Chapter 108 — Valmiki's Witness

At dawn Rama came to the sacrificial enclosure and summoned the rishis. Vashishta, Vamadeva, Jabali, Kashyapa, Vishvamitra, Agastya, Durvasa, Chyavana, Bharadvaja, and many others arrived; kings came too, with vanaras and rakshasas. Thousands from every order of the realm gathered to see Sita's oath.

Within that immense assembly, the royal brothers were visible near Rama: Bharata, Lakshmana, and Shatrughna, whose lives had been bound to Sita's from the first days of exile and return. Hanuman stood with the vanaras. Lava and Kusha remained among Valmiki's disciples, the two young singers whose poem had brought everyone to this morning.

When Valmiki heard that all had assembled, he came swiftly with Sita.

The enclosure had been made for a royal sacrifice, but that morning the ritual fire was not the only thing before which people stood. Rishis, rulers, vanaras, rakshasas, and thousands of others had gathered to see a woman who had already endured the forest, captivity, fire, exile, childbirth, and years of sanctuary. The crowd stood in its full breadth. This was no private meeting between husband and wife.

Sita walked behind the sage. Her face was lowered. Her hands were joined. Tears thickened her voice, and Rama was held in her mind. The crowd saw her following Valmiki and raised a great sound. Some cried, “Well done, Sita”; some, “Well done, Rama”; others called approval to both. Their grief moved through the enclosure with their praise.

She did not arrive as the jeweled bride who had entered Ayodhya after the war, nor as the captive beneath the simsapa tree in Lanka. She came in the clothing of the hermitage, after years beyond the palace, with Valmiki before her and the whole public world now facing her. Her lowered face is not silence without force. She was visible at the moment when others were preparing to speak about her.

Valmiki entered the center of the people with Sita beside him and addressed Rama.

“This is Sita,” he said, “steadfast in her vows and living by dharma. She was faultless when you abandoned her near my hermitage, fearing the talk of the world. She will give you the assurance you seek. Permit her.”

Then Valmiki named the truth that had been kept from the public: Lava and Kusha, born together, were Sita's sons and Rama's sons.

The words reached the boys as they stood in the sage's company. Their parentage, held back while they sang Rama's story in public, was now spoken before their father, their mother, their uncles, and Hanuman, the ally whose service had once made possible the first return from Lanka.

The sage placed his own life of austerity behind his words. He said he did not remember speaking falsehood; if Sita were not innocent, let the accumulated fruit of his long tapas fail him. He had received her at the forest spring only after considering her purity with every sense and mind together.

Valmiki did more than offer a general blessing. He named Rama's fear of public talk. He named the abandonment near his hermitage. He named Sita faultless. And he named the boys as Rama's sons before the same world in which their father had been listening to their song. The testimony was not vague, and its clarity made the demand still waiting more severe.

Sita stood within the gathered world while another person testified to her. Valmiki's witness was clear. Yet the next word, and the act that would end her presence among them, still belonged to Sita.