Alone by Themselves

They came at dusk to the banks of the river Tamasā, and there they halted for the first night of the exile, and the great crowd of citizens halted with them, camping along the river, unwilling still to let their prince out of their sight.

And Rāma, watching them settle for the night around him, understood that they would follow him forever if he let them, all the way into the wilderness, ruining their own lives out of love for him, and he understood that the kindest thing he could do was to leave them, and that they would never consent to be left. So he chose a gentle deception, the only kind of deception a man like Rāma ever practised, one meant wholly for the good of those it deceived.

In the deep of the night, while the exhausted citizens slept, worn out with the day’s grief and the long walk, Rāma quietly woke Sumantra and had the chariot readied in silence, and the three of them slipped away in the dark, going on ahead while the people slept, and taking care that the chariot’s tracks should be confused so that the citizens could not easily follow.

When the people woke at dawn and found the place empty, found that Rāma had gone on without them in the night, they understood at last what he had done and why, and they grieved afresh, but they understood too that he had released them out of love, that he did not wish them to destroy themselves for his sake, and slowly, sorrowfully, having no choice now, they turned back toward Ayodhyā, carrying their grief home with them. It was the only way.

He could not have argued them into leaving; he could only slip free while they slept and let the accomplished fact turn them homeward.

Now the three went on alone, and truly alone for the first time, and the world changed character around them. They came to the Gangā, the great and holy river, the broad shining boundary between the settled kingdom and the wild lands beyond, and here they met a man who mattered.

His name was Guha, and he was the chief of the Nishādas, the tribe of hunters and boatmen who lived along the river. He was not a man of the cities or the courts; he was a forest chieftain, a hunter, a man some at Ayodhyā would have thought beneath their notice. But he loved Rāma, for Rāma’s fame had reached even the river-tribes, and when he learned that the prince himself had come to his shore, in exile, in bark garments, he came out to meet him with his whole heart.

And here the story shows us something about Rāma that it wants us to see clearly. Guha received Rāma not with the distant respect a tribesman might be expected to show a prince, but with the open love of a friend, and Rāma returned it in exactly the same coin. He embraced Guha as a brother. He did not stand on rank; he did not hold the hunter-chief at the arm’s length that his birth might have licensed; he met Guha’s love with love, plainly and warmly, as an equal. This is not a small thing.

It is one of the deep marks of Rāma’s greatness that his goodness knew nothing of caste or station, that he saw the soul of a man and not his rank, and that a forest hunter who loved him truly was dearer to him than any high-born flatterer. The love that the common people of Ayodhyā had borne him, and that had followed him weeping to the Tamasā, was of a piece with this: Rāma was loved by the humble because Rāma genuinely loved the humble, and here on the riverbank that truth stood plainly revealed.

Guha, overwhelmed to have Rāma on his shore, offered him everything he had. Stay here, he begged. Do not go on into the terrible forest. Rule here, among my people; my whole territory is yours; my hunters are your servants; live here in what comfort the river-country can offer, and let me serve you all your days. He offered his kingdom, such as it was, with the same open generosity that a great king might have offered an empire, and it was worth as much, for it was everything he had.

And Rāma declined it, gently, with love, and his reason is important. I cannot, dear friend, he said. Not because I do not honour your gift, for I honour it above many a richer one, offered as it is with such a pure heart. But my father’s word sent me to live as an ascetic in the forest for fourteen years, and to accept your hospitality, to live here in comfort and rule, would be to evade that word, to keep its letter while betraying its spirit. I did not come into exile to find a softer exile.

I came to live the hard forest life my father’s vow requires, and I must live it truly, or my acceptance of it is a sham. Your love I keep and treasure; your kingdom I cannot take; for the whole meaning of my going is that I go to hardship, and I will not soften what I have undertaken. It was the same principle that had governed everything since the dark chamber: that duty half-done is duty betrayed, and that the value of a sacrifice lies precisely in not evading its cost.

There was one thing, though, that had to be done before they crossed, and it is a small quiet moment that the tellers love. Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, to complete their transformation into forest ascetics, needed to mat their hair as the hermits did, and for this they used the sap of the banyan tree, the milky sap that would bind and knot the hair into the ascetic’s matted locks.

Guha brought it, and the brothers matted their hair, and with that the change was complete: the two princes of Ayodhyā, who two mornings before had been dressed for a coronation, now stood on the riverbank with matted hair and bark garments, indistinguishable from the forest hermits they had become. Something in the finality of that small act, the royal hair bound up into the ascetic’s knots, brought home the completeness of what they had given up, and it is said that even Lakshmaṇa’s steadiness wavered at the sight, and that Guha wept openly.

Then Guha ferried them across. He brought his own boat, and with his own hands he rowed the prince he loved across the wide Gangā, from the settled world into the wild, and it was the last service the world of men would do for them for a long time.

They stepped out on the far bank, the three of them, into the true forest at last, and Guha stood in his boat on the water and watched them go, watched the three figures walk away from the river and toward the trees, growing smaller, until at last they passed in among the dark woods that led toward Chitrakūṭa and were lost to his sight. And he stayed there a long while, the hunter-chief, looking at the place where they had vanished, before he turned his boat and rowed slowly back to a shore that felt emptier than it had ever felt before.

They were alone now, truly and finally alone, three figures walking into a green wilderness, the kingdom behind them, the fourteen years ahead of them, the whole vast forest closing over them like water over a stone. Whatever comfort the world of men could give was on the far side of the river now. From here the road ran only into the wild.