A Week in Translations: The Liberation of Sita

an excerpt from…

THE REUNION

She saw a woman at some distance. Though her face was turned away, Sita could tell it was Surpanakha.

She went closer and called out gently, ‘Surpanakha!’

Surpanakha turned around. She did not recognize Sita.

‘Who are you, amma? Have you lost your way? How do you know my name?’ she asked.

‘I have not lost my way, Surpanakha. I have come looking for the right path. I’m Sita.’

Surpanakha was stunned.

Sita? Is she Sita? How much she has changed!

Surpanakha only knew the Sita covered in jewellery. Moreover, she had never taken a close look at her.

Is this Sita, the consort of Chakravarthi Sri Ramachandra, who slayed Ravana and extended the Aryan Empire across the entire south?

Surpanakha could not believe it.

Why this coarse sari? Why these garlands for jewellery? Why this sun-singed golden complexion?

Is she Sita? Sri Rama’s wife, Sita?

‘Sita—you mean, Sri Ramachandra’s …’

Stopping Surpanakha before she could complete the question, Sita said with quiet dignity, ‘I am Sita. I am Janaka’s daughter, Janaki. I am the daughter of Mother Earth.’

‘What about Sri Rama?’ Surpanakha was confused.

‘Sri Rama has abandoned me. I’m now living in Valmiki’s ashram.’

Surpanakha had no words to speak. Sri Rama abandoned Sita! Surpanakha knew about the love between Sita and Rama better than anyone else. And the price she had paid for it, too, was not small.

Was anguish inevitable for women who love Sri Rama?

On Sita’s face, Surpanakha could only see peace and dignity; there was no trace of distress.

Sita has matured a lot, thought Surpanakha.

‘Yesterday, my children saw your garden. They saw you too. Today, they brought me here. Your garden is so beautiful and peaceful,’ said Sita with a smile.

‘Were those your boys? How charming they were!’ Surpanakha said.

A fleeting expression of pride crossed Sita’s face. It did not miss Surpanakha’s attention.

‘All the creepers, plants and trees in this garden are my children,’ Surpanakha said.

‘Yes, that’s why they’re so beautiful!’ agreed Sita.

Pride stood firm in Surpanakha’s eyes.

‘Tell me, Surpanakha, how has your life been?’

‘As beautiful and joyous as this garden.’

‘I am happy to hear that, Surpanakha. I was worried about you after the humiliation you suffered. I knew how you hankered after beauty; I was worried that, unable to accept your own mutilation, you might have resorted to something extreme. I was troubled by such thoughts whenever I remembered you.’

Surpanakha was moved by the kindness and affection in Sita’s eyes.

A feeling of friendship sprouted in their hearts and thrilled them.

‘You’re a brave woman,’ Sita said.

Sita’s sincere words of appreciation overwhelmed Surpanakha. She felt a strong desire to narrate the course of her life to Sita.

‘Don’t look at how I am today and imagine that all this happened easily, Sita. I have become tough by facing upto the challenges life threw at me. I have been able to find happiness in trying to understand the very meaning of beauty.

‘My life was unbearable in the initial days after the mutilation.

‘I loathed my own appearance. I hated myself. There were also days when I even wanted to kill myself.

‘I want beauty. I want love. I can’t live without them. But I, who was such a worshipper of beauty, was turned into an ugly figure.

‘Looking at my ugliness, men—all the handsome men that I desired—used to abhor me.

‘Those days were hellish. I saw no point in living. My heart burned with pain and anger every single day. How much I cursed Sri Rama, his brother Lakshmana and you! I spewed venom at all of you. There was not a trace of love left in me; hate had gripped my heart. I, who loved beauty, began hating everything that was beautiful. My love of beauty turned into jealousy of all those who were beautiful.

‘I became a walking volcano. A stormy sea of grief.’

Their hearts grew heavy with the recollection of Surpanakha’s painful memories.

‘How did you come out of such sorrow, Surpanakha?’

‘It was hard. It was hard finding the real meaning of beauty. I was so proud of my beauty. You don’t know how much I adored my nose. The sharp noses of you, Aryans, looked strange to me. There’s beauty in strangeness, too, of course. My nose was neither sharp nor flat. It was, I thought, exactly how Eshwar must have conceived the perfect nose in the beginning of Creation. I was so proud of my nose! I used to adorn it with yellow and white wild flowers which shone like stars on either side. When my lovers tenderly kissed the tip of my nose, it used to arouse me.

‘No one except I will understand what it meant to lose such a nose. I endured all that misery. I endured the burden of all those perverted thoughts that arose out of my disfigurement. Sometimes I felt like disfiguring everyone, everything.

‘To come out of that spitefulness, to love beauty once again, to understand the essence of form and formlessness—I had to wage a huge battle against myself. My only collaborator in that battle was this infinite nature.

‘I struggled a lot to grasp that there is no difference between beauty and ugliness in nature. I observed many living creatures and understood that movement and stillness are one and the same. I discovered the secrets of colours. I had no guru in this matter. I pursued it on my own. I searched every particle in nature, and in the course of that search, my own vision has changed. Everything began to look beautiful to my eyes. I, who hated everything including myself, began to love everything including myself.

‘To recognize that the response evoked in me by a little bird, which had been pecked and displumed by its fellow birds, was a feeling at once of love and beauty, and to seize that response and understand its meaning— the effort I made to achieve all this was extraordinary.

‘Gradually I learned to love my hands. I learned how to create, work and serve with those hands. It took more than ten years for all this to happen. After ten years of rigorous practice and hard work bore fruit, I began growing this garden.’