qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review
Knowing now that Gauri was on her side, the gladness in Sita's heart could not be told; there are no words that will carry it.
And then something lovely, the very root that good fortune grows from: her left side began to flutter and throb.
Where this couplet comes from should be settled before anything about how it sounds. The bhajan of verses 1 to 5 — the stuti from the Vinaya Patrikā — ended in its own way and on its own terms, with a request. This sorathā is no part of it. It belongs, with the two stanzas before it, to the Gaurī-vandanā passage of the Rāmcaritmānas, and what it closes is that scene; the sung liturgy runs the three together as an ending because singers have long done so, not because Tulsīdās joined them.
The metre changes for the ending, and the change is audible. A sorathā is a dohā turned about: the couplet's two halves are swapped, eleven morae then thirteen where a dohā runs thirteen then eleven, so that the rhyme lands in the middle of the line instead of at its end. Here it is anukūla rhyming with mūla, both of them mid-couplet, which gives the two lines a tucked-in, closing quality — a verse-form that folds its arms.
Anukūla is a river word. Kūla is a bank, and anukūla is going along with the bank — with the current, with the grain. What Sītā has understood is not that a favour has been issued but that the goddess is facing the same way she is. It is the vocabulary of alignment, not of transaction.
Haraṣu na jāi kahi — the gladness cannot be got said. A poet declaring his own inadequacy is a convention of this literature, but here it does structural work: by clearing speech off the floor, it makes room for the only thing left.
And then maṃjula maṃgala mūla vāma aṅga pharakana lage. Three m's in a row first, lovely-auspicious-root, and mūla is a root in the same sense as the kanda, the bulb, back in verse 3 — the underground part that the visible thing grows from. Then the flicker: vāma aṅga, the left limbs, pharakana lage, began to throb.
In the śakuna lore of omens that Tulsīdās and his first hearers shared, a throb in the left side was the favourable sign for a woman, as a throb on the right was for a man. That is the convention the line is written inside, and naming it is enough; the poem is not arguing for it.
What the poem is doing with it is something a novelist would recognise. Every other event in these stanzas has been an act of attention — seeing, hearing, bowing, walking. The last event is involuntary. Nobody chooses a twitch. After a blessing she was given, a gladness she could not say and a walk home she took deliberately, the final line of the whole set is her body reacting without asking her, and knowing, in its own way, first.
Has your body ever known something before you did — before a test, or just before someone arrived? What did it feel like?
qMonk literal translation — draft, pending review·Devanagari checked against two printings·Draft — awaiting reviewer·How these texts were made