An Infatuation

An Infatuation

(From the Ramayana)

SHE’D BEEN WATCHING the two men for a while, and the pale, rather docile, wife with vermilion in her hair, who sometimes went inside the small house and came out again. She’d been watching from behind a bush, so they hadn’t seen her; they had the air of being not quite travellers, nor people who’d been settled for long; but they looked too composed to be fugitives. Sometimes the men went away into the forest while the woman attended to household chores—Surpanakha observed this interestedly from a distance—and then they’d return with something she’d chop and cook, releasing an aroma that hung incongruously around the small house.

She, when she considered herself, thought how much stronger and more capable she would be than that radiantly beautiful but more or less useless woman, how she’d not allow the men to work at all, and do everything for them herself. It was the taller one she’d come to prefer; the older one, whose every action had such authority. She liked to watch him bending, or brushing away a bit of dust from his dhoti, or straightening swiftly, with that mixture of adroitness and awkwardness that only human beings, however godly they are, have; he was so much more beautiful than she was. It was not his wife’s beauty she feared and envied; it was his. Sighing, she looked at her own muscular arms, used to lifting heavy things and throwing them into the distance, somewhat hirsute and dark but undoubtedly efficient, and compared them to his, which glowed in the sunlight. Her face, which she’d begun to look at in a pond nearby, had cavernous nostrils and tiny tusks that jutted out from beneath her lips; it was full of fierceness and candour, but, when she cried, it did not evoke pity, not even her own. The face reflected on the water filled her with displeasure. How lovely his features were in comparison!