The Forest of Enchantments

by Chitra Banerjee Divakaruni

It is the courage of endurance, of moving forward in spite of obstacles, of never giving in.

This was my first lesson on the nature of love: that in a moment it could fulfil the cravings of a lifetime, like a light that someone might shine into a cavern that has been dark for a million years.

‘You’ll get what you want, but it will not be what you expect. Success in the beginning will be followed by a thorny path.’

a trained mind is your strongest ally—and an untrained one your worst enemy.’

even the blackest night must end in dawn.’

I was in love, and love is wild and optimistic, especially in the beginning. Thus I did not think of this: what else might he destroy in the future?

I retreated to a place of silence within. My distress fell away and I was able to pray.

It’s important to speak your mind to the man you’re going to marry.

even the strongest intellect may be weakened by love. This struck me as paradoxical. Shouldn’t love make us more courageous? More determined to live according to our principles?

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.’

The problem was clearly with the king, but it was the queens who had to pay the price for it.

I didn’t believe in giving in to fate, not without a good fight.

This incident taught me that the more love we distribute, the more it grows, coming back to us from unexpected sources. And its corollary: when we demand love, believing it to be our right, it shrivels, leaving only resentment behind.

a woman who knew her power and allure and was willing to make the most of them.

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

I was looking at another of love’s many faces. It made us ready to wreak havoc—even on people we cared for—in order to protect those whom we cherished more. Wasn’t it the same force that impelled Kaikeyi to turn on Ram in order to guard her own son’s interest? Wasn’t it the same force that led Manthara—for the hunchback, I suspected, was the orchestrator of this entire disaster—to whisper directives to Kaikeyi, whom she still saw as the innocent child to whom she’d devoted her entire misshapen life?

love: it could make us forget our own needs. It could make us strong even when the world was collapsing around us.

to wait and to worry.

Love and duty battled on his face. Then duty won.

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

there was an austerity in his bearing, a nobility.

Could love, which I’d taken to be powerful and everlasting, be so frail as well? Could you pluck it out of your heart as easily as you’d pull a weed from a bed of flowers?

‘I was weeping for my father because he failed, at the very end, as a king. He held his personal honour higher than what was good for his people.

Even if we love them with our entire being, even if we’re willing to commit the most heinous sin for their well-being. We must understand and respect the values that drive them. We must want what they want, not what we want for them.

once mistrust has wounded it mortally, love can’t be fully healed again.

Such is the seduction of love: it makes you not want to think too much. It makes you unwilling to question the one you love.

Loving someone didn’t necessarily mean you understood them. In fact, remembering Dasharath and Kaikeyi, I wondered if loving someone too much prevented you from seeing them less clearly than an objective bystander.

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.

I’m not the kind of person—unlike your husband—who disfigures a woman and abandons her to a lifetime of sorrow and shame.

and probably would never—have. I thought of love’s contradictions, how it fills us with joy but also with worry for welfare of the loved one and pain for his suffering.

Love and happiness might not be in my control, but at least my dignity still remained mine.

Love is the spade with which we bury, deep inside our being, the things that we cannot bear to remember, cannot bear anyone else to know. But some of them remain. And they rise to the surface when we least expect them.

true transformation can only happen in the crucible of suffering.

All impurities fall away from gold only when it’s heated to melting.

Ram and he believed in the same things: righteousness and the sacred responsibility of kingship. For the sake of these, Ram had been willing to let me throw myself into fire. For the sake of these, Vibheeshan had told Ram how to kill his only son Taranisen, who would have been too strong to defeat otherwise. They’d both wept bitter tears afterwards, but faced with the same choice, they’d act in the same way again. The thought filled me with admiration—but admiration laced with anxiety. Such rulers were adored by the citizens they protected, but often their families had to bear the brunt of sacrifice.

Mandodari had chosen to wait by her husband’s pyre for the rest of her life. She’d done this, giving up all worldly comforts and power, because she loved him in spite of everything he’d done. This final act was her declaration of this love, of her forgiveness.

Forgiveness is more difficult when love is involved.

They required deep intelligence, an intelligence of the heart. But Ram didn’t understand that. He didn’t understand the complexity of the female existence.

I knew now that love—no matter how deep—wasn’t enough to transform another person: how they thought, what they believed. At best, we could only change ourselves.

understood that things happen to us for many complicated reasons, arising from both the past and the future. Thus I’m no longer sorrowful for all that has taken place in my life—or the things that are about to happen in yours.’

how difficult it was to know, in this world filled with grey shades, what was right and what was wrong. Ram had thought, in telling me to leave him and go away, that he was doing his duty as the future king of Ayodhya. Were Kaikeyi’s actions, which sprang from love for her son and her desire to secure the kingdom for him, that much worse? She hadn’t hurt me any more than Ram had. If I could forgive him, could I not forgive her?

without detaching ourselves from the spell of the past, can we focus fully on the moment that faces us?

my heart was a dense ball of fear. The laws of karma were complicated, and ultimately, one never escaped them.

what we bring upon ourselves and what destiny determines. They’re as difficult to disentangle as love and sorrow.

‘You aren’t some weak-willed wench. You can control your emotions. Remember all that you’ve survived. Behave like the queen you are. No one can take your dignity away from you. You lose it only by your own actions.’

How different the forest was by day, compared to the menacing wilderness I’d thrashed through in the panicked dark. Was that how life, too, seemed when we flailed around in desperation?

Endure, they seemed to say. Endure as we do. Endure your challenges.

I pondered the word endure, what it meant. It didn’t mean giving in. It didn’t mean being weak or accepting injustice. It meant taking the challenges thrown at us and dealing with them as intelligently as we knew until we grew stronger than them.

every darkness is edged with light.