सीतायाः शुभशकुनानि

To Sītā in that state, distressed and blameless, her joy gone and her heart dejected, auspicious omens came, just as attendants flock unbidden to a man whom fortune favours. Her wide left eye, black and white and fringed with curling lashes, throbbed like a red lotus struck by a fish. Her left arm, round and full, worthy of black aloe and sandal paste, on which her peerless beloved had so long rested his head, began to tremble. Her left thigh, full as an elephant's trunk, throbbed again and again, as if announcing that Rāma stood before her. And as she stood there, the lady of incomparable eyes and jasmine-bud teeth felt her gold-coloured robe, a little dimmed with dust, slip slightly. In the lore of omens the throbbing of a woman's left side is auspicious: here eye, arm and thigh throb in turn, and then the slipping garment foretells reunion with a beloved. What Trijaṭā had said now came to pass. The image of attendants coming of their own accord shows good fortune arriving naturally, and the arm Rāma had rested on awakens the memory of their love. The poet dwells on her beauty to show that even in misery it had not faded, as Trijaṭā had said.

Urged on by these and other omens that had proved true before, the lady of the lovely brows rejoiced again, like a seed withered by wind and sun that sprouts again in the rain. Her face, with lips like bimba fruit, lovely eyes and brows, curling lashes and gleaming teeth, shone like the moon released from the mouth of Rāhu. Her grief gone, her weariness cast off, her fever calmed, her spirit awakened by joy, the noble lady shone like the night lit by the cool moon rising in the bright half of the month. The three images, the seed revived by rain, the moon freed from Rāhu and the moonlit night, trace the turn from despair to hope. She who had just been ready to take her life with her braid was now at peace, and this short sarga prepares for Hanumān's coming forward in the next.