Two weeks ago today, the sickening news came: my daughter’s father, my ex-husband, suffered a massive heart attack while working. Rushed to the hospital, resuscitated, then open heart surgery. He never regained consciousness, not yet. He lies there, part of his brain not working, tube-fed, not breathing on his own.
She drove all night, six hours to get there. She thought they had taken her to the wrong room, unrecognizable. Last week end, I drove with her. Except for his hands, I would not have recognized him myself, so thin, so aged. How could someone change that much in the ten years since I had last seen him? She went back again late this week, returned late last night. Moved to a longterm care facility, he remains the same except he no longer even opens his eyes, no more staring into the void.
I feel frozen. This morning I delivered my grandson to my daughter–he stayed with me this trip. Checking on her father’s apartment, my daughter found his photos, some from when we were young. She showed a few to me. I stared, shocked, dismayed. My today’s to-do list just sits here. I force myself to work at it bit by bit, write two peer review assignments for a class I am taking–I do not want to disappoint, vacuum and dust one room at a time, tell myself I need to go out on this 20 degrees warmer than normal day and garden, write this blog post. I feel frozen.
He had plans neither she nor I knew about, plans to perhaps make him happier, return to the land of his birth. Will some miracle occur, will he awaken, recover? Is there some appropriate time for which we wait?
I feel frozen. When will I thaw?
Although “the” Ramayana is a fluid narrative, scholarship has traditionally recognized the Sanskrit Valmiki Ramayana as the most authoritative of Ramayanas. But recent studies have brought to light the hundreds of regional stories of Rama and Sita which are more popular with the masses. These would include Krittibasa’s Ramayana in Bengal, Kamban’s Tamil Iramavataram in South India, notably in the state of Tamil Nadu, Tulsidas’s Ramcharitamanas among the Hindi-speaking belt of northern India, and so on. But even here, a pattern seems to emerge; all the above-mentioned authors are male. Within this scenario, a rather unique text stands out, and that is Chandravati’s sixteenth century Bengali Ramayana, for its author was a woman. Even more fascinating is the double-toned nature of the narrative – through Chandravati’s own voice and through the voice of its tragic heroine, Sita.
writingontherim 