Chitrakūṭa

Beyond the Gangā the land grew wilder, but not, at first, more terrible. They walked on, the three of them, deeper into the forest, and along the way they came to the hermitage of a great sage, Bharadvāja, whose ashram stood where the rivers met, and there they were received with the grave sweet hospitality that the forest sages always showed to Rāma, for holiness knows holiness, and the hermits of the wilderness understood, as the schemers of the palace had not, who it was that walked among them.

Bharadvāja welcomed them, and fed them, and when Rāma asked the sage where they might settle to pass the years of exile, the old man had an answer ready, and it was a gift. Go to Chitrakūṭa, he told them. There is a hill there, and a river below it, the Mandākinī, and it is among the most beautiful and peaceful places in all the wide forest. The air is sweet there; the sages love it; the beasts are gentle and the birds are many; the very sight of the hill lifts the heart and quiets sorrow.

Make your home there, and the years will pass more kindly than you fear.

So they went on to Chitrakūṭa, and found it everything the sage had promised.

Let us dwell here a while, as they did, because after the darkness of the preceding days the story pauses to breathe, and we should breathe with it. Chitrakūṭa was beautiful. The hill rose green and wooded above the plain, and the Mandākinī ran clear and cool at its foot, and the whole place had a serene loveliness that seemed to belong to an easier and older world. There were flowering trees whose blossoms scented the air.

There were birds of every colour, peacocks that spread their trains in the mornings and cuckoos that called from the shade, and deer that came down to the water without fear and lifted their heads to watch the newcomers with mild curious eyes. There were clear pools where lotuses opened, and slopes of soft grass, and views from the higher rocks out over an endless green world.

It was the kind of place where a heart bruised by the world might slowly heal, and it worked that healing on the three of them, so that the exile, which had begun in so much grief, took on here for a while the character almost of a blessing.

And they made a home. This is one of the tender pleasures of this part of the story, to watch these three, who had left a palace, build for themselves with their own hands a small dwelling in the wild, and find in the doing of it a happiness the palace had never given them. Lakshmaṇa took the labour of it upon himself, for that was his joy, to serve, to do the hard and useful work that made his brother’s life easier.

He it was who chose the site and cleared it, who cut and gathered the timber and the reeds, who raised the framework and thatched the roof and packed the walls, building with tireless devotion a cottage of leaf and mud and wood, snug and sound, a real home in the heart of the forest. He worked at it as though it were the most important commission of his life, and in a way it was, for it was the house his brother and his sister-in- law would live in, and he built it with all the love that was in him.

We should notice what Lakshmaṇa is, in these forest years, for it is easy to overlook the quiet ones. He was a prince, a warrior of tremendous power, a man who might have stayed in Ayodhyā in comfort and honour; and he had thrown all of that away, without a second thought, to come and be, in effect, the servant of his brother’s exile.

He cut the wood and carried the water and stood the night watches and built the house and cooked the food and asked for nothing, and he did it not with the resentment of a man who has stooped but with the gladness of a man who has found his whole purpose. There is a kind of greatness in that willing lowering of oneself, in the choice to serve where one might have ruled, and Lakshmaṇa had it, and the forest years are his long quiet glory as much as they are anyone’s.

The devotion that had begun in the cradle, the child who would not sleep apart from his brother, had grown into this: a man who would not let his brother suffer the hardships of exile alone, and who took the heaviest share of them cheerfully upon himself.

And so, in the cottage that Lakshmaṇa built, on the beautiful hill above the clear river, the three of them settled into a life. And it was, for a while, a good life, better in some ways than the life they had left. The days had a simple shape: the gathering of fruit and roots, the fetching of water, the tending of the small sacred fire, the long evenings of talk, the nights under a roof of leaves with the river singing below and the enormous star-crowded forest dark all around.

There was no court, no intrigue, no ceremony, no crowd of petitioners and flatterers, only the three of them and the mountain and the river and the gentle wild creatures.

Rāma, who bore his losses so lightly because he held so firmly to the one thing that mattered, was able here to be almost purely happy, and Sītā beside him was happy, and Lakshmaṇa serving them both was happy, and for a season the exile was not a punishment but a kind of retreat, a stripping-away of everything unnecessary until only the essential remained: love, and simplicity, and peace.

It could not last. We know it could not last, and the story knows it, and there is a poignancy in the very beauty of Chitrakūṭa because we understand, as the three of them settling so contentedly did not yet fully understand, that this peace was an island in a rising flood, that the world they had left was already convulsing with the consequences of what had been done, and that the calm of the green hill was bought on borrowed time.

Even now, far to the north, in the city they had left, grief was doing its work, and a death was coming, and after the death an army would come south looking for them, and the peace of Chitrakūṭa would be broken. But that had not happened yet.

For now there was only the beautiful hill, and the clear river, and the cottage of leaves, and three people who loved one another living simply and gladly in the heart of the wild, and it is right to let that picture stand in its full sweetness, because there will not be many more like it, and because the very happiness of it is part of what the story means us to feel, so that we understand, when the peace breaks, exactly what is being broken.