Bharata Arrives

Bharata rode home with a heavy, formless dread that he could not explain. The messengers had told him only that he was urgently needed, nothing more, and their very silence, their evasion of his questions, had planted an unease in him that grew with every mile. And as he came at last within sight of Ayodhyā, that unease sharpened into something like terror, for the city was wrong.

He had left a bright and thriving capital, and he returned to a city of shadows. The streets that should have been busy were subdued. The sounds of ordinary happy life were muted or absent. There was a pall over everything, a heaviness in the very air, and everywhere he looked he saw the small signs by which a place betrays that something terrible has happened: faces turned away, eyes red with weeping, an atmosphere of dread and mourning that met him at the gate and thickened as he rode inward. This was not the Ayodhyā he had left.

Something had broken here in his absence, something enormous, and no one on the road or in the streets would meet his eye or tell him what.

He went first, as a son returning from a journey would, to his mother, to Kaikeyī. And here the story gives us one of its most painful ironies, for Bharata came to his mother’s chamber looking for comfort, for an explanation, for the reassurance a mother gives, and instead he walked into the presence of the very author of all the ruin, who greeted him not with grief but with a horrible, obscene satisfaction.

For Kaikeyī, poisoned still, deluded still, believed she had done a wonderful thing for her son. She had won him the throne. She had removed his rival. She had, as she saw it, secured his future and raised him to the summit of the world, and she expected him to be grateful, even glad. And so, when Bharata anxiously asked her what had happened, where his father was, why the city was in mourning, she told him everything, and she told it with pride, as one delivering happy news.

She told him that Rāma had been about to be crowned, and that she had prevented it. She told him of the two ancient boons, and how she had claimed them, and forced the king to keep his word. She told him that Rāma was banished to the forest for fourteen years, and Sītā and Lakshmaṇa with him. And she told him, at last, almost as an afterthought in her self-satisfaction, that his father the king was dead, dead of grief for Rāma, some days since, his body lying preserved and waiting.

And then she looked at her son to receive his thanks, for she had done it all for him, and the throne of Ayodhyā was now his, cleared of every obstacle, exactly as she had planned.

She had misjudged her son as completely as it is possible to misjudge anyone.

For Bharata heard the whole monstrous account, his father dead, his brother exiled, and the throne handed to him over the wreckage of his family, and where his mother expected gratitude, what rose in him was horror, and then a towering, sacred rage. He recoiled from her. He recoiled from the throne. He recoiled from the very idea that he should profit from this atrocity, and every fibre of his noble nature rose up in revolt against the thing that had been done in his name.

What have you done, he cried out to her. What have you done? And the words poured out of him in a torrent of grief and fury and disgust. Did you imagine I wanted this? Did you imagine I would rejoice? You have killed my father. You have banished my brother, who is dearer to me than my own life, who is more fit to be king than any man alive, whom I would gladly serve on my knees all my days.

You have destroyed our family and disgraced our name and stained the honour of the house of Ikshvāku forever, and you have done it all, you say, for me, as though I were the kind of creature who would climb to a throne over his father’s corpse and his brother’s exile. You do not know me at all. You have never known me. I want no crown so bought. I curse the crown so bought.

Rāma is my king, my elder, my brother, and the throne is his by every law of gods and men, and I would sooner die than sit in the place that is his by right and was stolen for me by this abomination.

He denounced her utterly. He rejected her, disowned the deed, refused the throne, and heaped upon his own mother the condemnation that her actions deserved, calling her by the hardest names, telling her that she was no mother to him, that she had made herself a thing of horror, that the whole world would remember her name with loathing.

It was a terrible scene, a son turning on his mother with the full force of a righteous revulsion, and it was entirely just, for Kaikeyī had done a terrible thing, and Bharata’s rejection of it was the measure of his own goodness.

And here we must mark the thing that makes Bharata one of the great figures of this epic, for it would have been so easy, so understandable, for him to take a different road. The throne was his for the sitting. His mother had cleared his path of every rival. He had only to be silent, to accept what had been done, to let the guilt rest on Kaikeyī and enjoy the crown she had won him, and no one could have forced him to do otherwise. Countless men, offered a kingdom at the price of a mere silence, would have found reasons to accept it.

But Bharata did not hesitate for an instant. He did not weigh the crown against his conscience; there was no weighing to be done; the thing was simply, obviously, unbearably wrong, and he rejected it whole, without calculation, at the very moment it was offered, and turned in fury on the one who had offered it. His love for Rāma was so pure, his sense of right so uncorrupted, that the throne held no temptation for him at all, only revulsion.

The seed his mother had planted in the poison of jealousy, the fear that Bharata’s interests stood against Rāma’s, is revealed here as the pure lie it always was: Bharata wanted nothing that was Rāma’s, would take nothing that was Rāma’s, and was wounded to the soul that anyone, above all his own mother, could have imagined otherwise.

The confrontation left Kaikeyī shattered in her turn, though her shattering came too late to undo anything. For she had done it all on the strength of a single belief, that her son would want the throne and thank her for it, and now her son stood before her rejecting the throne with horror and naming her a monster, and the whole edifice of her justification collapsed. She had destroyed her husband and her stepson and her family’s honour for the sake of a son who did not want the prize and despised the winning of it.

The poison that had made her act had promised her a grateful child and a secured future, and had delivered her instead a son’s loathing and a ruin with no purpose. Whatever she had thought she was buying, this was what she had bought, and the enormity of her error broke upon her at last, when it was far too late for breaking to matter.

Bharata turned from his mother and went to face the wreckage she had made: a dead father to be mourned and burned, a kingdom leaderless and afraid, and somewhere in the distant forest a brother wrongly exiled whom Bharata was already, in his heart, resolved to find and to restore, whatever it cost, whatever it took. He would not be king. He would never be king, not while Rāma lived. That much was decided in him already, in the first hour, in the fury of his grief.

What remained was to do the duties the death required, and then to go and set right, as far as it could ever be set right, the terrible wrong that had been done.