Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Araṇya · 21 of 50
21. Śūrpaṇakhā
Araṇya (अरण्य)
In the Pañcavaṭī hut a woman comes, Śūrpaṇakhā, sister of Rāvaṇa. She wants Rāma. He refuses, and he points her, lightly and cruelly, toward Lakṣmaṇa. Lakṣmaṇa refuses her too, and the refusals are jokes of a kind the poem will regret. A mocked woman attacks Sītā. Lakṣmaṇa cuts her nose and her ears. The page states the disfigurement and does not describe the cutting. It is the insult that starts the war. Nothing about it is small, and nothing about the brothers' mockery is admirable.
She goes, bleeding and furious, to Khara, who rules the rākṣasas of Janasthāna in Rāvaṇa's name. The private humiliation becomes a political one. A sister has been maimed in a hut the exiles built. The forest's rākṣasas, whom the sages asked to be protected from, now have a grievance that looks, from their side, like a grievance.
The poem does not stop to build Śūrpaṇakhā a full inner life, and this page will not invent one. It marks what the scene does. A marriage that went to the forest to be faithful is seen, by a stranger, as a man who can be propositioned. The answer she receives is a mutilation. Laṅkā begins here, in a joke and a knife, long before anyone has seen the sea.
नेपालीमा
पञ्चवटीको कुटीमा रावणकी बहिनी शूर्पणखा आइन्। उनले रामलाई चाहिन्। उहाँले हल्का र निर्दयी ढङ्गले उनलाई लक्ष्मणतिर पठाउनुभयो। लक्ष्मणले पनि अस्वीकार गरे। गिल्ला खाएकी उनले सीतालाई आक्रमण गरिन्। लक्ष्मणले नाक र कान काटे। यो पृष्ठले अङ्गभङ्ग भएको कुरा भन्छ। काट्ने तरिका लेख्दैन। युद्ध सुरु गर्ने अपमान यही हो। रगत बगाउँदै उनी रावणको नाममा शासन गर्ने खरकहाँ गइन्। मजाक र छुराबाट लङ्का सुरु हुन्छ, समुद्र देखिनुभन्दा धेरै अघि।