The rakshasi who dreamed of Rama's victory before the war began

The dream

She woke with her hand at her own throat.

Trijata was the oldest of the rakshasi guards in the Ashoka grove, the walled garden where Sita had been held for ten months. The peacocks were silent. The fountains ran only at dawn and dusk by Ravana's order, so their sound would not soothe the prisoner. Sita slept on bare earth beneath a great Shimshapa tree, hair matted, eating only what fell from the branches, reciting Rama's name under her breath.

The other rakshasis taunted her in rotating shifts. They described what Ravana would do to her. They pulled her hair when the captain was not watching. Trijata had never joined in. She sat at the edge of the circle, white-haired, her face lined more by thought than by malice.

On the night Hanuman would arrive, though no one yet knew this, she fell asleep at her post. And she dreamed.

She dreamed first of a white elephant, vast as conch-shell, six-tusked, climbing into the sky from the southern ocean. On its back stood Rama and Lakshmana, garlanded in white lotus. They came down on the city walls and did not dismount. The elephant walked through the walls as if they were mist.

Then Sita herself, standing on the back of a great white bull, ascending. Hair washed and oiled and braided with white champaka. Laughing. Her two husbands beside her, riding white animals, the three of them rising over the sea, going north, leaving the southern island behind.

Then the dream darkened.

Ravana, naked, his ten heads shaved bare, his twenty arms greased with red oil the color of fresh blood. He was riding southward on a chariot drawn by donkeys. Sinking. The chariot sank into a marsh of mud and bones. Kumbhakarna drowning in a lake of oil, his great snoring mouth filling and going silent. Indrajit with his head severed and his eyes still open in surprise.

Then Lanka itself. The golden city black with smoke. Small brown monkeys leaping from roof to roof, pulling down the golden flags. The great gate cracked open. The sea rising over the eastern shore.

Telling the others

The youngest rakshasi, a guard named Vinata who had been particularly cruel to Sita the previous day, looked up. "Trijata. You cried out."

Trijata did not answer at once. She looked at Sita beneath the Shimshapa tree. Sita was awake, sitting up with one hand on the trunk, watching with that perfect stillness of someone who has nothing left to lose.

Trijata stood. She walked into the center of the rakshasi circle.

"Listen to me. I have had a dream from the gods. Rama is coming. Rama and Lakshmana are coming on a white elephant. They will pass through these walls as if the walls are made of mist. Sita will be returned to her husband. Lanka will burn. Ravana will be naked and shaved and dragged south on a donkey-chariot into the underworld. Kumbhakarna will drown. Indrajit will lose his head. The city will fall. I have seen it."

The rakshasis stared at her. Then Vinata laughed. "Old fool. You have eaten too much fermented date-wine."

But Trijata was not finished. She turned to Sita.

"Daughter. Forgive me. Forgive all of us. The dreams of the rakshasi-women are sometimes true. We walk closer to the dream-world than your kind. What I have seen is going to happen. Your husband is coming. Forgive what we have done to you in this grove."

Sita said nothing. But her eyes filled with tears for the first time that anyone had seen, not the dry exhausted weeping she had done for ten months, but real tears, the kind that come when hope returns to a body that had given up.

The slow conversion

Vinata laughed again, but the laugh was thinner. The other women, the camel-headed one, the goat-eyed one, the one with the tusks, did not laugh. They had served Ravana long enough to know the look on Trijata's face.

The camel-headed rakshasi spoke. "If Sita is to be the queen of the world that follows, then we who have hurt her will be punished by Rama himself."

"You will be punished," Trijata said, "unless you ask forgiveness now, while there is still time. Bow. Ask. She is generous. She will release you from the karma of these months. But only before her husband arrives, not after. After is too late."

One by one they bowed. Even Vinata, eventually, after standing alone for a long minute with her arms crossed, even she dropped to her knees. They crawled to Sita beneath the tree. They asked forgiveness for the months of taunts. They wept rakshasi-tears, which are black and oily.

Sita said only: "I forgive each of you. May the dreams of your daughters be lighter than the dreams you have given me."

She did not raise her voice. She forgave them as a queen would forgive the household staff, completely, without warmth, without pretense of friendship.

The grove was quiet after that.

The arrival

Hanuman came that very night. He leapt from the wall and dropped into the grove from the canopy of the Shimshapa tree itself. Sita saw a small monkey above her with a ring in its paw, Rama's ring, and understood that Trijata's dream had begun to come true.

The rakshasis, watching, did not raise the alarm. They watched the small monkey speak with their prisoner. They watched her give him the head-jewel, her chudamani, to carry to Rama as proof. They watched Hanuman bow at her feet and leap back into the canopy.

Only after he was gone did they raise the alarm, and then only because not raising it would have been a crime they could not explain.

The Shimshapa tree under which the dream was first told became, in later Sri Lankan tradition, a holy site. A small shrine, not a great temple, just a stone platform, marked the place. Travelers would leave white champaka flowers there in honor of an old woman who, when truth came to her in a dream, had been brave enough to speak it among hostile listeners before it was safe to do so.

That is the test of dharma. Not whether you saw the truth. Whether you said it before the room had decided you were right.