Verse 17

¹²Having said this the living one went away; and his kinsmen then, astonished, let their grief go and cut through the chain of love for their own. ¹³The kinsmen carried their kinsman's body out and did the fitting rites, and gave up that love which is hard to give up and which brings grief and bewilderment and fear and pain. ¹⁴The women who had killed the child stood there ashamed, their brightness struck out of them by the killing of a child, and on the Yamuna, great king, they kept the penance for killing a child which the brahmins had laid down, remembering what the brahmin had said. ¹⁵So Citraketu, his self woken by what the brahmins said, came out of the blind well of his house as an elephant comes out of the mud of a lake.

¹⁶He bathed in the Kalindi as the rule lays down, made the holy offerings of water, held his breath in, and in silence bowed to the two sons of Brahma. ¹⁷Then to him, who had come for shelter, devoted, his self made clean, the revered Narada gladly spoke this knowledge: