The Return to the Earth

Sītā, banished and alone in the forest, was not left wholly without shelter, for the sage Vālmīki, the great seer, found her, and took her into his hermitage, and gave her refuge, and there, in the peace of the ashram, cared for and honoured by the sage and his people, Sītā made her home in her exile, and there she gave birth to her children, twin sons, whom she named Lava and Kusha.

And so, in the quiet of Vālmīki’s hermitage, far from the palace and the throne and the husband who had banished her, Sītā raised her two sons, and the years passed, and the boys grew, and it was a gentler exile than it might have been, for the hermitage was a place of peace and holiness, and Sītā was honoured there, and her sons grew up strong and good under the care of the great sage.

And Vālmīki himself took the boys as his pupils, and taught them, and among the things he taught them was a wonderful thing: for Vālmīki, the tellers say, was the very sage who composed the Rāmāyaṇa, the great poem of Rāma’s whole life and deeds, and he taught this poem to Lava and Kusha, and trained them to sing it, so that the two boys, all unknowing, learned to sing the epic of their own father, the whole story of Rāma, in the hermitage where their banished mother had raised them.

The years turned, and the boys grew to youth, and there came an occasion that brought the long-separated family, at last, toward its final reckoning. For Rāma, reigning in Ayodhyā, undertook to perform a great sacrifice, the Ashvamedha, the horse-sacrifice, the grandest of royal rites; and the celebration of it drew people from all the kingdom and beyond; and to this great gathering came, among the many, the sage Vālmīki, and with him the two boys, Lava and Kusha.

And the boys, trained by Vālmīki, sang the Rāmāyaṇa, the poem of Rāma’s life, in the assembly, before the king and the whole court, singing the beautiful story of Rāma’s deeds in their pure young voices, all unaware that they sang before the very hero of the tale, their own father.

And Rāma, listening, was moved beyond words, for he heard his own life sung back to him in the voices of these two beautiful youths, heard the whole story of his exile and his loss and his war and his triumph, sung with such beauty and such truth that it pierced his heart; and as he listened, and looked upon the two singers, he perceived a likeness, and a wonder grew in him, and he understood, or came to suspect, that these two boys who sang his story so were his own sons, the children of Sītā, born in the exile to which he had banished her.

And the recognition broke over him with all the force of the grief and the love that he had held down through all the years since the banishment, the grief for the wife he had sent away and never ceased to love, the sudden knowledge of the sons he had never known.

And Rāma sent for Sītā, for the recognition of his sons brought the whole matter to its crisis, and he summoned Sītā to come to the assembly, to be reunited, but on a condition that reveals that even now, even after all the years, the terrible logic of the kingly dharma still held him: he summoned her to come and to prove her purity once more, publicly, before the assembled people, so that the old doubt might be finally laid to rest and she might be received back with the world’s acceptance.

Once more, after everything, after the fire, after the years of unjust banishment, Sītā was to be asked to prove the purity that had never truly been in doubt, to satisfy the demand of the people and the throne with a public vindication.

And Sītā came, brought by Vālmīki to the great assembly, and she stood before Rāma and the court and the people, and she was asked once more to prove herself.

And Sītā, who had endured so much, who had been taken and imprisoned and threatened and tormented and vindicated by fire and then banished despite that vindication and left to raise her sons alone in the forest for all these years, Sītā had reached at last the end of what even her great endurance could bear, not in the sense of breaking, but in the sense that she would prove herself no more; she would not submit again to the endless demand for proof of a purity that was perfect and that she should never have been made to prove even once; and she made instead a final, sacred, and terrible declaration, a proof that would end all proofs.

If I have been faithful, she declared, calling now not upon fire but upon the earth itself, her own mother, from whom she had come; if I have never in thought or word or deed been untrue to Rāma, if my heart has been pure through all my life and all my suffering, then let my mother, the Earth, from whose furrow I came, open and receive me back, and take me home.

It was a calling-upon of her own origin, her own mother, the Earth from which she had been born in the furrow so long ago; and it was a declaration that she would return to that source rather than endure any longer the demands of a world that would not cease to doubt her; and it was her final and unanswerable proof, for she staked her vindication on the Earth’s own response.

And the Earth answered. As Sītā spoke, the ground opened, and Mother Earth herself rose up, or a great throne rose from the opening earth, and the Earth took Sītā into her arms, received her daughter back, and drew her down, and the earth closed over her, and Sītā was gone, returned to the source from which she had come, vindicated absolutely by the Earth’s own reception of her, and gone forever from the world of Rāma and Ayodhyā and the endless demands of the throne.

And Rāma was left, stricken, crying out in grief, reaching for the wife who had been received back into the earth, gone now beyond any recovery, taken from him not by any enemy but by the Earth herself, who had judged, as it were, that the world was no longer worthy to hold so faithful a soul, so tried and so doubted and so wronged a queen.

The Earth had received Sītā, and Sītā was gone, and Rāma understood at last, in the fullness of his grief, that his divine companion, who had come with him into the world and shared his whole long journey of exile and war and sorrow, had returned to her source, that the goddess who had taken human form to walk beside him had laid that form down at last and gone home, leaving him alone in the world she had departed.

Let us mark the terrible dignity of Sītā’s end, for the tellers give it to her as the final vindication of her whole long-suffering greatness.

Through the whole story she had been the one who endured, who held fast, who bore the sufferings that were laid upon her, taking and imprisonment and doubt and banishment, always faithful, always wronged, always enduring; and at the last, she reached the point where endurance became refusal, where the faithful soul, having proven itself again and again and been doubted again and again, would prove itself no more, but would rather return to its source than submit to a world that would not cease to demand what it had no right to demand.

Her return to the Earth is not a defeat but a final and absolute vindication, the Earth itself receiving her as proof of a purity beyond all further question, and it is also a judgment upon the world and the throne that had wronged her, a declaration that the demands laid upon her had at last exceeded what any faithfulness should be asked to bear, and that she would go home rather than endure them further.

Sītā, who had been born from the earth in a furrow and had come into the world as a gift, returned to the earth at the end, her work done, her faithfulness perfect and proven, her long suffering ended, gone home to the mother from whom she came, leaving behind her a grief in Rāma that nothing in the world could console, and a story of endurance and fidelity that has been honoured and wept over for as long as the tale has been told.