The Ramayana (49 page)

He heard heavy breathing within, and gingerly he glided through the shadows right up to its entrance. He saw the flickering light of the torches, which dimly lit the cloister. He heard the sound of snoring, and then someone sigh softly. In a flash, Hanuman darted his little head round the arched ingress. His eyes grew round and his heart gave a lurch. Her yellow silk was soiled, her face was stained with tears, and she sighed from time to time amidst the rakshasis who lay asleep around her. But she shone in that shrine like a wafer of the moon, and there was no doubt in the vanara's mind. This was Rama's love, this was Sita!

She had not eaten properly for days. But if anything, her beauty was heightened by her plight; it smoldered like fire hidden by ashes. Her face was tear-stained and unwashed. But not for a moment could any of Ravana's queens within their secure chambers, not even Mandodari by a long way, have held a candle to Sita. She had cast away all her ornaments and sat drooping like a wilted lotus. But she was the most beautiful woman Hanuman had seen, and would ever see.

Her great eyes were full of disbelief at what she now endured. Nothing in her sequestered past had prepared her for these brutal days and nights. Even as Hanuman watched, riveted, unable to tear his gaze from her, tears flowed down her face. Then, as if she sensed his presence in the shadows, she stiffened. She stared anxiously around her, and his heart nearly broke with the terror he saw in those gentle eyes.

Like a black snake, her hair trailed behind her, twisted into a single limp braid. Hanuman thought breathlessly, “Even like this she is more beautiful than I had imagined, more lovely than Rama described her as being. Though dirt and sorrow stain her face, the night shines with her beauty. Beloved of all the world is she who sits grieving on the bare ground because of the Rakshasa's cruelty. Ravana must pay with his life for what he has done.”

His mind was a whirl. “Truly, she belongs with Rama; no other will do for her or for him. How do they live without each other? Their love is so strong it prevents them from dying of grief.”

A breath of that sorrow touched Hanuman's imagination, and he shivered. “Only Rama could stay alive after being separated from this Goddess.”

Hanuman thought worshipfully about Rama, as if only now, seeing Sita pining for him, did he begin to understand the prince of Ayodhya. He prostrated himself before Rama in his mind, and cried silently up at the stars, “Rama, Lord, I have found your Sita!”

Then he also fetched a deep, deep sigh, and said softly to himself, “Fate is powerful indeed. Look at Sita, so lovely, so chaste, and yet she suffers as the wicked never seem to. Ravana's haughty queen sleeps peacefully in her bed and so does the Rakshasa himself. Rama and the mighty Lakshmana were her guardians in the forest, and still she was taken. Such are the ways of fate, irresistible; or, perhaps, such is the beauty of Sita.

“Vali died of this fate, or for her beauty, and Kabandha. Rama killed fourteen thousand rakshasas, when Surpanaka turned on Sita. For Sita's sake I have leaped across an ocean, and I would not wonder if Rama stands the universe on its head for her; for she is the rarest jewel in all of it. Oh, nothing in the three worlds can compare with Sita's beauty.”

Hanuman reflected on her character, more immaculate than her beauty. “She could have had any man or king, every luxury. She could have had the Devas at her disposal, had she been inclined to. But she followed Rama into the jungle, and she was happier there with him than she had ever been. Look at her now. What has she done to deserve the torment she suffers, the grief that savages her?

“She does not notice the charms of this asokavana. She is blind to everything save the vision in her heart, of Rama's face.”

For a while he watched her weep silently. Then, fearful of the rakshasis who lay around her, and he saw two that were awake, he crept away into the night. Hanuman climbed back into his shimshupa tree. His heart overcome equally by pity and rage, and his body by great exhaustion, the little monkey fell asleep in a cleft branch of that tree.

 

6. In the asokavana

Dawn broke over the horizon, and the first shafts of pale light divided the sleeping ocean, full of dreams, from Ravana's island. Hanuman in his tree heard the Vedas being chanted loudly and was startled awake. Within his palace, Ravana had also awakened early. The image he woke with was of Sita's perfect face; he had dreamed of her all night.

The Lord of Lanka rose from his bed. He had no eyes for Mandodari, who, as she lay asleep with her lips a sigh apart, was a picture of sweet seduction. He pulled on the fresh robes of white silk laid out for him. Putting on a necklace and golden bracelets, so brilliant they dispelled the last straggles of night that lingered wistfully in the world, he left his apartment. He strode through interminable passages and arrived by his own private entrance in the asokavana where his heart lay captive.

But as he went like a storm through the antapura's passages, there were others already awake: lovely women, who had dreamed of his virile face and form. They wanted a few moments with him, if not in their beds, at least like this, out in the open. All along his way through the harem, they approached him with soft caresses; but he strode impatiently along. Those women followed him to the asokavana, in a small throng. Some brought chamaras to fan him with; others held lamps to light his way, since the corridors were still dark.

Like Indra surrounded by his apsaras, Ravana came out into the crisp dawn. Not looking left or right, without a glance at the silken sea that lay like a languorous woman herself below Lanka, the Rakshasa made straight for the little shrine of the white pillars, where Sita sat sleepless and distraught.

Hanuman hid himself behind a screen of leaves and peered down at Ravana. Now he saw even more plainly how magnificent the Rakshasa was: tall and dark, handsome as Kamadeva. His white robe was like froth at the crest of the turbid sea of presence and power that was Ravana. In his time, Hanuman had seen other kings of the world, but never one nearly as arresting, as awesome, as this emperor. Greatness sat lightly on those rippling shoulders; fame and measureless authority radiated from his central face. Ravana had the power to make his cluster of nine heads become invisible at will. At dawn today, he came out with just one face showing, because he did not want to risk repelling Sita.

For all the dark majesty it wore, Ravana's face was haggard and careworn. The single-mindedness with which he stalked to the little temple in the asokavana cried out that great Ravana was strangely vanquished: that his vast kingdom meant less to him than the woman who sat sorrowing within that retreat. She had become all the kingdom he wanted, all his heaven and earth. Ravana breathed the image of Sita; he slept and woke in her obsession.

From his perch, Hanuman could see into the little temple. He saw Sita grow pale, when she knew Ravana had arrived. Swiftly, in a reflex of fear and shame, she covered her body with her hands. Like frightened birds, her eyes flew this way and that, avoiding his smoldering stare as he came and stood tall and ominous before her.

He drank deeply of the sight of her with his red gaze. He did not appear to notice how disheveled she was, or the dirt that streaked her tear-stained face. Before him Ravana, master of the worlds, saw only his hopes, his life, his heaven and hell; and if he had known it, his death as well. She stared down at the bare earth she sat upon. She was like a branch, blossom-laden, but cut away from her mother tree, and sorrowing on the ground.

Ravana sighed. In his voice like somnolent thunder, he said, “Whenever I come here, you try to hide your beauty with your hands. But for me any part of you I see is absolutely beautiful. You are the perfect woman; beauty begins with you. Honor my love, Sita, and you will discover how deep it is. My life began when I first saw you, but you treat me, so cruelly.”

She said nothing, never raised her eyes up to him. Hanuman, little monkey in his tree, trembled with what he saw and heard.

“You say it was dishonorable for me to abduct you; but you forget I am a rakshasa. It is natural, and so entirely honorable, for me to take another man's wife if I want her. It is even honorable for me to force myself on her if I choose. That is a rakshasa's nature, and his dharma.”

Sita gasped. At once Ravana regretted what he had said. He went on more gently, “I will never force myself on you, because I love you. I will wait for you to return my love, to give yourself to me willingly. You are my day and my night, and all my dreams. I feel I was never alive until I saw your face.

“Abandon this wretched grief; you were born to be a queen of queens. It does not suit you to sit on the bare floor like this, with your clothes soiled, your hair unwashed, your face covered by a screen of dirt, and starving yourself almost to death. When he made you, Brahma crowned his long quest of creation. You are the woman he labored through the ages to make. No man, no Deva or gandharva, why, not Brahma himself, can resist your beauty. No blame attaches to me for loving you as I do. The fault lies not in my love, but in your perfection.”

Color, a flush of shame, touched her cheeks as if his words were fire in her ears. It was not her Rama who spoke them, but they came unhindered into her hearing.

“Wherever I look, asleep or awake, I see your face. Even when I am dead, I know my eyes will see nothing else. I do not ask you to return my love with the same passion I have for you. Not even a shadow of it. I only ask you to begin to think kindly of me, to care for me a little. I beg you, come and rule my palace as my only queen. All the others will serve you as sakhis, even Mandodari. I will be your servant.

“Everything that is mine shall be yours. Time and again, I have vanquished the Devas and gandharvas in battle. Apart from what they bring me as tribute, I have taken untold wealth from them. The rarest silks, and jewels you cannot dream of, will be yours, even as they should. They will adorn your perfect body as they were made to. All my endless kingdom will be yours; only, set aside this stubborn grief.

“Sita, fate is all-powerful. You and I were created for each other. Why else would you have come to me at all, by the long and winding way that you did? Brahma intends that we should be together. Don't resist the will of God. Shed your grief, my love. Bathe, and put on the finest silks on earth. Adorn yourself with the most precious ornaments in the three worlds. And let me look at you, ah, let me feast my eyes on you!”

He was helpless for this insane love. Already, whenever he was able to tear his thoughts away from Sita and consider what he had plunged into, Ravana realized it was no less than his death he courted so ardently. Six months of the year he had given her to yield to him had passed, and she was as obdurate as ever. Each time he came to her she gave him the same answer, and with each visit to the asokavana his obsession grew, and his despair.

Ravana had no joy or peace any more in the arms of his wives. Out of old habit, he had made love to them, desultorily, for the first month Sita was in Lanka. But he found such aridness in these couplings that he gave up seeking to quench his fatal desire elsewhere. He had not been in Mandodari's bed for five months, and the others could not hope to tempt him at all.

Initially, his frustration when he saw Sita so lovely before him, and so unattainable, would drive Ravana into a frenzy. He would growl and scream at her. But soon he grew calmer; for the first time in his life, he began to resign himself to his own helplessness. He realized the only way into her heart was if she decided to give herself to him.

He had exhausted all his arguments of power, wealth, and virility. He persisted in them only out of habit; there was no conviction in him any longer when he boasted to her. At last, he knew all he had to offer this most exceptional woman was his love. And while doing her best not to be cruel, because she saw that he loved her in his dreadful way, she spurned him over and over again.

Now, out of habit, Ravana said, “What can he give you that I cannot? You are denying your own nature, Sita. Other women have been brought here as spoils of war, as frightened as you were when you first came, more so. But when they knew me, none of them resisted me for more than a week. None, once they tasted my love, ever wanted to leave me. You are stubborn. It is only stubbornness and fear, not love, which bind you to your Rama.

“He is not my equal, in wealth or power, valor, or even tapasya. Forget your wandering hermit. By now he has lost his mind from sorrow. Be sensible, as your humankind always is. Just think there is no hope of Rama ever seeing you again, no hope that he can cross the ocean that separates Lanka from Bharatavarsha. Give up your stubbornness; it is all you have to lose.”

His eyes roved over her slender form, and they blazed. He whispered, “Oh, Sita, give yourself to me! I will love you as women only dream of being loved. Rule my heart, and be queen of the worlds as you were born to be. We will walk hand in hand in this asokavana and you will discover the meaning of happiness.”

But again she picked up the long blade of grass and set it between herself and him like a naked sword. She said, “I am the wife of another man, Rakshasa, and my husband is my life. How can you even think of me as becoming yours, when I am already given to Rama? Given not only for this life, but forever, for all the lives that have been, and all those to come. I have always belonged to Rama, and always will. You have many beautiful women in your harem; don't you keep them from the lustful gazes of other men? How is it, then, you cannot conceive that I would be true to my Rama? That it is natural for me, because I love him.”

He looked away from her. Not that he saw anything except her face, even when he did. But he could not bear what she said. Never had he encountered such chastity, and to believe in it would mean denying everything he had lived for. A smile curving his dark lips, Ravana turned his gaze from her.

But Sita went on, undaunted. “You court death for yourself and your kingdom. Have you no wise men in your court, who advise you against your folly?”