Veranda Tales-Fourteen years of slumber
Storytelling has been an integral part of my life since childhood. I grew up listening to stories during the hot summer evenings and nights with my cousins. Mothers and grandmothers would gather all of us children for story time. It was usually pitch dark except for a very faint light coming from the flickering candle. Power cuts were as frequent as the hot and humid summer days. We all spread out on a cool concrete floor or bamboo mats on the veranda intently listening to fascinating stories about kings, queens, princes, princesses, and peasants alike. Stories about love, life, families, and people entertained and taught us life skills. These stories transported us to distant worlds, strange yet familiar. Often the same story told by two people sounded different as storytellers added new twists and turns adding their personal style and flair to the stories.
Storytelling wasn’t limited to summer evenings and bedtime. I was surrounded by adults who didn’t pass up an opportunity to share their wisdom using the art of storytelling. These rich vibrant oral traditions include songs, poems, stories, and సామెతలు (Sametalu are proverbs in Telugu). Men and women sing songs as they work in the fields, grinding grains and spices and doing other daily chores at their homes. Stories are often used to teach important life lessons, interpersonal skills, and survival skills. These stories and the time spent listening to them made our lives richer leaving an impression on me. This series is all about reliving those memories as I share these stories.
ఊర్మిళ దేవి నిద్ర (Urmila Devi Nidra)
When I was pregnant with my first child, I was anxious about labor pains and childbirth like every other pregnant woman on the planet. I dutifully took birthing classes, took a tour of the hospital pregnancy rooms, and the neonatal unit. I wrote a birthing plan and kept my bags packed with my favorite pillow, blanket, and favorite music in anticipation of long labor. It turned out my pain tolerance was suspect and still is.
In one of the birthing classes, all of us pregnant women sat in a circle with our attentive partners sitting right next to us. Our instructor started talking about what to expect in labor and how intense the labor pains could be. She handed us all ice cubes and asked us to hold them in our palms as long as we could. The goal of this experiment was to help us gauge our pain tolerance. As the ice cube container was being passed around, I was thinking to myself, “Piece of cake, how hard could it be?”. All of us placed one ice cube each in our palms. Instructor started the stopwatch. It took all but 20 seconds before I threw the ice cube down on the floor. All other women in the circle kept going until the 60 second mark. I could see concern written all over my partner's face. He could hold it longer than I could. I came home and immediately wrote down my birthing plan in bold, “Hit me with the strongest pain medication you can find during labor”.
I consulted my doctor about options such as epidural and Nitrous oxide. My doctor dutifully informed me that epidural can only be administered early in labor and I shouldn’t bank on them. Some women in my birthing class were sold on the natural birthing option and took solemn oaths to not use any kind of medication during labor and water births at their home in bathtubs. Their reasoning was that women have been giving birth since our cave days without medication. I bet there were good herbs and roots midwives knew about and had secret recipes passed down generations. I didn’t want to opt for cesarean and give birth to a caesar salad. I figured if I put up with the pain for a few hours, I wouldn’t have to deal with a large cut on my belly and surgery pain for weeks on end. So I was all for medication, crossing my fingers for good measure to avoid ending up in surgery in the middle of labor.
I had another fear on top of all these fears. I worried that I would start speaking in my mother tongue, Telugu during the birthing process and nobody, including my partner, would be able to understand and help me. My partner and I grew up speaking different mother tongues and English is the only common language we can converse in. I can understand some of his mother tongue and can manage simple sentences. He doesn't understand any Telugu other than a few cuss words I very generously taught him. All through pregnancy I was concerned that I would start speaking in Telugu. This what if scenario of me breaking into babbling in Telugu when I was in labor kept me up at night. I had nightmares about blabbering and doctors, nurses, and my partner standing around the hospital bed looking concerned. We made plans to get help from a local Telugu speaking friend if it was necessary. Google translate did not exist yet to be a helpful assistant.
When the fateful night arrived, we went to the hospital driving on deserted roads as the moon was shining above us. After going through the admission process and settling on the hospital bed, the waiting started. After several hours of waiting, the doctor examined me yet again and declared it was very early labor and decided I would be better off going home and waiting comfortably at home until the real labor pains show up. I would say comfortably was questionable, but going home made sense. I nodded my head while thinking to myself, “How bad is it going to get, it is unbearable now”.
The doctor prescribed sleeping pills to take to get rest as I was up all night long by that time. So the last thing I remembered was a nurse handing me two pills and a glass of water around 8 or 9 in the morning. When I woke up it was six in the evening. I was back at the hospital with several nurses and the same doctor that sent me home in the morning surrounding the bed, and my partner sitting next to me holding my hand. After an hour or so, the doctor shook his head and said, “This isn’t going well, we have to look at plan B if this continues”. With that I was wide awake now from my sleeping pill induced ఊర్మిళ నిద్ర (Urmila Nidra).
ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) is an unsung heroine of the epic Ramayana. She was an avatar of Nagalakshmi, the serpent goddess and princess of Videha like her older sister, Sita, the central character of the epic Ramayana, whose main plot is Rama saving his wife Sita from the clutches of demon king Ravana of Lanka.
Rama is the eldest son and heir to the throne of Kosala kingdom. Rama and his three brothers, Laxmana, Bharata, and Shathrugna marry four sisters who are princesses from Videha. Rama the eldest marries the eldest sister Sita and the rest marry the three remaining sisters in the hierarchy of the birth order. ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) marries the second of the four brothers, Laxmana. Laxmana follows his older brother and Rama, and sister-in-law Sita into fourteen year Vanavasa. ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) stays behind caring for her in-laws. Soon after the Vanavasa starts, Laxmana makes a deal with నిద్ర (Nidra), the goddess of sleep to grant him a wish so he can stay awake the entire 14 years to protect his brother and sister-in-law 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year for the next 14 years. The goddess, నిద్ర (Nidra) grants him the wish with a caveat that according to the laws of sleep, another person needs to take his place to sleep the entire time he would be awake. Laxmana sends a message to his wife through the goddess నిద్ర (Nidra) requesting her to take his place to satisfy the laws of sleep. ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) agrees and falls asleep right away.
ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) sleeps through Sita’s abduction by Ravana, Hanuman burning Lanka, Rama killing Ravana, and Laxmana killing Ravana’s eldest son, Meghanadha aka Indrajit. Conveniently Laxmana’s staying awake for fourteen long years comes in handy as Meghanadha can only be killed by someone who hasn’t slept for a longtime. The puzzle pieces fall in place, Laxmana goes back to Saketa, the name for Ayodhya during the Ramayana time to wake up ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila). It takes him some work to wake her up and she couldn’t recognize him at first. She asks him lots of questions and admonishes him for touching someone else's wife. while half asleep. She finally wakes up fully and embraces him with tears of joy streaming down her cheeks. He then promptly falls asleep missing his brother’s coronation sending ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) to attend in his stead.
Even though ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila) was not mentioned much in Valmiki’s Ramayana, her sacrifices weren’t lost on people. Several stories, songs, and poem were written about the forgotten princess, ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila). One among them was the Telugu folk song, ఊర్మిళ దేవి నిద్ర (Urmila Devi Nidra) popular among women in Andhra Pradesh.
Despite my fears about speaking in Telugu during labor, I did fine. Even Though I didn’t remember how I came home from the hospital in the morning and how I went back around around midday, I was talking and responding in English the whole time. I just don’t remember any of it even to this day. I was sleepwalking and sleeptalking while my little guy was also in slumber like ఊర్మిళ ((Urmila).
The sleeping pills disrupted both our rhythms and my little guy wasn’t trying to come out and I was too sleepy to help him in his quest to emerge into the world to take his first breath. We were both in ఊర్మిళ నిద్ర (Urmila Nidra).
It all ended well after 23 hours of labor to bring my child into the world. The little guy emerged a couple of hours after waking up from my slumber without needing measures to cut my belly open to get him out. Maybe he also woke up from his ఊర్మిళ నిద్ర (Urmila Nidra) when he heard the doctor talking about Plan B like I did.