Anger and Reconciliation

The rains came. In that country the monsoon fell in a great unbroken deluge that made all movement impossible, that turned the rivers to torrents and the paths to mud and shut the world indoors for months, and it was agreed, reasonably enough, that the search for Sītā could not begin until the rains had passed, for no host could march through such weather.

So Rāma and Lakshmaṇa withdrew to a cave on a hillside near Kishkindhā to wait out the monsoon, and Sugrīva returned to his palace and his kingdom, and the two waited, in their very different circumstances, for the rains to end and the search to begin.

And the difference between those two circumstances is the heart of this chapter, and it is drawn with a deliberate and painful contrast. In the cave on the hill, Rāma waited in sorrow. The rains, the enforced idleness, the long wet months with nothing to do but wait, were a torment to him, for every day that passed was a day of Sītā’s captivity, a day of her suffering in the hands of the demon, and Rāma could do nothing but wait and grieve and long for the weather to break so that the search could begin.

The monsoon that shut the world indoors shut him in with his grief, and he passed those months in an agony of impatience and sorrow, counting the days, aching for his lost wife, the beauty of the rain-washed world only sharpening his loss as the beauty of Pampā had sharpened it.

And in the palace of Kishkindhā, Sugrīva forgot.

For Sugrīva, restored to everything he had lost, drowned in the sweetness of his recovered fortune. He had his kingdom back, and his throne, and his wife, and all the pleasures of a great king, after long years of hunted exile, and the sudden reversal from misery to luxury overwhelmed him. He gave himself up to enjoyment, to feasting, to wine, to the delights of his recovered palace and his recovered queens, and in the intoxication of his pleasures he forgot, simply forgot, the debt he owed and the promise he had sworn.

The rains gave him an excuse to do nothing, and pleasure gave him a reason to want to do nothing, and between the two he let the whole matter of Sītā and the search slip out of his mind, and passed the monsoon in indulgence while Rāma grieved in the cave, and even when the rains ended he did not stir, so lost was he in his recovered pleasures.

Let us pause on this, for it is a sharp and unsparing portrait of a real human failing, and the story means it as a warning. Sugrīva was not a wicked man. He had suffered genuinely; his joy at his restoration was natural; who could blame a man, long miserable, for delighting in his recovered fortune? And yet in that delight he committed a real wrong, the wrong of forgetting, the wrong of the man who, once his own troubles are eased, forgets the friend to whom he owes his easing and the promise by which his own good fortune was bought.

Rāma had given Sugrīva everything, his kingdom, his throne, his wife, his life; and Sugrīva, once he had them, forgot the giver and the price. It is a common failing, and a grievous one, this forgetting of our debts in the comfort of our satisfaction, this letting-slip of our obligations once our own needs are met, and the story holds it up in Sugrīva as a thing to be ashamed of, a lapse that nearly cost him everything and that certainly cost him his honour for a season.

Prosperity, the story warns, can corrupt as surely as adversity, can make us forgetful and indulgent and false to our word, and the man who keeps faith in his misery may break it in his comfort, and that is a shameful thing.

And the ending of the rains, which should have been the signal for the search to begin, passed unmarked in Kishkindhā, and still Sugrīva did not stir, and word of his continued indulgence reached the cave, and Lakshmaṇa’s wrath, which we have seen before, kindled now to a terrible blaze.

For Lakshmaṇa could not bear it, this betrayal, this ingratitude, this drunken forgetting while his brother grieved. That Sugrīva, who owed everything to Rāma, should wallow in his pleasures and forget his sworn duty while Sītā suffered and Rāma broke his heart in a cave, filled Lakshmaṇa with a fury that would not be contained.

He took up his bow, and he marched to Kishkindhā, to the very palace, in a rage that shook the ground, his bowstring twanging, his whole being blazing with the anger of a loyal heart betrayed, meaning to call Sugrīva to account, and, if the false king would not answer, to deal with him as an oath-breaker deserved.

The palace of Kishkindhā trembled at his coming, for the wrath of Lakshmaṇa was a fearful thing, and the vānaras fled before him, and it seemed that the alliance itself might be about to end in blood and the ingrate Sugrīva to pay for his forgetting with his life.

And here, in the crisis, it was again a wise woman who stepped forward to prevent catastrophe, and it was Tārā, Vāli’s widow, the wise queen who had passed now into Sugrīva’s keeping and counsel. For Tārā, seeing Lakshmaṇa’s terrible wrath and understanding the danger, went out to meet him, calmly, with dignity, and she faced the raging prince where the frightened vānaras had fled, and she spoke to him with such grace and such reason that she disarmed his fury.

Do not yield to anger, noble prince, she said, or such was the sense of her words. Your anger is just; Sugrīva has done wrong; I do not deny it. He has been at fault; he has forgotten himself in his pleasures; the delay is a real fault and a shameful one. But consider: his love for Rāma is true, beneath his forgetting; his fault is weakness, not treachery; he has been overwhelmed by his sudden fortune, not turned false in his heart.

And consider too that a great enterprise like the search you plan is not so easily begun, that the gathering of the vast hosts of the vānaras from all the corners of the earth takes time and preparation, and that even now the work may be further along than your anger supposes. Do not destroy the alliance in a moment of just wrath; do not let a real but forgivable fault become the ruin of the whole cause.

Give Sugrīva the chance to make amends, and you will find him eager to fulfill his promise; strike him down in anger, and you lose the very ally whose help you need. Let justice be tempered with patience; let the fault be corrected rather than punished; and the search will go forward, and Sītā will be sought, and all will be well.

Her eloquence, her calm, her wisdom, and above all the manifest truth of what she said, reached through Lakshmaṇa’s fury and quieted it, as her counsel and her grace had a power that raw force could not have had. Lakshmaṇa’s wrath cooled; he saw the justice of her words; he saw that to destroy the alliance would serve no one and doom Sītā; and he consented to give Sugrīva the chance to make amends.

And Sugrīva, roused at last from his indulgence, shaken to his senses by the near-disaster his forgetting had brought upon him, was overcome with remorse. He came to Lakshmaṇa, and to Rāma, full of shame and apology, acknowledging his fault, begging forgiveness, and, most important, moving at once to make good his broken promise.

He would begin the search this very hour; he would summon the vānara hosts from every quarter of the earth; he would pour the whole strength of his kingdom into the finding of Sītā, and make amends for his shameful delay by the vigour of his repentance.

And so the crisis passed, the anger was reconciled, the alliance held, and the great search, so long delayed by rain and by forgetting, was at last set in motion.

Sugrīva, restored to his duty by the near-loss of everything, summoned the vānaras, and they came, a host beyond counting, gathering from all the corners of the world at their king’s command, until the whole country around Kishkindhā swarmed with the mustering armies of the monkey-people, ready at last to be sent forth in the four directions to search the whole earth for the hidden Sītā. The forgetting was forgiven, the debt was being paid, and the search for the lost queen was about to begin in earnest.