Here’s a confession: Never did I ever think that I’ll find a place in Sita’s tale. I was so mesmerised that it felt as if Sita had stepped out of the pages of The Forest of Enchantments (2019) to sing Sitayan to me. I didn’t think much of Sita until three years ago when I read Volga’s The Liberation of Sita (2016), translated from Telugu to English by T Vijay Kumar and C Vijayasree. I had compelled a few of my friends to read The Liberation of Sita so that I could talk about female companionship. We had then realised that we had spent many evenings on Whatsapp talking about Ahalya but never really saw her as a significant part of the Ramayana, and hence the book made the silences in the epic visible to our young eyes. Beyond that, we were taken by disbelief that someone could imagine Surpanakha and Sita coming together to have a dialogue, the ‘other woman’ and the ‘wife’. It was no longer about the epic as we knew it. As I mentioned above, I didn’t think much of Sita. Dr...