The Forest of Enchantments

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

I hope that it brings new meaning to that old blessing: May you be like Sita.

‘Ah, the relationship of Shiva and Shakti! It’s the perfect connection of male and female, equal yet splendidly different. It’s based on love and respect and knowing each other’s strengths and weaknesses. Yes, the gods also have their weaknesses. It’s part of the divine play.

Be courageous and remember, even the blackest night must end in dawn.’

‘Anything that makes us forget our true selves is a trap,

I looked up at the sky through thankful tears, and it seemed to me that the gods were, indeed, smiling down at us.

‘The ways of the gods are strange, hard for our limited human minds to encompass. Remember this, too: sometimes our ill luck has consequences that bless others.’

We come into the world alone, and we leave it alone. And in between, too, if it is destined, we’ll be alone. Draw on your inner strength. Remember, you can be your own worst enemy—or your best friend. It’s up to you. And also this: what you can’t change, you must endure.’

Love was full of contradictions. Sometimes the person you loved weakened you and sometimes he or she made you a stronger person.

But where love and sorrow bind people together, goodbyes are not so easily said.

you who are the unsung heroine of this tale, the one who has the tougher role: to wait and to worry.

I learned a new fact about love that day: it could kill. Sometimes it could kill instantaneously.

I blamed love, too, for my silence. How it makes us back down from protesting because we’re afraid of displeasing the beloved, or because we’re afraid that our disagreement is the symptom of a greater disease: incompatibility of values.

How entangled love is with expectation, that poison vine! The stronger the expectation, the more our anger towards the beloved if he doesn’t fulfil it—and the less our control over ourselves.

An odd closeness, a bond from some other world.

I felt its flowers drop on me like tears, for it was as helpless as I was.

The pain of lost love had changed my husband. He’d closed off his heart in order to survive. Would he ever open it again?

They required deep intelligence, an intelligence of the heart.

He didn’t understand the complexity of the female existence.

The world is full of divine mystery,

He has come to teach the men, but you have come to teach the women. The lesson you teach will be a quieter one, but as important.

As I watched them, it seemed that their human outlines lost their shapes and became flame-like, and then the four flames merged to become one great shining. Its brilliance blinded me and its beauty brought tears to my eyes.

Ah, love is the sharpest, sweetest weapon of all.

do. Anger and self-pity are useless emotions,

‘What occurred when I was alone in the darkness, under the sorrow tree, you don’t know. You don’t know my despair. You don’t even know my exhilaration, how it felt—first in the forest and then in Ayodhya—when I was the most beloved woman in creation.’