Chapter 59 — Vedavati

Agastya said that Ravana left Kailasa and continued across the earth, troubling kings wherever he found them. In a forest of the Himalaya, he saw a woman at religious observance.

She wore a dark deer skin and had matted hair. Her practice was tapas, disciplined religious restraint undertaken here with a stated purpose. Ravana saw her beauty and her austerity together, and asked why a woman of such appearance lived in a way he called contrary to youth.

Vedavati received the stranger with the formal courtesy due an arrival. Then she told him who she was.

“My father was the rishi Kushadhvaja,” she said. “I was born as he recited and studied the Vedas, and I am called Vedavati. Gods, gandharvas, yakshas, rakshasas, and serpents came to seek me from my father. He gave me to none of them. He wished Vishnu, lord of the three worlds, to be my husband.”

A daitya king, angry at that decision, killed her father while he slept. Her mother entered the fire holding her husband's body. Vedavati had taken up tapas, she said, to fulfill the purpose her father had held toward Vishnu.

“I know who you are,” she told Ravana. “Go, descendant of Pulastya. By this practice I know what moves in the three worlds.”

Ravana climbed down from Pushpaka. Desire and contempt governed his reply. He told her that her observance did not suit her youth, mocked the name of Vishnu, and praised his own power, pleasure, strength, and austerities as if no one could equal him.

Vedavati told him not to speak so. Ravana reached out and touched her hair.

She answered at once. With her hand she cut away the hair he had touched. She made a fire and stood before it without surrendering the purpose she had named.

“Because you have violated me though I have done no wrong and have no protector here,” she said, “I will be born again for your destruction. I will not spend the power of my tapas merely in a curse upon you.”

Then Vedavati entered the fire before Ravana. Flowers fell from the sky around the blaze.

Agastya did not leave the consequence uncertain. Vedavati, he told Rama, had lived in the earlier age; in the age that followed she was born among human beings in a field opened by a plough, and people called her Sita.

The account did not make Sita's life a punishment or a repetition without choice. It marked a bond that carried across the ages, and it returned Ravana to the road he had chosen, carrying its consequence before he could understand it.