The Divided Line: Dunya [Part 2]
It began slowly—the plague, the greed, the riots. Revolutionaries rose up behind symbols, murals, and songs, while the masses were fed machinery and religion. In the wake of the destruction, politicians deemed art a dangerous thing—a worthless thing—and the masses agreed. They took away the paint, the books, and the instruments. But they could not wholly silence the artists. These are the stories they left behind.
Agni Pariksha.
Dunya clawed at her hair, nails digging deep into her scalp so they came away red.
This is a story of the gods.
Spotted deer
Silent tears fell in thick drops from the corners of her eyes. They rolled down her cheek and dripped from her chin, landing in her lap. She wiped their trails away and watched the clear, cold liquid pump through the tubes that pulled at her veins. A baptism of hallucinogenics.
Deep in the verdant Janasthán, Rama, the exiled prince, hunted a golden deer for his darling Sita.
Soft orchestral music began to play through speakers in the stone. Dunya plugged her ears against it. She knew the things it heralded.
The deceiver, Rávan, King of Lanka, set upon the lonesome Sita, dressed in the guise of a gentle mendicant.
Machinery whirred to life, and the shadow of a symbol took shape upon the wall. A music note, which warped and rippled with the drug and changed into the eye of the revolution. It began to change again, and as it took shape, poison seared through Dunya’s veins.
Pain clawed through her blood and came out through her throat in a savage scream.
The red-eyed Rávan, King of the Rākşasas shed his guise and stood before Sita, ten-headed and twenty-limbed. He snatched poor Sita and stole her away. Held fast against him in the chariot, she cried out for help.
Soldiers marched outside Dunya’s cell, their booted steps like the beat of a giant’s heart. As they crossed the great light, their shadows blotted out the ever-changing symbols on the wall. They became a mass of sprouting heads and tangled limbs.
From that beast of shadows stepped Rávan, the god from the stories the Old Man used to tell. He stood now fully fleshed before her—red-eyed and blood-lipped.
Dunya curled into herself and began to pray.
Only one heard poor Sita’s cries: the Vulture King from on high. He swooped down upon the deceiver and rended the demon’s flesh with talon and beak.
The Rākşasas King strode toward her, and without even lifting a clawed hand, he tore her open. A sharp, unrelenting agony and an unending grief. The god smiled with the Old Man’s lips—those bloodied lips that’d parted in shock as the noose tightened around his neck.
Dunya could only stare. At Rávan in the Old Man’s form. At death. At the symbols warping on the wall. One after the other. Symbols of music, of religion, of movements and revolutions. Each one again and again, pulsing like the beating, bleeding wounds the Rākşasas inflicted.
King Vulture
With his sword, Rávan, King of Lanka, smote the vulture king and hewed the bird from back to breast. Mournful Sita, when the great bird was slain, wrapped her arms around her champion’s neck and wept.
Dunya remembered how the Old Man had swung gently in the wind, feet bared and clothes torn. She remembered the discordant sound the Old Man’s broken violin had made when she’d picked it up; a wounded, songless bird. She’d had it repaired somewhere in the city, had given voice to its chamber once more, had poured her own voice into it. They could not take that from her. She would never let them.
The Maithil Lady was swept away from the forest and the light of day. And the land, the trees, and the waters all grew dark with despair.
She could hardly remember the words the Old Man had told her, knew only that the Old Man and the dark god muttered them in tandem, two voices from the same mouth. One a plea, and one a mockery: “Do not let them turn you into nothing.”
Sita stayed imprisoned in the kingdom of Lanka for eleven months and fourteen days. Rama, Sita’s love, lamented her disappearance. He scoured the earth for moonlit Sita and set out to bring her home.
Dunya closed her eyes and banished the Old-Man-turned-god from her sight. Still, the gods remained before her. In the abyssal blackness behind her eyes, there burned a glowing light. Shadowed figures cavorted around it, symbols flitting overhead. Vishnu and Rávan circled each other in a violent dance of war, and Dunya lay in the pyre at their stamping feet.
Rama, allied with the monkey king, brought an army to Lanka to vanquish the Rākşasas king and set Sita free. Once Rávan was slain, however, doubt festered in Rama’s heart. Certain Sita had betrayed him, he ordered her purity to be tested. Sita built her own funeral pyre and walked through the flames. She emerged from the other side unburned.**
Dunya let herself be consumed by the pain, let it wash through her, let it rage and destroy and burn, let it eat away her fear and her grief until there was nothing. Annihilation. She let the darkness smother her and breathed easy.
The orchestral music faded out, and the liquid in her veins changed to something soothing, something numbing. All that remained was the distant hum of the light source in the central chamber.
It stood a bright and benevolent god which sang the note of creation, the resonant root of all music. Om. Peace.
She clambered to her feet, swayed, skin coated with sweat, and she reached up. She watched the light coast across her fingertips, watched their shadows on the wall.
She was still here. She was still her. And they would not destroy that.
**Story of Sita paraphrased in Dunya’s mind from The Ramayana
Divided Line is an original serial.
