A Mother’s Grief

While the three found their fragile peace at Chitrakūṭa, Ayodhyā was a house of mourning, and at the centre of the mourning were two broken people: an old queen who had lost her son, and an old king who had lost everything and was dying of it.

Kausalyā’s grief was the grief of a mother, and it had a particular bitterness in it, for she had waited so long and been passed over so often. She was the senior queen, the first wife, and yet through all the years it had been Kaikeyī who held the king’s heart, Kaikeyī who was cherished and indulged, while Kausalyā kept her dignity and her patience and her place. Her one consolation, her one great joy, the thing that made all the quiet years of being the less-loved wife worthwhile, was her son. Rāma was everything to her.

And the day of his coronation was to have been her vindication, the day when her patience was crowned along with her boy, when she would at last take her rightful place as the mother of the king. And that day had been snatched away and turned into this: her son in the wilderness, her rival’s son on the path to the throne, and herself left alone in a palace that had become a place of ashes.

She wept, and she could not stop weeping. She railed against Kaikeyī, against the king, against the fate that had done this to her. She lay in her chambers and would not be comforted, and the sight of her grief was terrible to those who loved her.

And into that grief came Sumitrā, and here the story gives us a portrait worth pausing on, for Sumitrā is one of its quiet wise women, easy to overlook and deeply admirable. Sumitrā was the third queen, the mother of Lakshmaṇa and Shatrughna, and she had lost a son to the forest too, for her Lakshmaṇa had gone with Rāma. She had as much cause to grieve as Kausalyā. But Sumitrā met the catastrophe with a strength and a wisdom that lifted everyone around her, and instead of drowning in her own sorrow she gave herself to steadying Kausalyā’s.

Do not grieve so, sister, she said, or words to that effect, and her comfort was not the empty comfort of one who does not understand, for she understood completely; it was the true comfort of one who sees further into the situation than grief can see. Consider who your son is, she told Kausalyā. Consider what manner of being Rāma is. Do you truly fear for him in the forest? The forest should fear him.

He whom the demons flee, he who broke the bow of Shiva, he who is guarded by his own dharma and by Lakshmaṇa’s tireless bow, what harm can the wilderness do to such a one? And consider Sītā, who chose to follow him, and my Lakshmaṇa, who guards him night and day. They are together, the three of them, and they are strong, and they are righteous, and the righteous are not finally abandoned by heaven. This exile is a hardship, yes, but it is not a doom. Fourteen years will pass.

And when they pass, your son will return, not diminished but glorified, tempered by his trials, beloved more than ever, and he will be crowned after all, and you will take your place as the mother of the king, and this grief will be a memory, a dark passage that led to a bright morning. Weep if you must, but do not despair, for despair would be an insult to the greatness of your son and the justice of the powers that watch over him.

And by such words, Sumitrā slowly drew Kausalyā up out of the worst of her grief, not by denying the sorrow but by setting it in a larger frame, by reminding the grieving mother that her son was no ordinary man cast helpless into danger, but a being whom the danger could not touch, walking a road that led, however darkly, toward a return.

It is the gift of the truly wise in a time of catastrophe, that they can hold the long view when everyone around them can see only the immediate wound, and Sumitrā had that gift, and she used it to save Kausalyā from being destroyed by her own sorrow.

We might pause on the difference between these two women, for the story clearly wants us to see it. Both had lost a son to the forest. Kausalyā met it with a grief that turned inward, that railed and despaired and could see nothing beyond its own wound. Sumitrā met it with a grief mastered by faith and wisdom, a grief that could still look up and out, that could comfort another even while carrying its own loss. Neither loved her son less than the other.

But Sumitrā had something Kausalyā in her first grief had lost, a trust in the larger order of things, a confidence that the righteous are not finally forsaken, and that trust gave her a strength that grief could not overthrow. It is a thing worth wanting for ourselves, that steadiness that can grieve without despairing, that can feel the full weight of a loss and still keep faith that the loss is not the end of the story.

But if Kausalyā could be lifted out of her grief, there was one in that palace who could not be lifted out of his, and whose grief was not merely sorrow but a mortal sickness. Dasharatha was dying. From the moment the chariot had passed out of sight, taking his son, the old king had begun to fail. He had no wish to live in a world without Rāma, and more than that, he was crushed by the knowledge of his own part in the catastrophe, that it was his rash boons, his own honoured word, that had driven his son away. He could not eat.

He could not sleep. He lay in his chambers growing weaker by the day, calling Rāma’s name, reliving the parting, sinking steadily toward an end that everyone around him could see coming and no one could prevent.

And there was something more that haunted his dying, a thing from his own distant past that had risen up now to claim him, a memory of a sin committed long ago in his youth, and a curse that had been laid upon him then, whose hour, he now understood with dreadful clarity, had come round at last. For Dasharatha’s death was not a simple death of grief.

It was the closing of a circle begun long before Rāma was born, the falling due of an old debt, and to understand why the old king died as he died, we must go back with him, as he went back in his last hours, to a night on the banks of the Sarayū many years before, and to the terrible thing he did there, and the curse it earned him.