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Part of this night in Lanka is still inside one house, the house marked with the signs of Rama‘s weapons. A moment ago Hanuman called himself a fickle monkey, low in every way, and said that Rama had been gracious even to him. His eyes filled as he remembered Rama’s virtues. But the work he came for will not be finished in this house. For that he must go to the corner of the city. There a woman has sat under Ashoka trees since before the rains came and went, with no news reaching her and no way to send any out.
On the far shore the host of bears and monkeys is still waiting on the sand, living on roots and wild fruit. A whole rainy season has passed since Sita was carried off, and autumn has come. When the rains ended, Rama himself said that word of her had still to come. The only word since then is Sampati’s: he saw her from across the water, sitting in a grove of Ashoka trees in Lanka, lost in her thoughts.
In this episode Tulsidas sets three things down one after another: a sight that breaks the one who sees it. A pressure that begins with talk and ends at a sword. And a dream that turns Lanka’s account of itself upside down. The loudest voice in the grove that night belongs to Sita. Before she will speak at all, she picks up a blade of grass and holds it between herself and the man in front of her. What she says from behind it is among the strongest lines in this kand.
That night in the Ashoka grove
The main figures in this episode
- Sita Janaka’s daughter. She sits under an Ashoka tree with her body wasted thin, her eyes on her own feet, and her mind at Rama’s feet.
- Hanuman who says nothing aloud once he is in the grove. Hidden in the leaves, he sees everything.
- Vibhishana from whose house the road to the grove begins. He tells how Sita lives and how the grove can be reached.
- Ravana who arrives in his finery with a company of women behind him, and leaves after announcing a term of one month.
- Mandodari the daughter of the demon Maya. She acts in this episode for half a line, and in that half line she saves Sita’s life.
- The rakshasis the crowd of demonesses set to frighten her, who before the night is out are frightened themselves and fall at her feet.
- Trijata the rakshasi whose heart is at Rama’s feet, and whose dream is the largest event of the night.
- Rama nowhere in the grove, and inside every sentence spoken there. Sita opens her mouth only after she has called him to mind.
From Vibhishana’s house to the grove
The night picks up where it left off. Hanuman’s praise of Rama reaches its last sentence: those who know a master like this and forget him all the same, and wander astray, how could they not be unhappy? Tulsi closes the praise with one word for the speaker’s state. Speaking this way of Rama’s virtues, Hanuman came to a peace that cannot be put into words.
That sentence is spoken in Lanka, the city where the largest example of that forgetting sits on the throne. The speaker names no one, and the listener, that king’s own brother, understands. Then Vibhishana comes to the hardest news his house has to give, and tells the whole story of how Sita was living there.
Hanuman heard it through and had one thing to say. “Listen, brother, I want to see mother Sita.” Two words of kinship sit in that line: brother for the man beside him, mother for the woman he has come to find. He asks for a way to her, because without that sight the crossing stays unfinished.
Vibhishana told him every means. Tulsi keeps the details to himself. Hanuman took his leave, took that same form again, the mosquito-sized body he had entered the city in, as the commentary identifies it. He went to the part of the Ashoka wood where Sita lived. It is his habit in this kand: small to pass through Surasa’s mouth, small at the gate, small to enter the city. And small once more now that the place he crossed the sea for is within reach. Tulsi finishes it in half a chaupai. The lesson is a large one: where being seen is the one danger that matters, strength is used by hiding it.
The first sight, through the leaves
There she is, and Tulsidas keeps the description short. Seeing her, Hanuman bowed to her in his mind. The bow stays inside him, because letting her know he had come would, in that hour, put her in danger. Then he sees: she lets all the watches of the night go by sitting up (all four, by the commentary’s count). So lying down is something this garden has forgotten. Her body is wasted thin. On her head is a single braid of matted hair, the quietest sign in the scene that she has stopped doing anything for herself.
One thing holds her up through all of it: in her heart she repeats Rama’s virtues without a break. They are the same virtues Hanuman spoke aloud in a house across the city tonight. Her grief has a practice inside it that keeps it from breaking.
There is no clothing in these lines, no ornament, no counting of beauty. The poet who spent a three-stanza chhand on Lanka’s rampart, gardens, and wrestlers finishes this portrait in half a line, because the garden has taken everything else from her. What remains is the repetition, and he puts it at the end of the line, so the reader is left holding what she holds.
Then the doha. Her eyes rest on her own feet, and her mind is sunk in Rama’s lotus feet. Two pairs of feet in one line: the pair she looks at, and the pair she lives in. Her lowered eyes are her dignity. In a garden that belongs to the man who stole her, why would she raise them?
The second half of the doha belongs to the envoy. Seeing Sita in that wretched state, Hanuman was overcome with grief. Of all his strength, Tulsi records only that he suffered. Whoever is truly someone’s envoy takes on the other’s pain before doing the work.
At that moment he came
Hidden among the leaves, Hanuman turned over a simple question: brother, what am I to do? The commentary hears the rest of it: how is her sorrow to be taken away? The one who leapt the sea, answered Surasa, and knocked Lankini flat with a punch is asking himself what to do next. Because what this hour needs is patience, and strength can do nothing here.
He was still deciding when the silence broke. At that moment Ravana came, dressed in all his finery, with a company of women at his back, into a garden where a woman sat in one matted braid.
Then the wicked one worked on Sita in every way he knew. Tulsi names his methods by the four means the books of statecraft count: soft words, gifts, fear, and division, setting one person against another. All four go into half a line, and that is Tulsi’s verdict on them: all four failed.
Then the offer, which shows the man’s mind. “Listen, fair-faced one, wise one,” Ravana said. “Mandodari and all my queens, I will make them your maidservants. This is my vow. Only look toward me once.” He lays out his own wives like things to be counted, and asks in return for one glance. Her eyes, the doha has just told us, are on her own feet. The king who can promise away all his queens cannot get one look from one woman, and that is the first proof of his defeat.
Behind a blade of grass
Sita’s answer begins before she speaks. She calls Rama to mind, picks up a blade of grass, and holds it between herself and him. Only then does she open her mouth. It is one of the best-remembered pictures in the kand. A breath of wind would carry that grass away, and here it does the work of dignity. She has to speak, because he would read her silence in his favor. But she will not speak to him directly. Something will stand between them, even if it is one stalk of grass. And she remembers Rama first so that the strength about to come into her words is counted as his.
The name Tulsi gives that remembering suits the moment: the lord of Ayodhya, the one who loves beyond all others. The man in front of her has just been reckoning up his queens and his gifts. The name she holds is also a king’s, the king whose bond with her is love. After that, there is no room left in her for trembling.
“Listen, Ravana,” Sita said. “Can a lotus ever be made to bloom by the light of a firefly?” The answer is inside the question: a lotus opens to the sun, as everyone knows. A firefly does have a small light of its own, one you can even see at night. Tulsi’s insult grants him a light and then measures it, and the measuring is what cuts.
She tells him to settle that in his own mind, and then puts her hand on exactly the place where he is afraid. “Wretch, you know nothing of Rama’s arrow.” The arrow has not been loosed. The army is still on the far shore with the sea between. But in her mind its arrival is settled, and that certainty gives the sentence its weight. And hidden in the leaves, the one who asked that army to wait for him on the shore hears every word.
Her last line is the most direct blow. “Fool, you carried me off when no one was there. Low, shameless creature, have you no shame?” She calls him a thief, and the kind of thief who lacked the courage to come in the open. A woman who has sat under guard for months demands an account of his shame from the man who holds her life in his hand.
The sword comes out
Ravana has no argument left. Hearing himself likened to a firefly and Rama to the sun, and then those harsh words, he drew his sword and spoke in a fury. Tulsi’s word for his state is khisiana, anger with the sting of humiliation in it, the rage of a man who has just been shown his own size. What wounded him was the comparison. The sequence is now complete: first talk, then temptation, then threats, and now iron.
“Sita, you have insulted me. I will cut off your head with this hard blade. Or else obey my word, and quickly. Fair-faced one, otherwise your life is lost.” The commentary hears an “even now” in that second demand, a door he still holds open. He leaves no road between the two choices, and “fair-faced” is still in his mouth with the sword in his hand.
Here comes the turn Tulsi saved his tightest lines for. The woman facing the drawn sword takes the sword itself and makes it the means of finishing what she has to say.
That arm, or this sword
She begins with an arm that is far across the sea. “Ravana, Rama’s arm is as beautiful as a garland of dark lotuses, and shaped like an elephant’s trunk.” The commentary sees fullness and length in that trunk. Then she brings the picture to her own throat. She puts two choices in front of the man with the sword: “Either that arm will lie at my neck, or your terrible sword will. Listen, fool: that is my true vow.”
With that sentence the sword loses its power. A weapon frightens someone who wants to live. Here it has become one side of a choice, and the one choosing is the woman whose neck it was meant for. A little earlier Ravana announced a vow of his own, to make his queens her servants. His vow spends his queens. Hers is paid with her own neck. Set the two side by side and the verdict needs no one to give it.
The plea to Chandrahas
Then she stops speaking to Ravana and speaks to the blade in his hand, in the voice of a plea, something he never imagined when he drew it. “Chandrahas,” she said, giving the sword its name, “take away this burning of mine, born of the fire of separation from Rama. Your edge is cool and keen. Take the burden of my sorrow from me.”
To a body burning in separation, an edge of iron would truly feel cool. What Ravana holds out as her end, she asks for as relief. And Tulsi makes plain in the first line where the burning comes from: separation from Rama. In the account of her sorrow Ravana goes unnamed. He is a man standing there holding a weapon, and even its use has passed out of his hands.
Maya’s daughter, and a month’s grace
At those words Ravana rushed to kill her, and in the same line someone stops him. Maya’s daughter spoke to him of right conduct and brought him to his senses. The verse names her by her father. The commentary gives her name, Mandodari, the name Tulsi gave Maya’s daughter long before, in the Balkand, when Maya brought her to Ravana as his wife.
Valmiki tells this moment with a different woman staying the king’s hand and a different count of months. In Tulsi’s telling the hand is Mandodari’s and the term is one month. This half line is her whole part in the episode. A little earlier she was promised away as a servant. Now hers is the voice that stops a killing. Tulsi does not comment. He sets the two lines near each other and trusts the reader.
Then Ravana hands the work to others. He called all the rakshasis together and ordered them to frighten Sita in every way they could. He set a term: “If within a month she has not done as I say, I will draw this sword and kill her.” The sword that was in his hand a moment ago has been put off for a month. To put a date on a threat is to admit it will not be carried out today.
With that term a clock starts in this kand. Until now time in the garden went unmeasured, and the nights passed as she sat. Now a month is being counted, and the counting will go on in Sita’s mind. Ravana meant it as pressure. In fact he tied his own hand with his own word, because what was not done today must now wait a month. And in a month a great deal can come across the sea.
The ring of demonesses
The doha that ends his visit is split down the middle. In one half, the man who gave the order goes home to his palace. In the other, under the trees, hordes of demonesses put on hideous shapes of every kind and set about frightening Sita. A woman seated, and around her a crowd of terrible, changing faces. Tulsi’s word for those shapes is manda, frightening and base at once.
The garden still holds one thing Ravana went home without knowing: a witness in the leaves who has watched the sword come out and the order given. And in the middle of that ring comes the real turn of the night. From inside the very crowd set there to terrify her, one voice rises and turns the ring around.
Trijata’s dream
Among them was a rakshasi named Trijata, and Tulsi settles who she is in one line. She is a rakshasi, and he says so plainly. Her heart is given to Rama’s feet. And she is skilled in discernment, the judgment that knows what a thing means. It is the third time in this kand that Rama’s side speaks from inside Lanka: first Lankini at the gate, then Vibhishana’s house, and now this dream.
Trijata called them all together, and her counsel was to serve Sita and so do themselves good. That is what discernment means: saying a thing in the language the listener understands. Then she told her dream. A monkey burned Lanka, and the whole rakshasa army was killed. Ravana was naked, riding a donkey, his heads shaved and all twenty arms cut off, and in that state he was going south. Lanka seemed to have passed to Vibhishana, and Rama’s proclamation had gone round the whole city. And then Rama sent for Sita.
The monkey who burns Lanka in that dream is sitting in the leaves above as she speaks, hearing every word. He has not yet burned so much as a blade of grass. To the rakshasis it is a frightening dream. To the reader it is a map of what is coming. Tulsi tells the story ahead of time and loses nothing by it, because with him the question that holds us is how a thing will happen.
The details of the dream have their own order. Shaved heads, nakedness, and a donkey to ride are hung on the man who came into the grove in all his finery and left after reckoning up his queens. The twenty arms cut off are the strength his pride stood on. And the direction is south, which the commentary reads as the road to Yama’s city, the way the dead go.
A matter of four days
Then Trijata raised her voice. “I say this aloud for all to hear: this dream will come true when four days have passed.” Four days, the commentary says, means a few days, soon. Now two counts of time stand in that garden, his month and her four days. The shorter one was spoken by one of the rakshasis he set on Sita himself.
The effect is immediate. The rakshasis who came to frighten her were frightened themselves at Trijata’s words, and fell at Sita’s feet. In one chaupai the board turns over. The ring is the same ring, the woman inside it is the same woman, and now the ring is on its knees.
Then they all went off, here and there, and the garden was empty again. Tulsi carries the episode one step past that victory and closes it where the heaviest part of the night begins.
When they had all gone, Sita began to think: when the month has passed, that vile night-walker will kill me. This is the woman who begged a sword to take away her sorrow a little while ago. That was said to an enemy’s face. This is a thought that rises when she is alone. Tulsi puts both in one episode, and that is what makes his Sita a real woman. Before an enemy she does not bend. Alone, she is human, with a month to count.
In whose hands the terms lie
Everything rests on that blade of grass. When a captor presses a captive, the captive either bends or fights. Sita does a third thing. Before a word is spoken, and before the sword comes out, she sets a blade of grass between them. It would stop no blow, and it settles the terms on which the talking will be done. The strength was on his side. The terms were hers, and they never moved.
Then there is the envoy who keeps silent. Hanuman is hidden in the leaves, seeing everything, with the strength in him to change the scene in an instant. He holds still, because he understands the work. Had he come down then, the city would have known that Rama’s envoy was inside it. The message would never have reached Sita, and the army across the sea would have been left in the dark. His hand will move soon enough, once the message is given. The hardest test for anyone entrusted with a great work is to keep the hand still when a small work presents itself.
And there is Trijata. The rakshasis set to guard Sita were not all alike. In any crowd that closes in on someone there is one whose heart is somewhere else, and change most often starts there. Trijata simply told what she had seen, in front of everyone, and the ring broke by itself. By this point in the night there are three in the grove who belong to Rama: Sita, Trijata, and the one hidden in the leaves. Lanka knows nothing of it yet.
The same story, elsewhere: Valmiki’s Ramayana, chapter 21: The Ashoka Grove, the Sight of Sita, and the Ring.
Source: the Gita Press edition of Tulsidas’s Ramcharitmanas, Sundarkand, doha 8 to 11, read with Hanuman Prasad Poddar’s Hindi commentary.