Verse 19

¹⁴Struck through by his stepmother's foul words, hissing with anger like a snake beaten with a stick, he left his father, who sat looking on with his voice gone, and went crying to his mother. ¹⁵Suniti lifted the boy onto her lap, breathing hard, his lower lip trembling; and hearing from the townspeople all that her rival had said, she was cut to the heart. ¹⁶She let her steadiness go and wailed, a young thing like a creeper in a forest fire of grief; and remembering her rival's words she carried a flood of tears in her lotus-lovely eyes. ¹⁷Sighing long and seeing no far shore to her trouble, she said to the boy: My son, do not wish harm on other people. What a man gives to another as pain, he eats himself.

¹⁸What Suruci said is true: you were carried in the belly of an unlucky woman and grew up on her milk. The lord of the earth is ashamed to own me for a wife, or to keep me at all. ¹⁹So take her at her word, my son, and hold no spite; what your stepmother said was not false. Serve the lotus feet of the one beyond the reach of the senses, if you want a seat such as Uttama has.