Chapter Seven: Literature of the Rasika Tradition

Bhagavan Rama, whose every desire is already fulfilled, performed with Sita a loving sport that no one in the three worlds has ever performed or ever will perform.

Rama placed in his own mouth a folded betel leaf filled with areca nut and thickly covered in sandal paste. “Take it at your ease, dear girl,” he said, using this as a pretext to drink the nectar of her lower lip.

Janaka’s Daughter slowly divided it into four and, her eyes closed in the freedom of love, took it from his lower lip. From each morsel Rama imagined that he had obtained dharma, desire, wealth, and liberation, although he knew Brahman, after drinking her sweet lower lip.

When Sita lay asleep, Rama beheld her:

Her lotus hand rested upon her breast, as though barring Ramachandra—who dwelt within her heart—from any possible escape. Wide-eyed like a doe, she had attained only the semblance of sleep.

Seeing a bee upon Sita’s breast, he reflected:

Deeply caught in sandal paste upon the breast of the beloved, exhausted and withered by the fire of Love, its wings spread above it, the bee appears like the sole surviving arrow of the flower-bowed god, buried up to its feathers.

At that moment:

Gently swaying the weight of her ample hips, her soft curls moving and earrings trembling, exposing the roots of her arms and revealing the playful beauty of her breasts, Jānaki’s feigned sleep at once delights her husband.

Jānaki awakens:

In girlish innocence she both longs and fears. At the touch of love she closes her eyes and draws in her limbs. Though she protests in pretence, “Ah! No, no,” her smiling, honey-sweet sidelong glances reveal what is within.

—Mahānāṭaka, Act 2, verses 5–12