Bharata Suspected

The great column wound south through the forest, and it could not move in secret, for a host of that size, with its baggage and its animals and its thousands of feet, raised a dust that hung above the trees and a noise that carried far ahead of it through the quiet wild. And it came, in time, to the Gangā, to the country of Guha the hunter-chief, the same Guha who had ferried Rāma across not long before and watched him vanish into the woods with an aching heart.

And Guha, from his shore, saw the army coming.

He saw the dust first, a great brown cloud rising above the northern trees, and then the head of the column emerging, rank upon rank of armed men, banners, chariots, the whole apparatus of a marching power, advancing straight toward the crossing, toward the road that led to Rāma. And Guha’s heart went cold with a terrible suspicion, and it was, on the face of it, a reasonable one.

Here was Bharata, the son of the wicked Kaikeyī, the very one for whom Rāma had been exiled, marching south at the head of an army toward the place where Rāma sheltered defenceless in the woods. What could it mean but the worst? The queen had not been content to exile Rāma; now her son was coming to make sure of him, to hunt him down in the wilderness and murder him, so that no returning heir could ever threaten the stolen throne.

Why else would Bharata come armed into the forest, toward his exiled brother, if not to finish the crime his mother had begun?

Guha did not hesitate. Whatever he was, hunter-chief of a river-tribe, he loved Rāma, and he would not let an assassin pass to him unopposed. He mustered his hunters, his fierce river-men, and made ready for war. He would hold the crossing. He would throw his whole tribe against this army if he had to; he would die on the bank before he let Bharata’s soldiers cross to hunt the prince he loved.

He drew up his men along the shore, grim and ready, and waited for the army to declare itself, prepared to make of this river a wall of his own bodies rather than see Rāma betrayed.

It was a noble error, and the story wants us to feel both the nobility and the error. Guha’s suspicion was wrong, utterly wrong, as we know and as he would soon learn. But it was wrong in the right direction; it was the error of a loyal heart, leaping to defend the one it loved against a danger it only imagined. There is something fine in it even in its wrongness: this forest chieftain, of no high birth, ready to make war on the whole might of Ayodhyā out of pure love for a friend.

And it tells us, too, how black Kaikeyī’s deed had made her family’s name, that even the faithful Guha could believe, on sight, that her son must be coming as a murderer. The poison had spread its shadow so far that Bharata, the noblest of brothers, was met at the river as a suspected assassin, and had to prove his innocence before he could pass. Such is the cost of a great wrong: it darkens even those who had no part in it, and makes the good suspected along with the guilty.

But as the column drew nearer, Guha, watching keenly for the confirmation of his fears, began to see things that did not fit.

He had expected an army in battle-array, banners high, the arrogance of a force marching to conquer. What he saw instead confused him. At the head of the host walked a young man on foot, not riding in state as a king or a conqueror would, but walking, humbly, in the plain rough garments of a mourner and an ascetic. His hair was unbound in grief. His face, even at a distance, was marked with sorrow, not with the hard purpose of a killer but with the raw grief of one who has suffered a great loss.

And the men behind him did not march with the swagger of an invading army but with the subdued, heavy tread of a great funeral procession. This was not how assassins came. This was how mourners came, and suppliants.

Guha’s certainty wavered, and then broke, and he went forward himself to meet the young man and learn the truth, and the truth, when he had it, moved him as deeply as his suspicion had roused him. For here was Bharata, and Bharata, far from coming to harm Rāma, was weeping for him, was on his way to beg him to return, had refused the very throne the whole crime had been committed to win him, and was making this whole painful pilgrimage into the wilderness for one purpose only: to fall at his brother’s feet and give back the crown.

When Guha understood this, when he saw the young man’s genuine grief and heard his true purpose, his hostility dissolved into something like reverence, and a deep answering respect. Here was no villain’s son come to complete a villainy, but a soul as noble as Rāma’s own, bowed down with a grief and a shame that were not even his to bear, seeking only to undo the wrong that had been done in his name.

And Guha, who moments before had been ready to die fighting this man, now received him as a friend and a brother, and honoured him, and the two of them, the hunter-chief and the prince, who both loved Rāma with a whole heart, found in that shared love an immediate and easy kinship.

Guha wept to hear how things stood, wept for the dead king and the exiled prince and the ruin of that great house, and he gave Bharata and his people every hospitality his river-country could offer, and prepared to help them cross and to guide them onward toward Chitrakūṭa.

There is a quiet lesson threaded through this meeting, and it is worth pausing on before we let the column cross the river. It is the lesson of how easily love, even true love, can misjudge, can leap to the darkest reading, can arm itself against a friend mistaken for an enemy. Guha’s suspicion was born of love, and it was still entirely wrong, and it would have led him into a tragic and needless war had he acted on it before learning the truth.

How often we do the same, in smaller ways: how quickly we assume the worst of one whose true errand is good, how ready we are to see an enemy in an approaching figure whose heart, could we but read it, is full of nothing but grief and goodwill. Guha was saved from his error only because he looked closely, because he let the evidence of his eyes correct the fear in his heart, because he went forward to learn the truth before he struck.

Bharata’s humble walk, his mourner’s dress, his grieving face, these told a story that overrode the story Guha’s fear had told him, and Guha had the wisdom to see them and to change his mind. It is not a small wisdom, the willingness to let the truth unmake a suspicion, and it spared two good men a bitter and pointless conflict on the banks of the holy river.

So Guha ferried this second great company across the Gangā, as he had ferried the first small one, and Bharata and his host passed over into the deeper forest and turned their faces toward Chitrakūṭa, toward the green hill where three exiles lived unknowing, and toward the reunion that Bharata had crossed a kingdom and a river and his own suspected name to reach.