126. performance
elephants sweep through the crowd and, startlingly, right up over the stage, so
that the two kings (Ram and the Maharaja) momentarily face and balance each
other. The Ramayanis sweep into song, their voices swift and exuberant. They
sing the ultimate unraveling of a cosmic war, of a god-king’s fourteen-year exile,
of a city’s twenty-five-day spectacle, and a vast population’s moving drama.
Ram and Lakshman sit on a high throne. There is no dialogue in tonight ’s
drama, and only the briefest action. Ravan removes his mask of ten stylized
heads and crowns, along with his twenty wooden arms, and thus denuded, walks
down the long platform to Ram, bows, and touches his feet. It is finished. The
air vibrates with excitement, happiness, unity.
But the night is far from over. There will be a long break of several hours while
the Maharaja performs a long puja.The break creates a space in which the world
of the Lila, with its huge figures of good and evil, of power and sweetness, of tran-
scendent beings both with and beyond form, is in suspension. For a few hours all
is balanced, the monumental struggles neutralized. But still, there is movement.
The population of the world, of all the worlds, keeps circulating, many thousands,
among lanterns and torches, gods and demons mixing with vendors of peanuts and
tea. The sadhussing,“Jai siyaram,” beating their drums. Monkeys and bears wan-
der among the spectators, and there is no distinction. They are all actors and all
spectators, all wearing costumes. It is like Brueghel’s great canvas of children play-
ing: no center, just countless people in clusters, in pairs, alone, gathering around
points of interest, all separate but all linked. Movement everywhere, but a sense of
circularity, circulating around the fairgrounds, the circle of the cosmos, the circle
of the four ages, creation, destruction, manifestation, disappearance.
At three cardinal points, forming a triangle that is the locus of “reality” during
these hours of suspended narrative action, sit the principal figures.
. Ram and Lakshman sit under a canopy on a gentle rise, brightly lit, sur-
rounded by their attendants, fan wavers, priests, distributors of garlands, re-
ceiving with silent but warm dignity the attentions of their worshippers.
. On another high place Sita, the Mother of the Universe, the embodiment of
maya,the energy of all life and form, sits in a pavilion surrounded by four
golden pillars, overhung with leafy trees, visible from every part of the Lila
ground. This is the Ashoka Grove, where she has been held captive by
Ravan. Now sure of rescue, she relaxes with an attendant, chatting a little,
while he sometimes fans her, sometimes massages her feet.
. And on a bare hill is a colossal effigy of Ravan, despoiler of the three worlds,
conqueror of the gods, personification of insane arrogance. But that Ravan
has just died with the name of Ram on his lips. Now the actor who played
