Story: Vengeance

Vengeance

                Almost every culture has a legend about a vengeful female demon.  The Chinese speak of nu gui, females who have been sexually assaulted and return to seek their revenge, the Spanish whisper about La Llorona, a woman in a white dress who killed her children after her husband has an affair, and in Cambodia they talk about Krasue, a decapitated beautiful woman.

                Do you ever wonder why that is?

                I am the original scorned woman, and all of those myths originate from me.

                When I was young, I was the delight of my family.  I was the most beautiful person in all the land and with my powerful father I could have had any man in the kingdom.  I was content and everyone served me.

                But the heart wants what the heart wants, and everything changed when I met him.

                Rama was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, more beautiful than my brother or my father.  He had the most gorgeous brown eyes that felt like they were staring into my soul. . . I can still see them when I dream.

                But I digress.

                I waited days to speak to him, spying on him through the trees as he hunted and swam.  Every day I fell more and more in love with him until one day I knew I had to do something.

                So I appeared to him and asked him for his hand in marriage, never thinking that he could turn me down.  After all, no one had ever done that.

                He did worse than reject me though; he outright laughed at me.  He refused to even consider my proposal saying that he would never betray his beautiful wife, Sita, pointing at her through the trees.  I protested saying that she was nowhere near as beautiful as I was, but he only laughed again.

                I hate being laughed at.

                Stalking away from him, I vowed revenge.  Nobody would hurt me this way and get away with it.  If I couldn’t have what I wanted, neither could he.  I would take away that which he loved most—his wife.

                Not one for patience, I flew at Sita immediately when I saw she was alone, hoping to cause as much damage as possible.  To my surprise, someone stopped me and threw me back.  When I stood up again, I could feel blood dripping down my face, and I screamed.

                “What have you done to me?!”  My face, my beautiful face, was gone.  Crying tears of humiliation, I ran and swore revenge anew.

                I persuaded some demons to attack Rama and his brother and carry off Sita but somehow they managed to defeat them all.  How I did not know, but I knew of one more way to carry out my revenge.

                I called on my brother, one of the most powerful demons, to help me.  With his cunning and my wrath, I knew we could never fail.  All I had to promise him was the girl.  I agreed readily.

                She wasn’t the one I wanted anyway.

Rama spurns Shurpanakha.  Web Source.

Author's Note:  I didn't take many liberties with the plot of the story except for using the version where Rama doesn't tell Shurpanakha to seek Lakshmana and instead he intervenes when she attacks Sita.  I also drew parallels between her story and other folktales featuring vengeful women.

Bibliography:  Public Domain Ramayana.  Web Source.