Holder of the World - Bharati Mukherjee [68]
Ravanna’s simple lust for her grows into love so potent and humbling that he offers to rid himself of his other wives, his riches and his monumental ego just for her acceptance and approval. Sita tells him that she scorns him as a swan scorns a crow. She negotiates a twelve-month moratorium, at the end of which period she knows that she will either be cannibalized by Ravanna or rescued by Rama. And Rama, with the able help of Hanuman and his monkey warriors, does rescue Sita. But while Mary Rowlandson’s freedom had cost twenty pounds in goods, Sita’s freedom is dearer. Scores of mortals and demons are slain, the villain is felled with a weapon borrowed from the gods, and a kingdom is laid waste.
The real difference between Mary Rowlandson and Sita, perhaps, is that Sita’s story doesn’t end with her rescue. The complications, the variations, are only beginning.
Sita’s reunion with Rama is brief and unhappy. To Rama her claim that she guarded her wifely honor from the attentions of her captor is not sufficient to absolve her of her crime of having allowed herself to be kidnapped and imprisoned. Worse, Sita chose survival instead of suicide while in prison. Ravanna has desired you and gazed upon your beauty. Honor has required me, your husband and king, to avenge this evil. Now the same honor requires me to renounce you.
Sita proves her purity to her husband and to her society in a trial by fire. The god of fire, Agni, embraces her and expels her unscorched.
Bhagmati always halted her recitation with Sita, embodiment of wifely virtues, stepping triumphantly out of the flames. It wasn’t censorship; it’s all that Bhagmati knew, or had ever been taught. Hannah couldn’t visualize the family reunion after that fiery ordeal. Did the Hindu Sita, like the Puritan Mary Rowlandson, question the rules that her husband had pledged to uphold? Could a woman who had strayed leagues and sea channels away from the restrictive protection of the white circle, who had traveled in flying chariots, resisted the heady courtship of a ten-headed demon, discovered the potency of self-reliance, return to the passive domesticities of her very young girlhood?
ORALITY, as they say these days, is a complex narrative tradition. Reciters of Sita’s story indulge themselves with closures that suit the mood of their times and their regions.
Venn’s mother, (Mrs.) Padma S. Iyer, M.B.B.S. (Vellore), M.D. (Johns Hopkins), who now operates her own fertility clinic in Boston, was born a half hour’s automobile ride from the old White Town of Fort St. George. Her version of Sita’s story ends with Sita throwing herself back into the fire (in Padma’s newfound vocabulary), “to spite Rama and the hegemonic rules of Rama’s kingdom, Ayodhya.”
Venn’s friend Jay Basu, who came from Calcutta to MIT only last year to work on the X-2989 project, was taught a more drawn-out conclusion by his grandmother. In his version, too, Sita passes the trial by fire. Rama, relieved, installs her in the palace as his queen and gladly fulfills his conjugal duties and passions. At night he lies awake torturing himself with imagined violations Ravanna may have committed on Sita. No, it’s worse: he can forgive Ravanna his rape. His fear is that Sita might have enjoyed it. After the first, no future lover leaves a mark: Rama doesn’t know.
Distrust, his own and that of his advisers, drives him to banish Sita, now pregnant with twin sons, to the forest. Years pass. Sita makes a life of pastoral contentment for herself. The twins grow up regal and strong. Remorse and loneliness bring Rama into the forest where he accidentally rediscovers Sita. Eager to restore serenity to himself, and his family to the palace where it belongs, he begs