saw her eyes sparkle softly, dangerously, in the shadows, glinting with a cold colourless light, like a fire trapped in obsidian ovals. A raven, jet black to the point of blueness, emerged tail-first from her navel, walked up her belly, and perched on her left breast, regarding Rama sullenly. Then, as the fire in her eyes died down, the raven rose without flapping its wings and shot directly upwards like an arrow aimed at the belly of the sky. The lion ceased growling and began swirling its tail slowly in lazy circles. It lowered its jowls to its paws again, eyes half-hidden by the wrinkled folds around them.
She replied, ‘What do you wish to know? My name? I have more names than there are words in any tongue. Some have been forgotten aeons before you people were created, some will not be spoken for aeons yet.’
He did not say anything. She tossed her head, her hair glinting with flame-bright sparkles. ‘The people of Eric the Norseman named me Frejya. The Inuits of the land that is always clothed in ice call me Sedna. In the land of Nippon, I am known as Amateras of the Sun. In Greece, Demeter of the Corn. In Egypt, they know me as Isis of the River. In times past and future, I have been and will be known as Tara, Coatlicue, Ishtar, Artemis and Shakti. These are but a few of my infinite names. Which would you like to call me?’
When he did not answer, she went on, ‘I am the life-bestower, nourisher, lover, comforter and, finally, life-taker. I am the mother-goddess who resides in dark caves and sits on pink lotuses surrounded by birds and beasts, spinning the web of life or kneading the earth with life-giving sap. Sometimes I am a man, for what else is a man but a woman who has altered her form to suit a different purpose? My friend here is portrayed as one lion or two, but also as a swan, a cow, or a pack of dogs. You see him as lions, and you see me as you see me now, because that is how you choose to see us. He is the masculine to my feminine, the completion of my circle and my first creation. Together we are I. I am all things to all beings.’
He spoke softly, neither apologetic nor arrogant. He knew that the first would elicit a loss of respect while the latter would entail a loss of his life. He said simply, ‘Devi, lead me where you will.’
She smiled again at last, this time revealing flawless pearl-white teeth dazzling to behold in the darkness. She stepped forward and raised her arm, now bedecked in a diaphanous garment of a fashion he had never seen before. He walked the few yards to her side and allowed her to take his arm, gripping it with both her hands as she walked him deeper into the forest. Without looking back, he knew that the lions did not follow. He had passed their scrutiny.
***
In the northernmost hut of Siddh-ashrama, Brahmarishi Vishwamitra was seated in the lotus posture. On the stoop of the hut two pre-pubescent brahmacharya acolytes sat chanting slokas alternately, maintaining a chain of recitation that had not ceased since the ashram’s inception, over a thousand years ago. They would be relieved in a few hours, at dawn, but for now their entire concentration was on the recitation. Not a syllable must be dropped or mispronounced.
Within the single room of the hut, a room bare of furnishings or adornments as befitted a holy man, the brahmarishi himself was neither asleep nor awake. He was in that yogic state of suspended animation known as yoganidra. The sleep of meditation; not truly a sleep, but a trance-like condition conducive to higher contemplation. His flowing white beard and tresses were evidence of his five millennia of intense tapas– literally, the heat generated by self-sacrifice. In this exalted state, he barely needed to draw breath, able to sustain his bodily needs by a mere wisp of air drawn every few hours, perhaps a sip of water taken once every day. Even that was voluntary. He could have remained without nourishment indefinitely if he chose to do so; indeed, he had only recently roused himself from a twohundred-and-forty-year penitential trance, necessary for achieving the spiritual goal he had set himself.
In times past, he had meditated thus in deep jungles, on icebound mountaintops, in flowing rivers in spate, even at the bottom of the ocean once. Nothing could break his yoganidra. The faint blue glow of Brahman shakti surrounded and protected him from all risks, physical, mental and spiritual. He had no need to chant mantras or slokas aloud; he had long since mastered the art of achieving silent, perfect harmony with the cosmic reverberations of supreme Om itself, the heartbeat of all creation.
Yet now, for only the second time in two hundred and forty years and a week, his concentration broke. It was by choice that it happened, yet that was no less a rarity. For it took a crisis of cosmic magnitude to rouse a seer-mage of Vishwamitra’s stature from even a single night’s meditation. His eyes opened, the blue light of Brahman flickering like cerulean lightning within their deep-set orbs. His lips parted, drawing a single minimal breath.
There was nobody to see his awakening. The two young acolytes outside on the stoop continued their recitation, unaware of the mighty forces swirling around the ashram this night.
Yet if anyone had been there to look into Vishwamitra’s opening eyes, they would have seen, for a fraction of an instant, a tiny reflected image on both his pupils. The kind of image that one might expect to see if the seer-mage had been staring at a
particular object.
It was the image of Rama entering the Vatsa jungle alone.
The brahmarishi spoke a single word, barely audible even in the stillness of the ashram. Against the sound of the rote incantation of the brahmacharyas, the word was an unseen drop in a rain-washed pool. Yet its echoes filled the universe.
‘Rama …’
TWO
Sita.
Whisper-smooth, silken-soft, feather-gentle. The voice caressed her as sensually as a peacock-feather fan. The erotic undertone was unmistakable: the speaker wanted her.
She blinked herself awake, thinking it was another of those strange disturbing dreams that left her oddly aroused and unable to sleep. She sometimes had them after listening to Sakuntaladaiimaa’s scarier stories–although she was the one who always coaxed and cajoled the ageing wet nurse to tell those gruesome tales. Never again, she swore now, shivering even though the winter chill had all but fled since Holi. No more scary stories after dark.
She reached up slowly, touching her face and upper body, making sure she really was awake and not dreaming. She could still feel the spot on the nape of her neck where he had breathed her name. She had felt the warmth of his breath before he spoke, as if he had been nuzzling her and had then whispered into her ear. She turned her head on the pillow, convinced that there would be a dark shadow looming beside the bed. A towering hulk of a man looking down at her from the darkness of a thick black cloak. And a cowl around his head that bulged impossibly wide to either side, a cowl pulled so low across his face that she could see nothing but his yellow eyes, gleaming like hot ingots in a goldsmith’s furnace.
But the corner by the bedstead was empty. As was the rest of the room. Of course it’s empty! What else did you expect? She smiled sleepily at the folly of her thoughts. A man? In her bedchambers? In the thick of night? Impossible! Her father was ferociously possessive of his daughters, and none of the
four jewels in his crown–as he proudly called them–was more precious than his eldest. At the time of her birth, Raja Janak had instituted a special division of female Kshatriyas, dubbing them ranirakshaks to remind them that they were exactly that, queen-protectors. They were oath-sworn to guard her with her life. They monitored her every action, rising or asleep, and checked every visitor and would-be visitor. Even now, she knew, they would be patrolling her palace in the traditional Mithila ring-formation, at all times within sight and sound of her presence. All she need do was whisper aloud, and they would be beside her, ready to give their lives in her service.
Especially Nakhudi. The amazonian chief of the clan would sooner die than allow a man to get within ten paces of her princess. Her queen, as she always calls me, even though I’m a long way from being crowned. Yes, Nakhudi would surely be outside the door of her chamber, only a few yards away.
At that thought, the last vestiges of trepidation faded away and she tossed her head carelessly, scornful now of her brief nervousness. A bad dream, that was all it was.
She sat up and was enveloped by the gossamer folds of the insect netting. Pushing the net away, she swung her feet out of bed. The red-tiled floor was deliciously cold against her sleep-warm soles, a sensation she loved. A gentle night breeze nudged the tied drapes of the open veranda, whispering softly. The princess gardens fronted the four-sectioned palace in which she and her sisters resided, keeping at bay the animal fetors and other cosmopolitan odours of the city. The breeze carried in only the sweet natural scents of the gardens, its blossoms just starting to bloom in this first blush of spring. She could make out the individual scents of her favourites, name each species and sub-species as authoritatively as Sadanand, the royal gardener. But right now she was content to simply breathe in the aromatic fragrances. A celebration of the new season. Before it ended, she would no longer be simply a princess, or even a crown princess. She would be a wife.
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