Chapter 109 — Sita's Return to Earth

Rama stood before Valmiki with joined hands and looked at Sita, radiant even in ascetic dress.

“It is as you say,” he answered the sage. “Your unstained words give me assurance. Long ago, before the gods, Sita gave proof. Knowing her innocent, I abandoned her because I feared the world's speech. Forgive me.”

He did not say that the boys had revealed anything to him. He said he had known she was innocent. He recalled the proof she had already given before the gods after Lanka. And he named the cause of the abandonment: fear of what people might say. The words stood in the center of the assembly, neither concealed nor made painless by the request for forgiveness.

He said he knew Lava and Kusha were his twin sons, born to Sita. Yet the public assembly remained, and Sita's final answer would not be spoken by Rama or Valmiki.

As Rama's intention became clear, the gods gathered with Brahma at their head. A sweet, fragrant wind moved through the people. Human beings from many lands looked on in stillness.

Sita, clothed in the ochre of an ascetic, stood with joined hands and lowered eyes. Then she spoke.

She did not repeat Valmiki's testimony, and she did not ask the crowd to decide between her and Rama. Her final declaration was her own. Its condition reached to the interior life no public witness could finally command: whether she had ever, even in thought, turned to another man.

“If I have never, even in my mind, thought of any man but Rama, may Mother Earth make an opening for me.”

As she made the oath, an astonishing throne rose from the ground, borne on the heads of mighty serpents and adorned with jewels. Earth herself took Sita in her arms, welcomed her, and placed her upon it.

Before the eyes of Rama, the sons whose birth had just been acknowledged, the sages, kings, allies, and gathered people, the throne descended into the depths of Earth.

No hand reached from Rama to stop her, no order brought her back, no last reunion came before the ground closed. It was an ending of a different kind from the fire. The woman whose purity had been demanded before the world had left that world.

Flowers fell without ceasing. The gods called out praise for Sita's conduct. In the enclosure, rishis and kings could not cease from wonder. Some beings rejoiced; others stood absorbed in meditation; some looked at Rama, and some at Sita, unable to move.

The world seemed stunned for a moment beyond measure.

The descent was not a reconciliation, and the praise repaired nothing of what had been demanded of her. It left Rama and the gathered world facing her absence.