Sītā

With the sacrifice safely completed, Vishvāmitra’s purpose in bringing the princes was fulfilled. But he did not send them home. There was another thing he meant them to see, though he did not tell them so directly, for the best teachers arrange the lesson and let the pupil walk into it. He turned their steps not north toward Ayodhyā but further on, toward the kingdom of the north, toward Mithilā, where a king named Janaka ruled and a great event was about to take place.

As they travelled, the sage spoke of Janaka, and it is worth our while to listen, for Janaka was no ordinary monarch. He was a philosopher-king, one of those rare men who wear a crown and yet are not owned by it. He ruled his kingdom well, with justice and with care, and at the same time he had gone as deep into the questions of the spirit as any forest hermit. The sages honoured him not as a patron but as a peer.

It was said that Janaka had reached a state where he could hold the whole business of kingship, its wealth and its wars and its ceremonies, in an open hand, neither grasping it nor throwing it away, present to all of it and attached to none. He was in the world and not of it, and this is one of the hardest things a human being can be, harder by far in a palace than in a cave, and Janaka managed it in a palace.

And it was to this king, years before, that a strange and beautiful gift had come.

Janaka had been performing a sacrifice, and part of the rite required him to plough a strip of sacred ground with his own royal hands, for even a king, in the presence of the holy, takes up the labourer’s work. As he drove the plough down the consecrated furrow, the blade struck something in the earth, and he stopped, and looked, and found in the opened ground a child. A baby girl, lying in the furrow as though the earth itself had lifted her up and offered her to him, perfect and unharmed and gazing up at the astonished king.

She had no mother that any man knew, no father, no lineage that could be traced. She had come from the earth, from the furrow, from the ploughed line itself, and so Janaka named her Sītā, which is the word for that very furrow. She was, the tellers say and the faithful believe, no ordinary foundling but a descent, as Rāma was a descent, the Goddess herself taking human form and human infancy, come into the world by the strangest and gentlest of doors to meet the one who had come to meet her. But Janaka did not know this, or did not need to.

He knew only that the earth had given him a daughter, and he took her up out of the furrow and into his heart, and he loved her from that first moment as no natural father ever loved a natural child.

And she grew, in the palace at Mithilā, into a girl of such grace and such quiet strength that those around her felt it without being able to name it. There was in her, from her earliest years, a self-possession that did not come from her upbringing, for it was there before her upbringing could have put it there. She was gentle, and she was immovable, and the two lived together in her without contradiction, the way they lived in Rāma. Perhaps that is why the story was always going to bring them together.

Some meetings are prepared long before they happen.

There is a tale of her childhood that Janaka loved to tell, and it foreshadows everything. In the treasury of Mithilā there was kept a great bow, the bow of Shiva himself, an object of immense sacred power and enormous weight, so heavy that it took hundreds of men to move the cart it rested on. It was not a thing anyone touched. It sat in its place, honoured and untouchable, the most fearsome relic in the kingdom.

One day, when Sītā was still a small child, a ball she was playing with rolled beneath the great bow’s pedestal. And Sītā, thinking nothing of it, being a child who wanted her ball, walked over, took hold of the pedestal that grown men could not shift, lifted it aside as easily as if it were a stool, retrieved her ball, and went back to her game.

The court that witnessed it went silent with awe. Janaka understood, in that moment, that his daughter was not what she appeared to be, that the earth had given him something more than a child. And he made a vow, there and then, about her marriage. He would not give her to any man merely for his rank or his riches or the alliance he offered. The girl who had lifted Shiva’s bow with one small hand would be given only to a man who could match that strength, a man worthy of her origin and her nature. Let the bow be the test, he declared.

Whoever among all the kings and princes of the earth could lift that mighty bow and string it would win the hand of Sītā. And until such a man came, she would not be given at all.

Years passed, and no such man came. Kings tried and failed. Great warriors, proud of their strength, came to Mithilā to attempt the bow and went away humbled, unable even to stir it in its rest. The vow began to look less like a wise condition and more like a wall, and Janaka, who loved his daughter and wished to see her happily settled, began quietly to wonder whether he had asked for a thing the world could not supply.

And now, as our story returns to the road, Janaka had proclaimed a great assembly, a gathering of kings, one more contest of the bow. From every quarter the mighty were coming to Mithilā to try their strength, and the whole kingdom was astir with it. This was the event toward which Vishvāmitra was quietly steering two boys from Ayodhyā, one of whom was strong beyond the reckoning of any king on earth, and neither of whom yet knew that a girl born from a furrow was waiting at the end of the road.

The sage said nothing of any of this. He only led them north, and told them stories, and let the road carry them toward the meeting that the earth and the fire had been preparing since before either child was born. But before Mithilā there was one more hermitage to pass, one more soul waiting by the way, and her story is among the tenderest in the whole telling, and it deserves a chapter of its own.