IN THE SCANT LIBRARY of my childhood home there were no histories, no novels—not even Reader’s Digest Condensed; no biographies or autobiographies, no links to the outside world beyond the woods that surrounded us. Autobiography of a Yogi scarcely counts, since it leaned against other like-minded books which counted as quack esoterica in the 1940s—books on health such as Back to Eden, banned from the mails due to some heavy leaning by the American Medical Association.
How the slim red volume titled Quest for Sita ended up on that narrow shelf I don’t know, and never asked. Its contents were mysterious and sexual, this I knew from its drawings: line drawings of a woman naked from the waist up; a man who carried a bow; and a monkey-man—but all on their separate pages as I leafed through the book at age six. Sita was my secret. Surely my mother had forgotten the book was there, for she always shrugged away any amorous advance by my father; as for my father knowing what was held between the book’s faded red boards, no book ever opened upon his lap, only the newspaper.
The book’s originally red boards were mottled pink in places; perhaps water figured in its past. If so, Quest for Sita had suffered only a sprinkle. It opened cleanly, to cream-coloured paper. Everything about the physical book was clear, the type clear and increasingly legible as I learned to read. I could sound out most of the words, except some of the long foreign ones. The name Rama was easy, as was Sita—she had only that one name, and was beautiful in a strange, stylized way. Her hands lifted in strange gestures, her fingers slenderly pointed and flexible as lizards. It was difficult to know whether Sita was fleeing or merely lost. What was clear was that the Prince was in pursuit. He wanted Sita: I knew this from the drawings, before I even got tangled up in the story. In every picture of her, Sita’s breasts faced this way, or that way, as if in disdain at being followed so closely.
I looked up “quest” in the dictionary at school: a search or the act of seeking. The tips of Sita’s fingers arching backwards. The nipples of her high breasts inscrutable, tiny circles within circles. The act of being sought.
When I left home, I took the book with me without asking permission. I stole it, relying on the principle that whosoever loves a book best is its true owner. But my first lover (after the other first one, who didn’t count), my first lover—the one who taught me to follow him places—seemed to think that he was the reader most deserving of Sita. I showed it to him, loaning it to him at his request, flattered by his interest; and then he disappeared. I would sometimes see him on campus, but he was always hurrying to a class; I’d mention the book, and he’d promise to return it, yes, but he had to run. When we’d briefly been lovers his name had been Steve White, and I’d been sure that he would return my precious stolen book. But then with heightened political awareness on campus he changed his name to Estaben Blanco, the Spanish version, and I was never to see the book again.
I have tried to find it; I have tried to find Estaben Blanco, but there are too many in the San Francisco phone book. In Toronto once I inquired at a shop of rare and used books, but was met with a shake of the head.
I know now that Sita was the fate of Prince Rama in the great epic poem of India, the Ramayana. And although I don’t know the author of the brief prose version called Quest for Sita, I have recently learned that its drawings were executed by the celebrated Mervyn Peake, of the Gormenghast Trilogy—an unforgotten classic. This fact makes me a little soft on Peake, that he had it in him, those drawings. Elegant and erotic, they awakened me to their own mystery, and further, to the mystery of the surrounding words.