Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [67]
In the long battle to free Sita from captivity in Lanka, Prince Rama is given crucial military help by General Hanuman and his monkey warriors. Hanuman, born of the wind god Parvana, has the power to fly, to seize clouds, uproot trees, relocate mountains. He can cross the waters that separate the tip of India from Lanka in one vigorous leap. He can torch the demon capital with his burning tail.
She had seen the rolling fire spreader those nights of her earliest memory. The stories of Bhagmati ignite the memories she has tried to suppress. Abduction, betrayal, vengeance. Like the Nipmuc, Hanuman can cure burns and battle wounds with his knowledge of the pharmacological properties of rare herbs, and he can sooth anguished hearts with his poetry.
If Hanuman was an artist-physician, Hannah is glad that Gabriel was fighting for, and not against, the temple-defending Nayak.
But more than the story of Hanuman, it is the story of Sita’s captivity that consumes Hannah. Rebecca had embraced her alien lover. Rebecca chose to stay in her Lanka with her Ravanna. But Mary Rowlandson, the virtuous Puritan woman, had been dragged from Lancaster. Did Sita step out of her fenced garden because she heard, as Hannah herself had only faintly heard in Salem but now heard louder on insomniac nights, a knocking on her door, as though every bird, every flower, every sail at the horizon’s edge were calling to her?
In Bhagmati’s honey-toned recitation Sita is the self-sacrificing ideal Hindu wife. But the shape she assumes in Hannah’s fantasies is of a woman impatient to test herself, to explore and survive in an alien world.
Hannah finds herself attracted to the events in Sita’s life. Like Hannah, Sita was a foundling. The Fitches recovered her from their doorstep; a childless king, Janaka, had unearthed the girl infant with his plow and named her Sita, or “furrow.” Sita adjusted to life as a king’s adopted daughter and a prince’s wife as willingly as Hannah had to her girlhood in Salem. And then, because of machinations against her husband, her life changes abruptly. She has to choose between continuing her life in a palace wracked with malice, jealousy and intrigue or breaking away and trying out new surroundings and whatever they will bring.
Sita chooses the new, and new temptations. She banishes herself from court life and sets up pastoral domesticity free of court customs and taboos. But one day she sees a beautiful deer grazing outside the hut. She has to own that deerskin; it is a passion such as she has never known.
Bhagmati had her way of stopping the tale, of extending her fingers in every direction as if to say, “Hedges-sa’ab. He had to have.” And Hannah got the intended message: in attachment is death.
Sita pleads and nags Rama into pursuing the animal deep into the forest. Rama, ever alert to dangers, even, perhaps, aware that Sita’s lust is unnatural, makes his brother pledge himself as Sita’s protector. And, of course, the deer is a demon in disguise dispatched by Ravanna. As Rama’s arrow pierces the demon-deer’s throat, it utters a cry for help in Rama’s voice so loud that it is heard by Lakshman and Sita in the hut. Sita, again driven by new emotions—this time fear and rage rather than greedy longings—forces Lakshman to break his pledge to protect her and go off to Rama’s rescue.
Before leaving, Lakshman draws a white circle around the hut within which Sita is to confine herself, and be safe, while she is alone. White Circle, White