Author's Note

This book is a work of devotion. It is also a retelling of the Ramayana in prose for a modern reader, and I have written it with one reader especially in mind: someone who is meeting Rama and Sita for the first time, who does not know how the story ends, and who has no one nearby to ask what a word means or why a character does what they do. If you are that reader, you are welcome here, and nothing you need has been assumed.

I have followed the Valmiki Ramayana as closely as I was able, from the first poem to the end of the Uttara Kanda, which many retellings leave out and which I have kept, because the story of Sita does not end at the coronation. Where the book draws on later traditions, on other tellers and other regions, it says so in the back matter, section by section, so that you can always tell what comes from Valmiki and what comes from elsewhere. The chapters themselves do not stop to argue about sources. The notes at the back do that work.

This is prose, not scripture. It does not claim any authority beyond a reader's love of the story, and it is not meant to replace the poem, the commentaries, or the tellings that families and temples have kept alive for longer than any book. If it sends you toward those, it has done what I hoped.

Any errors and omissions are my own and unintentional. A story this long and this loved has been carried carefully by many hands, and I have surely let something slip in mine. I ask your forbearance for that.

My thanks go to the tellers who came before, from Valmiki onward, in every language: those who sang it, those who wrote it down, those who translated it, and those who simply told it again at night to someone who had not heard it yet. This book is one more telling, offered in gratitude to all of them.

Simba Bala