I ask: Can anyone understand my anguish? Do you even dare?
I’ve skipped centuries in my storytelling. Let’s undo them for there’s one point I wish to clear. Yes, I’m aware of a certain recorded literary discrepancy: If I were invisible, how did I put up a sudden appearance on Earth as evidenced in Kalidasa’s lyrical play, Abhijanasakuntalam? I admire Kalidasa’s command over language but that’s about it. Let me tell you the famed poet-playwright got most of it wrong– though I did appear.
Hear my version: My child Sakuntala grew up in a forest ashram; she was a loving, strong-willed girl. My daughter was a minor when King Dushyanta — who was hunting in the vicinity — spotted her. He awakened her sexuality and seduced her with promises of eternal admiration. As a mother I know Shakuntala fell more for the storybook idea of romance embedded in that encounter than him, per se. Come on, he, a powerful king lay at the feet of this bare-foot girl from a hermitage; he wrote love poems to her on lotus leaves and slid them downstream to her; he even gave her, as a promise of undying love, his signet ring — which my child lost one day, splashing about in the river.
As you know he abandoned her soon after saying he had pressing official matters; my daughter believed his every word. She spoke truths like the day brings light and thought no less of anyone else. As her pregnancy advanced she grew impatient and constrained by imminent motherhood. She was told not to climb the trees she so loved, she couldn’t chase deer nor was allowed to go boating through she was a strong rower. Besides she was an adolescent who like all others of her age wanted to reap the benefits of being adult, she chose to go to ‘her’ man.