“'I am not Rama, who would accept a woman who had spent a year in the captivity of the most despicable Ravana, and who could have done anything to her!”
– Washerman to his wife, the Uttarakāṇḍa of the Ramayana (Ramayana, Valmiki, 1959: 335-336)
If Sita had a trial by way of the people and not of fire, she would see: the agonized faces of her sisters, her brothers-in-law shielding their palpable shame, Ravana with his wife and sister, her mothers-in-law beside them, the washerman and his wife, and Ram, at the head, expression as cool as ice. Golden earrings dangle from his earlobes; an aureate necklace rests against his sternum, only revealing his rapid heartbeat as the jewel jumps with the pulse, to his sister-in-law Urmila. “Come, Janaki," commands Lakshman, who holds the wife of his elder brother deep in his heart, “and speak.”
Discovered in the furrow of the earth, Sita can feel her true mother stir beneath her feet as she rises from her seat. The harsh torchlight lances off her husband’s dark eyes, hard and unforgiving. He sits high above her, burnished gleaming brown from his long travels in the jungles of Lanka, hacking through dewy wet vines with an impatient army at his back for her. Sita cannot tell what he is thinking, this inscrutable, unfeeling king. “I was untouched by Ravana,” she says, voice quivering, “in my long captivity. The child in my belly is my husband’s, not his.”
What man of honor would indulge his passion so far as to take back a woman who has dwelled in the house of another?
“There are rumors, otherwise, my lady,” Ram objects, voice cold like the Ganga in winter, crystallized to the bones. He is like a total stranger. The man who embraced her in Lanka is a ghost, the sweet scent of sandalwood that rose from his clothes vanishing. “I'll have nothing more to do with you. What man of honor would indulge his passion so far as to take back a woman who has dwelled in the house of another? I no longer have any attachment to you. Go where you like… go to Lakshmana or Bharata, Shatrughna, Sugriva, or the demon Vibhishana. Make your choice, whoever pleases you most.”
“Elder brother, let her at least make a statement,” Lakshman interjects, quelling his revulsion at the king’s cruelty. I am second to him, he half-shouted to her in the forest, when she had done what she had done to him in Dandakaranya, how can I take what is his? You, who made me break my devotion? How true had it been? Had there been violence there too, beneath his flesh, ready to take her, after Ram had gone to pursue the golden deer she had begged him for? “Do you promise, before the gods, your father, and husband, to speak the truth?”
Saltwater tends to burn the throat.
“Yes.” Sita wishes she did not sound so desperate. Inadvertently, her gaze casts towards the rakshasa Ranava, who refuses to look at her, too. Mandodari meets her eyes instead, a complicated emotion struggling inside those pretty irises. Does she hate her or pity her, Sita wonders dazedly. Being the wife of a demon who so easily lends his body like a whore is not as simple as drinking freshwater. Saltwater tends to burn the throat. Beside her, Shurpanakha reaches over to clutch her hand; the rakshasi has a veil on, the wound on her ugly face safely hidden. “Those who slander me are false. If there is further doubt, I can show the child when it is born.”
A hushed whisper ripples across the court. Indeed, a babe with golden-brown skin to the hideous dark of Ravana is proof enough. Who else would dare to raise their tongue against the queen of Ayodhya, if she proved her chastity? “What say you, dhobi?” Ravana unexpectedly speaks up, laughing at the washerman. “If Sita bears the king’s child? Will your man keep you?”
The young husband, despite his foul tongue and sour look, pales. He is nothing, a pest in the eyes of his superiors and lords. The washerwoman claps her palms over her ears, and Sita realizes he is addressing the poor girl, instead. A savageness rises up inside her, as she thinks of the parrots from the ashram, the female parrot expiring out of despair after she had let only the male parrot go, and his anger at her. Oh, blessed lady, as you have taken my mate from me when she was about to bear our chicks, so will you be separated from your husband in your hour of need! Those dark, beady eyes glower at her from within the washerman’s face, sunken and sullen. Sita is sick of hypocrisy. “Ravana, what right do you have to mock her? You, who tricked me and took me from my husband?”
What right did Prince Lakshman have, in slicing my sister’s face?
The rakshasa abruptly stops smiling. A vein pops in his neck. For a moment, the monstrosity of his appearance dissipates into thin air, and Sita also sees the shadow of Ram stir behind his eyes. Overwhelmed, she turns to check if her husband has not shapeshifted. Seeing things is a bad omen, the priests would murmur. “Right?” Ravana scoffs. “You Brahmins and Kshatriyas really are full of yourselves. What right did Prince Lakshman have, in slicing my sister’s face? What right did all of you have, for coming into our forests and our homes, when we have lived here for centuries, and taking it? What right did you have, to keep the boot on the necks of those dhobis?”
“So, you would take another man’s wife?” Brahmin noblemen begin to scream from the rows, and Ram has to magnify his voice above the noise, leaping up to his feet with his jangling jewelry. He is fearsome, in all his earthliness and godliness combined. “What a monster you are, Ravana.”
“You say so, and yet you doubt her virtue?” the rakshasa sneers, to the horror of his womenfolk. “Because of a so-called mere washerman?”
“His word means something, in this court of law.” Lakshman tries to be the better man. “And so does yours.”
Ravana rises, matching Ram’s indignant stance. “So, now it matters?”
Like smoke, the women of the room evaporate; there is nothing but the yoke of the gods...
Sita knows the rage there, having felt it for two years, the suppressed tremble of fury that passed through the lean body when every night, he would ask her to be his wife, and every night, she would reject him. Like smoke, the women of the room evaporate; there is nothing but the yoke of the gods—the trial has concluded, on Lord Vishnu’s word. Sita will be exiled a second time to the forest, Ravana executed. In terror, the washerwoman trails after her husband, casting glances at the dark-blue glow emanating from her king. The Brahmin noblemen and their Kshatriya soldiers angrily depart, knocking into the two dhobi, and not even apologizing when Shurpanakha is shoved onto the floor. Ram has his head in his hands, and he only, weakly, stands up when the courtroom has emptied.
“Oh, Lakshman, in this birth, you served me so well and did your duties as a younger brother,” says Ram wearily, coming down from the dais and grasping his brother’s thin shoulder, “so I will do the same in my next birth as your younger brother.”
“I have nothing to say to you, elder brother.” Lakshman’s voice shakes, but he is brave. The touch of his own blood incinerates his soul, like a sinful rash. “What do you gain from this, other than more pain? Does it not hurt to banish your wife? To make Lady Mandodari a widow? To leave Lady Shurpanakha without any support? To have your child raised in the jungle? The rakshasas and the laborers are angry, and will continue to be angry. You have done nothing but sow more sadness that will continue down the generations.”
...do not be surprised, Ram, if more Ravanas come to haunt you.
Ram lets go, in deep surprise. His little brother has never disobeyed him, except once, that day in the forest when he heeded Sita and came after him. “You yourself sliced Shurpanakha’s nose. ‘Tis hardly my fault she is so vengeful.”
“To protect my sister-in-law! But I regret it,” he cries bitterly. “I regret it all. All of this… do not be surprised, Ram, if more Ravanas come to haunt you. Violent and lustful as he is, against our sisters and daughters and our female citizens … in the end, your own sins will come against you.”
In the next life, Lord Vishnu’s avatar, Lord Krishna, has grown old, after an existence of mischief and war. Gandhari’s curse sits upon him like a duvet. He is sleeping soundly below the canopy of a forest, when a hunter shoots the heel of his foot. From the shadows, a beautiful golden deer bounds through the copse of trees, as the younger brother of this birth dies.
Cultural Note: Hinduism does not have a definitive text like the Christian Bible. There are a million variations of a singular myth, so the one presented here is one of the “majority”, one that is the most frequently told. Reincarnation is perhaps the most major topic in Hindu mythology. Sita undergoes trial by fire after her rescue by Rama and Ravana’s defeat, and is later turned away in a second exile after the trial, but I combined both here for dramatic purposes. Due to its long history, many of the mythologies in Hinduism are often analyzed as allegories; the rakshas are theorized to represent the indigenous peoples of the Indian Subcontinent (“Adivasi”), before the Indo-Aryans arrived and imposed their caste systems and religion, and the royal characters as representatives of the ‘clean, pure’ versions of high-caste Brahmin and Kshatriya castes. For further reading, “Durga did not kill Mahishasur’: Hindus, Adivasis and Hindutva” by Moumita Sen is a good start.
