Janaki Mani plodded her way through the day. That is what she did with her life. Same she did with her talents, her youth, her marriage, her middle age, her children, her relationships and with every thing about her. Plod. That term hits her like muddy, sodden sock. I mean, it fits her well. Did she have emotions ? She had done her share of crying. She has had her excitements. But her stoicism got the better of her soon and she continued to plod her way. She used to be under the tongue lashings of her dynamic mother-in-law, when that grand old lady was moving about like a tigress on the prowl.(It is another story about her, a separate chapter or even a book, cannot do justice to her) But since she became a disabled tigress, Janaki had to move on her own accord and that new freedom seemed too late. A sighted person whose eyes have almost atrophied by blindfolds suddenly open to lights. She plodded her way in this comparative freedom. Her body had aged during the course of these plodding and her mind too tired.
But she is made of iron. She knew that in the back of her mind. That reflected sometimes in her stubbornness. An asinine stubbornness, sometimes. She may look anemic. She may be slightly bent. But she won’t break, that is for sure. She is in fact the silent prop to her stronger looking husband. She is a sure example to the saying : behind whatever success a man has achieved there stands a woman. Shesuccoured him during his emotional weaker moments. Did he drain her? Well, he might have, at times. But the very fact of her having to recharge his energies, and that too, unobtrusively, silently, made her strength stronger.
Is it not a fact that you can climb a mountain better and faster when you have to help somebody dependant on you ?
Her husband had his highs and lows, but everything was even for her. It was not a flat flatness. She didn’t resent it. Her very nature cannot resent anything or anybody.
What excites her most ? Children ? Relatives ? Music ? Books ? All these had excited her to some extent. But nothing had been of titanic proportions. But even those little excitements are no more for her. She has seen them all.
God ? Does God excite her? Yes, a bit. But not the God of her husband or that of her monastic children. God is for her a quiet surety. A surety within her.
For her husband God has lately become a passionate affair. A passion in which his “I” was very much there. For her monastic children God is a passion that has been sometimes loud and some times flashy and finally taken the colour of monastic ochre.
She had been the quiet deep well from which they had sprung colourfully.
She, now at 73, plodded her way, in a way alone. The pin prick of a still garrulous mother-in-law itched her. Her body, which neither laboured hard as her mother-in-law’s had done nor did systemic exercises, now plodded along with her but not with as much willingness as herself. It refused to get up and cook up something interesting and sustain itself but satisfied itself with simple minimum sustenance.
Her mind plodded along, on a day-to-day basis, not taking recourse to nourishing foods such as music or books but spreading along only as much as the day-to-day affairs of the growing family required.
But it knew of its strength deep down.
Janaki is Sita. Sita is not flashy. Sita is strength. Sita is not fully recognized even by her children and grand children. Sita herself didn’t know or perhaps did not let others know that she knew that Ramayana is really Sitayam Charitam Mahat. That, doings of Sri Rama is really the great history of Sita. Jai Siaram ! Victory unto Sita Ramachandra !
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