Free Sita's Ascent by Vayu Naidu

were multiple
     questions that had to be answered instantly. Valmiki, as a poet, saw the boys as
     phrases, sounds, sentences budding from an image and slowly he started to see them
     as Sita did. Here were two young boys, in flesh and blood, who unravelled
     life’s potential in every passing moment. If Lava was more interested in
     following Valmiki around and capturing sounds and exercising his lung power in
     reciting the improvised slokas, then Kusa would stay close to the women, using his
     tiny hands to be initiated into making herbal paste and sniffing the combination of
     ingredients. Kusa delighted in squelchingand combining many
     unguents to daub himself. His various stages of anointment were received with
     Urmilla’s ‘Aeyee! That was meant for dry and wrinkled
     skin!’ or ‘No, no, that’s not to be eaten,
     it’s for healing eye infections!’ and concluded with washing and
     drying, accompanied by hugs and a chorus of endearments. He had a tactility that
     Sita found herself being drawn towards, even if he was not her own flesh and
     blood.
    One day Lava was out with Valmiki and
     Urmilla to learn how to make handheld catapults to knock guavas down from very high
     branches as the parrots had ravaged the fruit on the lower ones. Sita was in the
     kitchen. She had carefully swept with her hands the dry lentils that had spilled on
     the mud floor when she was measuring them to cook dal. She was on her haunches and
     was flicking a few lentils from her fingernails when Kusa, who was playing with the
     chapatti dough, asked, ‘Amma, how were you born?’ Sita blinked.
     ‘Of course, yesterday was the boy’s birthday, celebrated
     together with Lava’s.’ Sita had told them the story of how they
     were born, being economical with the truth as Lava and Kusa had come to regard
     themselves as identical and inseparable twins. While they looked identical, their
     emerging personalities emphasized different aspects of longing and fulfilment,
     endurance and resourcefulness that were also known to be strong aspects of Sita.
    As she was wondering how to answer Kusa,
     so many memories came tumbling back to her that she could not make out which were
     real and which imagined. But within the shafts of the images she remembered, within
     each one of them, she realized there was a story that had to be told, and a story
     that had to be handed down to the boys as a chronicle of their origins. What was the
     story that she remembered about herself that she could tell Kusa? What was the story
     she would want to be remembered by?
    She could feel herself squeeze through
     that narrow doorway of the past into another time. She screwed up her eyes as if to
     see clearly in the haze of the half-light. A woman stood in the doorway. When the
     woman turned, her diamond earrings and nose studs flashed like suns against her dark
     skin. The gold threads from her pomegranate-pink silk sari gleamed like the
     sun’s reflection on a rippling river. Her voice was deep and bellyful and
     resonated from her nose. It was Mandodari. Ravana’s queen and wife. For
     quite a while Sita sat, forgetting herself as she watched Mandodari tell Kusa a
     story.
    ‘A long time ago a holy but
     poor man lived in a little thatched hut on an abandoned field. He used to wake every
     morning and bathe in a pond and pray to Vishnu, the great sustainer of life. Many
     people used to come to sit by him during the day and through his silence he was able
     to heal their family troubles. Vishnu, too, saw that this mandid not crave anything in life except to help others. “How would he go
     about getting his food?” thought Vishnu, and decided that instead of the
     man having to go and seek alms or work to earn money, why not gift him a cow. Not
     just an ordinary cow but a holy cow. The man could carry on his work, and whether
     the cow went out to graze or not, it would give him a limitless supply of milk. The
     man collected the milk in a pot and