Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Uttara · 49 of 50
49. Lava and Kuśa
Uttara (उत्तर)
The twins learned the poem from Vālmīki, the whole of it, and they sang it as brahmin boys in a king's sacrifice, not knowing they were singing their father to his face. He learns it in the other direction. The children are his, the poem is his life, and the poet who made the meter out of a hunter's cruelty has been raising the sons of the cruelty's latest form. The frame of the first sitting closes. The sage at the river and the king in the hall are in the same room.
Rāma takes the boys. He does not get Sītā back by recognizing them. Recognition, in Uttara, restores the line and not the marriage. Lava and Kuśa grow up as princes after having grown up as a hermit's students. The poem they carry is now the court poem, which is an irony the text can bear. A song born from an abandoned wife is sung under the abandoner's patronage.
What the sitting keeps is the doubling. The Rāmāyaṇa is inside the Rāmāyaṇa. A king hears a true version of himself and does not become, by hearing it, the man who would not have exiled her. Art, in this book, is not a correction. It is a record that arrives in time to be heard and too late to be used.
नेपालीमा
जुम्ल्याहाले वाल्मीकिसँग पूरै कविता सिकेका थिए। बाबुको मुखैमा गाए, नचिनेर। राजाले उल्टो दिशाबाट चिन्नुभयो। छोरा उहाँका हुन्, कविता उहाँको जीवन हो। पहिलो बसाइको चौखट बन्द हुन्छ। नदीका ऋषि र सभाका राजा एउटै कोठामा छन्। चिनाइले वंश फर्काउँछ, विवाह फर्काउँदैन। त्यागिएकी पत्नीबाट जन्मेको गीत त्याग्नेकै आश्रयमा गाइन्छ। कलाले सच्याउँदैन। सुन्ने बेलामा आउँछ, काम लाग्ने बेला ढिलो।