Against the Current: Sita and Her Foils in - Bad Request

The culminating section of Ambai’s story presents Sita in middle age. Her sons
have returned to Ayodhya with Rama, but she has refused to accompany them because
Rama asked her to submit to another fire ordeal. Instead, she has abandoned the security
of Valmiki’s ashram to wander deep into the forest. There, following the sounds of vina
music to a small hut, she encounters an ascetic who identifies himself as Ravana. When
he tells how he escaped death and has awaited meeting her again, exasperated Sita
assumes he is still in thrall to his infatuation with young Sita. Announcing that she is
over forty years old, she expresses weariness with her life’s “many tragedies” and
resentment at being imprisoned in her body.
Yet Ravana too has aged, and now devotes himself to music. He offers to teach
Sita to play the rudravinai, a stringed instrument whose design is inspired, according to
tradition, by the shape of Parvati’s body. 16 Although Ravana concedes that the body can
act as a prison, he contends that it can be a path to fulfillment if used to make music. He
urges her to learn the rudravinai so creativity can fill her life: “Don’t think of it as an
ordinary musical instrument. Think of it as your life, and play on it.” When he attempts
to put the instrument in her lap, Sita instead insists that he place it on the ground so she
can grasp it herself. When asked why, she describes herself as one with “[a] life that
many hands have tossed about, like a ball. Now let me take hold of it [the vina]; take it
into my own hands.” The story with Sita lifting the vina to begin life anew.
Imagining her heroine as an older woman in Ambai’s day, Ambai imputes to Sita
a version of a mid-life reassessment. Like today’s “empty nesters,” Sita’s responsibilities
for her offspring have largely ended. Looking back on many years of self-sacrifice, Sita
sees how she let others control her life. The tragedies she suffered have drained and
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