It took Rama, Sita and Lakshmana a matter of months to master the art of living in exile. Naturally, their life was simple. As they travelled through the forests, they encountered different kinds of birdsong; Sita would note the changing flora and fauna, marking the beginning and turn of a season, and time. They met travellers, and never once disclosed their identity so that they could meet life as it is, not as if it was a royal pageant. They decided that they would camp in a particular forest for at least six months and then move on.
A few years passed, and Rama was grateful to have Sita beside him. She made him see things in a different light. Lakshmana offered other perspectives on viewing life. It made him realize all the more the different kinds of habitats, not only of animals but of tribes, people who lived rejecting society or conventions of a community, and how people might be compelled to act in certain ways according to their circumstances. They met boatmen, fishermen, hunters and ascetics, but one encounter was truly different.
After Bharatha’s departure, Rama, Sita and Lakshmana could not bear being in the forest known as Chitrakuta. It seemed the closure of one chapter and they decided to move to another forest. The season was also turning. It was no longer fresh, holding the breath of basant’s spring and new blossom. With the rising heat and humidity, flowers hung heavy, their scent strong and heady, but drooped lifelessly in a short while. On other trees, it was time when fruit were ripening. The buffaloes drove themselves into ponds and lakes to keep cool, slick with mud. It was a job for forest dwellers and villagers alike to get the buffaloes out of their water stations so that they could be milked! This was the season of Greeshma. Afternoons were hot and sultry when the best thing to do was slip into a heavy sleep and sweat. On waking, the southern breeze would dry the beads of sweat and that kept one cool.
The three of them now entered a forest. It seemed clearer than the ones they had just travelled. There were groves of clusters of five different kinds of trees. Vata (ficus benghalensis, Banyan), Ashvattha (ficus religiosa, Peepal), Bilva (aegle marmelos, Bengal Quince), Amalaki (phyllanthus emblica, Indian Gooseberry, Amla), Ashoka (Saraca asoca, Ashok), Udumbara (ficus racemosa, Cluster Fig, Gular), Nimba (Azadirachta indica, Neem) and gave the forest its name: Panchavati. Many were with low boughs and branches that spread wide and close on the ground.
Lakshmana swiftly used the low boughs as a scaffold and with Rama, they built two dwellings; Lakshmana’s camouflaged watchtower was attached to his dwelling. Panchavati was so calm after all they had been through, and Sita cheerfully made this her home. She began to name plants and flowers and their fruits. Rama would take in the late afternoon flurry of birdsong and squirrel fights and tap a soft percussive rhythm on his bow to the low grizzle of tigers in the distance.
One day, he was completely captivated by the emerald, green dance of the parrots. Their shrieks were echoing in response to the mating calls of the monkeys. In the dappled sunlight, the green wings and bright pink beaks of the parrots darting through the trees was an enchanting choreography. Absorbed in this scene, he must have let his guard slip.
Someone, unknown to any of them, was watching him. It so happened that there was a visitor in Panchavati. She was a demon who wanted to investigate the calm of the forest and demolish it. That was her nature and her job description as a professional demon rakshasa. But she caught sight of Rama. “Now he is worth my attention,” she thought. It was Soorpanakha. She did not want to eat him, even though eating while demolishing was part of the perks of her job; instead, she wanted to approach Rama as a lover. What amazing courage. She was going against her nature and her job description. In the midst of the calm that Rama, Sita and Lakshmana had created, she experienced human feelings of joy stir within her. Feeling happiness she had not known before, she wanted to share it, in her way, by making an offer of love of a different kind.
Love is blind, we have heard before; often we are blinded by our own love, thinking that the object of our love must love us back. The slight problem is that demons and humans have different attractions. Humans are fussy about good looks. Humans don’t like a “come as you are person” offering love. They like it all dressed up. Soorpanakha knew this about humans. She looked at herself, what did she look like?
She had a face that was shaped like a circle about sixteen feet in diameter. Her mouth was another circle about three feet in diameter when shut. When it opened, there was one sabretooth that could stretch like a telescope to a length of twenty feet. She had one eye in the centre of her forehead. Below the eye was a bulbous nose. Her lips were a lush red, darkened by the blood of the freshly killed animals and humans that she had flung into her mouth on one of her demolition patrols. She had no neck and her head was on top of a mountain of a body that could be drawn in six circles, each wider than the other. Strangely, although her feet looked large and heavy with curving toenails that were useful in gouging the intestines from her prey, she was light-footed. Her toes faced backwards, and her heels faced forwards. She had to be light on her feet to capture her prey. This wasn’t all. Her hair was twenty-nine and three-quarter feet long. In its knots and tangles were mud and slime, and snails and scorpions, and water snakes. From her ears, the wax stood out like fossilized cones, hosting creatures that are now well extinct.
Yes, it does take courage to go up to someone and insist on having their love, when all that person would feel is the shock of death!
But Soorpanakha was a senior mistress rakshasa demon in the art of illusion and disguise. After all, she was the sister of her favourite and imperial brother Ravana.
Rama, transfixed by the dance of the parrots suddenly caught Sita mischievously looking at him as if to say, ‘That was the way you looked at me when our eyes met on that street in Mithila! Now, something else has caught your attention I can see!’ He acknowledged her thought by grinning and as he pointed to the parrots, suddenly his senses were filled with an opiate perfume. And then, she appeared. Soorpanakha. But not the way you and I saw her a few moments ago. She was now the queen of distraction. She was five feet tall and had doe-like eyes heavily lined with kohl so the whites of her eyes looked like crescent moons. Her lips were red with the dye of betel nut leaves. Her hair was lustrous in ebony tresses and reached down to her full hips, swinging like a pendulum when she walked. She was dressed in the finest yellow silk from her waist to her feet. Her bodice was a parrot green silk embroidered with precious diamonds and rubies encircled in paisleys of pearls. Around her shoulders, she had a diaphanous silk dupatta in a mother-of-pearl colour that made her shoulders gleam with the colours of the rainbow in the afternoon light.
Excerpted with permission from The Living Legend: Ramayana Tales From Far and Near, Vayu Naidu, Penguin India.
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