your bridge home
The Great Epics
She did not free Sita, change sides, or plot anything. She was decent inside a situation she had not designed and could not leave.
The rakshasis in the Ashoka grove had a job, and the job was to break her.
Sita had been in Lanka for months, under a tree, refusing. The women set to guard her were there to wear her down.
By threat. By argument. By steady pressure on somebody with nowhere to go. The Sundara Kanda records them at it.
Telling her Rama would not come. That nobody was coming. That she should take the terms she was being offered, while they were still on the table.
One night they were worse than usual, and they were talking about eating her.
And an older rakshasi among them, Trijata, woke up and told them to stop, because she had dreamt something.
What she describes in the twenty-seventh chapter of the Sundara Kanda is one of the strangest passages in the Ramayana.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.