Sita

A king plowed the first furrow in a sacred ritual. The blade of the plow parted the dark soil, and the smell of damp mud drifted on the morning breeze. Then the furrow opened, and from deep inside the earth came the cry of a baby.

No one had planted her. No one had sown her. Mother Earth herself had offered up a child.

This is a Hindu legend, told in the Valmiki Ramayana. The Ramayana is an ancient Indian epic, composed in Sanskrit. In it, King Janaka of Mithila bent down to look. A tiny baby girl lay in the middle of the furrow, her eyes wide open. She smiled at him as if she had known him all along. The king lifted her up and held her close. The child was the daughter of Mother Earth, Bhudevi. She was given the name Sita, a Sanskrit word that means furrow.

She grew up in the palace of Mithila as the king's beloved child. But something in her was always different from those raised among gold and splendor. She was a child of the Earth.

And a child of the Earth is not shaken by any wind.

When she came of age, King Janaka held a contest. Whoever could raise Pinaka, the divine bow of the god Shiva, would marry Sita. Many kings and princes came to try their strength. Not one of them could lift it.

Sita watched from a distance. She would not choose by noise or by promises.

Then Prince Rama of Ayodhya stepped forward. He did not just raise the bow. He drew it until it snapped in two, with a crack like thunder. In many later tellings, Sita placed a garland of flowers around his neck. It was her own choice, made freely and calmly, the way the earth always knows the season to bloom.

But their happiness in the palace of Ayodhya did not last. Because of scheming at court, Rama lost his right to the throne and had to live in exile in the forest for fourteen years. Everyone urged Sita to stay behind. No one ordered her to follow. Yet she chose, on her own, to go with him. All she knew was that wherever Rama went, that place was her home.

Rama's younger brother Lakshmana went with them into the forest. The three of them walked on together, season after season, as the leaves changed.

Then one day, the demon king Ravana came. By a trick, he got Sita alone and carried her across the sea to the island of Lanka. She was taken far away, to the Ashoka garden inside the palace of Ravana.

In the Ashoka garden, Sita had no weapon. She had no army. Around her were the demon women who guarded her. Ravana came again and again, sometimes promising gold and splendor, sometimes threatening, sometimes pleading.

But Sita did not waver.

She knew who she was. She was a child of the Earth. She was the wife of Rama. And no one could take those two things from her. She sat beneath a tree with her thoughts on Rama, never stepping back, never giving in. That is the strength of someone who knows exactly who she is.

The Ashoka flowers bloomed, faded, and bloomed again. Sita was still there, as steadfast as a tree with its roots deep in the earth.

Then one night, a shadow slipped into the garden. It was Hanuman, son of Vayu, the god of the wind. He had crossed a hundred yojanas of ocean. A yojana is an old Indian measure of distance. He shrank himself to the size of a cat and crept into the garden in the dark.

Hanuman placed Rama's ring in Sita's hand. The ring was small and warm. It lay in her palm like a breath she had been holding for months. She went still and held it tight, feeling its familiar weight against her skin.

She did not ask Hanuman to carry her away at once. Instead, she raised her hand to her hair, to her hairpin, the chudamani. It was a treasure her father had given her on her wedding day. It was the one thing that still tied her to Mithila, and to the woman she had once been. She took it out.

"Take this back to him," she said. "So he will know I am still waiting."

After that, Rama led a great army of vanara monkeys across the sea. He fought at Lanka and defeated Ravana. And Sita was free to come home.

This story has long been known to the Cham, in the land that is now Vietnam. The Cham are a people of south-central Vietnam whose ancestors lived in the ancient kingdom of Champa.

Her wedding was carved in stone here more than a thousand years ago, on the Trà Kiệu altar. That is how some scholars read its carvings. In their reading, its carved sides show the bow contest at Mithila, the preparations for the wedding, and apsara dancers celebrating the marriage. In 2012, the altar was recognized as a National Treasure.

There is also an old book of Vietnamese tales, the Lĩnh Nam chích quái. It dates from the Trần dynasty, around the 13th and 14th centuries. In it, the tale of Dạ Thoa Vương tells of a crown prince's wife carried off by a demon king with ten heads. An army of monkeys comes to rescue her. The story of Sita entered Vietnamese memory long ago, even if its names changed from one generation to the next.

Sita was born from the earth. Not from a royal house, not from a temple. Strength was not always the crack of a bow or the firelight of battle.

Sometimes, strength meant sitting still in the Ashoka garden, knowing who she was, and letting no one take that from her.

That was the gift Mother Earth gave her, from the day she lay in that very first furrow.