#mareech

“Oh look!” Sita calls, like she always does. “Oh, oh, what a handsome deer!”

Lakshmana looks up obediently, as he always does, and his hands still where he is stoking the kitchen fire.

“Huh,” he says. “That can’t be a real deer.”

“Why not?” Sita is enraptured, already taken by the gilded body, the soft, innocent face. How sweet she is, and how naïve! And how naïve he had been too, all of them except Lakshmana.

“Deer look like deer,” his brother explains, eloquent as ever. “That is not a deer.”

“So you say!” Sita huffs and pouts, swaying like a sunflower on a stem. “Husband! Will you not speak on my behalf?”

Rama closes his eyes to meditate harder; pretends not to hear. Behind him, his brother snorts. “Really?”

Rama sighs. “It is very beautiful,” he acknowledges, because he is not a liar, and because he cannot be accused of blindless yet.

“I want it!” Sita says. “How happy Mother Kausalya shall be to see it! When we go back in a year or so – oh, how fast time has flown – we will give it to her, and wouldn’t she be pleased? Remember how she adored that mynah you caught for her, brother Lakshmana?”

“Mhmm, I don’t think there is any guarantee that we can catch things without killing them, you know. I don’t think the hare traps will do.”

“Then we can skin it!” Sita says, warming up to the topic. “Whichever way you see it, we will benefit from it.”

Lakshmana hums. “I still don’t think it’s a good idea.”

Rama listens as the two bicker, clenching his trembling hand into a fist. His body is weighed down with the exhaustion of repeated grief. It hurts to hear Sita so bright and excited, planning gifts for their return as if it was a given, as if no disaster could strike them now, so close to the end. It hurts to hear Lakshmana’s prophetic words, and to wonder how he could have been so foolish, so utterly dumb, as to not hear the brother who forsook life and limb for him, and to –

“…will go, won’t you?”

It takes him a moment to understand he is being addressed, and another to parse out the question. When he does, he barely holds back a snarl and says coldly, “We should heed Lakshmana. Leave it alone.”

Her lip purses, and her eyes burn, but Sita doesn’t cry as he had feared. Perhaps it had been all Rama’s fault before, the ignorance of his weak, quailing heart. Nothing can happen now.

Sita slips inside, frowning. Rama hates himself for putting that expression there, but it is preferable to months of war and death. He meditates, and Lakshmana snips the wood into shavings, and the forest is calm around them.

At noon, he gets up. Lakshmana has moved on from shaving wood, and is now gathering clothes they hung out to dry. Sita has not yet emerged.

“Sita?” Rama calls. Was she upset? “Sita, where are you?”

The house is silent and empty. The hunting traps Lakshmana made for the hares are missing. Rama’s blood chills, and in spite of himself, he shrieks.

Lakshmana comes running, quiver on his back and knife unsheathed. He takes one look around the empty house and hauls Rama up. “Come,” he commands, and Rama goes.

Please, he begs, as they search, to whoever will listen. Please don’t let Ravana take my Sita away again.

And yet when he finds his wife, he wishes he had not prayed so at all. Sita is cold and unmoving, blood pooling around her. Sita is no more.

2.

Rama drops to his knees and howls.

In the morning, Mareecha – the dog, the beast below all beasts, the clod of dirt that did not bear a place even under Ravana’s ugly shoe – comes to them. He is dressed as he always is, bright, shining gold, barely short of being gaudy, and breathtakingly beautiful.

“Oh look!” Sita calls, like she always does. “Oh, oh, what a handsome deer!”

Lakshmana looks up obediently, as he always does, and his hands still where he is stoking the kitchen fire.

“Huh,” he says. “That can’t be a real deer.”

“Why not?” Sita asks, as taken by the gold as ever, always so keen and eager, as if the loveliness in her sought in that deer a paltry companion.

“Lakshmana is right,” Rama interjects, before it can devolve to the same argument he has heard over and over.

 “Oh, but even so, I want it!” Sita says. “How happy Mother Kausalya shall be to see it! When we go back in a year or so – oh, how fast time has flown – we will give it to her, and wouldn’t she be pleased? Remember how she adored that mynah you caught for her, brother Lakshmana?”

“Uh,” he brother says intelligently, torn between agreeing with Sita and paying heed to Rama’s words. “Sure?”

“Will this one not look so fetching in Ayodhya’s gardens? I say– ”

“Lakshmana,” Rama commands, interrupting his wife quite rudely, but unable to bear her excited joy for even a moment more, “Lakshmana, go get that deer. Kill it, we will cure the hide and take it home for mother’s shrine to Shiva.”

Sita starts, but does not protest; she is by nature easily pleased. Rama would feel ashamed for using it so, if he did not know what would happen, and if he did not know he had to prevent it.

Lakshmana rises, picks up his bow, dithers awkwardly for a second where he seems to recognize that Sita had wanted Rama to give it to her, then swallows his opinions and obeys. Rama feels a sudden swell of affection for his poor, sweet brother, so shy and clumsy in such matters, and when he looks over at his wife, she too is smiling.

“You should not tease him so,” she scolds him, when Lakshmana is gone. “You know how he is.”

“He doesn’t mind.”

“Even so,” Sita looks affectionately the way he went. “Poor boy.”

Rama laughs, heart easing. “It’s like you like him more than you like me.”

Sita stands up, puts her nose to the air. She does not take kindly to Rama fishing for compliments. “Fie the woman,” she declares primly, “that picks the husband over the son.”

Rama is amused. “People will disagree, you know.”

There isn’t an answer to that, so Sita hmphs and pokes the fire aggressively. His plate at lunch, Rama reflects, will surely have an interesting taste.

He thinks differently when Lakshmana isn’t back by noon, even though the sun is high in the sky and Sita has laid out their plates.

“Oh, has he not found that thing yet?” Sita asks him, fretfully. “Now I wish I hadn’t asked for it; he will be late for lunch and the food will go cold.”

No sooner has she finished saying this that a horrible, high-pitched scream, so full of surprise and fear it does not seem it could ever belong to his brother, but is, unmistakably Lakshmana’s, trembles through the forest, sending birds flying from trees and rendering the singing cicadas silent.

Rama’s body reacts before he permits it too, but halfway he remembers what his brother had said.

“You have to go,” Sita screams, shaking his arm. “Lakshmana is in danger.”

Rama is unmoving, like a mountain, like stones. “It is the creature,” he says, and does not go.

Lakshmana does not return all night. In the morning, Rama takes Sita by the hand, and they trudge across the leafy forest path, to where the screams came from. There is a clearing, crudely made by a hacking sword. There is Mareecha, spilled across like ground like a broken bird. There is Lakshmana too, silent in death, a familiar gold-fletched arrow at the back of his neck.

3.

There is also Rama now, on his knees, howling.

In the morning, Mareecha – the dog, the beast below all beasts, the clod of dirt that did not bear a place even under Ravana’s ugly shoe – comes to them. He is dressed as he always is, bright, shining gold, barely short of being gaudy, and breathtakingly beautiful.

“Oh look!” Sita calls, like she always does. “Oh, oh, what a handsome deer!”

Lakshmana looks up obediently, as he always does, and his hands still where he is stoking the kitchen fire.

“Huh,” he says. “That can’t be a real deer.”

Rama looks to the deer, to Mareecha, and feels something quail in his chest. He does not allow Sita to ask for it, cannot allow himself to hear her praise that wretched creature.

“It is Mareecha,” he tells them. “He is here to cause us ill.”

His wife and brother look at him with wide eyes – one pair confused, one disbelieving.

“How do you know that?” wonders Lakshmana, frowning. “Wasn’t he meditating or something?”

Rama cannot breathe from the rage that consumes him. “Is it not enough that I know?” he demands. “Must I always answer to you now?”

“Don’t say that,” Sita chides him immediately, suddenly frightened. “Don’t speak to him like that. What happened  to you?”

Lakshmana bows his head and doesn’t say anything, because he never speaks over Rama, but he too is surprised and hurt. Rama has never spoken to him in this manner.

(Well, he has, once. But now no one but himself remembers it.)

“Forgive me.” Rama says. A gentleman always acknowledges his mistakes, and Rama will not have those in his care fear him. “Let us not think on it now.”

“Shouldn’t we catch him then?” Sita asks. Rama wonders if it is fate, laughing at him. “You said he has ill intentions.”

“Later.”

“Why later?” Lakshmana demands. Rama wills himself not to snap again. “Last time, they wrecked such havoc and tormented so many sages. Is it not our duty to at least apprehend him?”

“If you leave now,” says Sita, gentler, “you will be back by lunch, I think. We can have the hare you caught yesterday.”

Rama does not hear her entirely – his vision is filled with the sight of him chasing that knife’s edge of gold through the sunlit forest, of watching his brother arrive alone, of coming back to an empty hut. He means to say all of this, but what comes out is, “I will go? And what, leave you alone with him?”

Silence, great and condemning, fills their little house.

Slowly, the words he spoke trickle into Rama’s consciousness. Sita is quaking with barely-controlled rage. Lakshmana is close to tears.

“I didn’t…” Rama begins, “I didn’t mean…”

Lakshmana stands. “I will go,” he says, through what, Rama realizes in muted horror, is a sob held back. “Please stay here.”

Rama wants to reach out, but again, the sight of Lakshmana lying unmoving and dead shakes him to his bones, and instead he says, “No!”

His brother crumples back to his seat.

“What happened to you,” Sita shouts. “Both of you then, begone, kill that beast. No one is good enough without your supervision, are they?!”

Sita, it turns out, can speak well to hurt. Then again, with the mess Rama has caused, can he blame her?

“All of us will go.”

Mareecha is still there when his wife and brother follow him out, glittering between the trees like a fragment of dawn.

Rama knows it is wrong.

He has known it a hundred times before.

“Stay close,” he tells Sita and Lakshmana, anyway, though he knows bone-deep that it is futile. They run, fleet-footed and swift, following the deer.

However, it does not go in circles as before – Rama has played fate too dangerously. He senses the arrow before he hears it whistle, and foolishly, knowing Ravana’s desire for Sita, leaps to guard her.

There is a prickle at the back of his neck. Sita screams. Lakshmana shouts. The forest floor, wet and alive, comes up to meet him. His heart thumps, measuring his failures beat by beat.

One, Sita pulls the dagger from his waist. Two, his hands reach for her, and meet only air. Three, she sinks beside him, curling into him like they do in the cold nights, her blood hot on her cool skin.

+1.

Lakshmana, shouting and screaming, is still standing over them. His poor, loyal brother, still swinging his sword over the enemy closing in, only to delay Ravana the indignity of their remains. Rama does not see him fall over them, shielding till the very end. Rama does not hear Surpanakha’s mocking laughter, or Ravana’s tantrum at not having Sita. The last he knows is his wife, who chose ash over captivity, and his brother, still standing, still fighting.

In the morning, Mareecha – the dog, the beast below all beasts, the clod of dirt that did not bear a place even under Ravana’s ugly shoe – comes to them. He is dressed as he always is, bright, shining gold, barely short of being gaudy, and breathtakingly beautiful.

“Oh look!” Sita calls, like she always does. “Oh, oh, what a handsome deer!”

Lakshmana looks up obediently, as he always does, and his hands still where he is stoking the kitchen fire.

“Huh,” he says. “That can’t be a real deer.”

“Why not?” Sita asks, eyes bright with joy.

Rama listens to them quietly. It will be a long time before they are like this again – just the three of them, gently laughing and teasing, no war or grief or misery between them. It will be a long time before he hears the cadence of Sita’s voice, clear as the rushing river, stir the world around him. Rama watches them, and keeps that image in his heart, for all the long years ahead.

When Sita asks him for the deer, he leaves without protest.