Festive Preparations

Twelve years passed in Ayodhyā, and they were the best years the kingdom had ever known.

Rāma and Sītā lived in a happiness so complete that it seemed to warm the whole city. They were young, and they loved one another with a love that had recognition at its root, and they moved through the palace and the capital as a blessing moves, leaving people gladder for having seen them. Rāma had grown from the boy who broke the bow into a man in the fullness of his powers, and every quality that had shown early in him had deepened.

He was just, and he was merciful, and he was accessible; the humblest citizen could bring him a grievance and be heard with the same grave attention he gave to a minister. He forgot no one’s name. He remembered the troubles of ordinary people and asked after them. The love the city had felt for the infant prince had grown, over these twelve years, into something closer to worship, and it was not the worship of fear or distance but of gratitude.

The people of Ayodhyā simply could not imagine a better man to one day be their king, and they thought of that day, when it should come, with pure anticipation.

For Dasharatha was growing old. He had been old already when Rāma was born, and now the years had gathered on him, and though he still ruled well and his mind was clear, his body was telling him what bodies tell all of us in the end. And one morning it told him plainly.

He was at his mirror, or being attended by his barber, the tellers vary, when he saw it: a single grey hair, there by his ear, catching the light. One white thread among the dark. And Dasharatha, who had faced demons and armies without flinching, looked at that one grey hair and felt his own mortality settle onto him like a cold hand.

We should not pass over this too quickly, for it is one of the truest small moments in the whole story, and every one of us will have our own version of it if we have not had it already. It is not the great catastrophes that tell us we are mortal; those we half expect. It is the small ordinary sign, the grey hair, the stiffness in the morning, the name that will not come to the tongue, the stair that is harder than it used to be.

In such a trifling thing the whole enormous fact of our passing suddenly stands revealed, and we understand, not as an idea but in the body, that our time is finite and running out, and that whatever we mean to do with our life we had better be about it. Dasharatha looked at one white hair and heard, quite clearly, the messenger of his own ending, and he resolved to act while there was still time to act.

He would crown Rāma. He would install his beloved eldest son as Yuvarāja, the prince-regent, the heir apparent, and see with his own living eyes the thing he most wanted to see in all the world: Rāma seated in power, the kingdom safe in those good hands, before his own eyes should close for the last time. It was the natural, the right, the joyful decision of an old king at the end of a long reign, and he made it with a full and happy heart.

He summoned his council and the elders of the city and the representatives of the people, and he put it to them, though it was hardly in doubt. He spoke of his age, and of his long reign, and of his wish to lay down his burden into worthy hands while he yet lived. And then he named Rāma, and asked their will.

The assembly did not merely consent. It erupted. The proposal was met with a joy so immediate and so total that it swept the hall, the ministers, the elders, the citizens’ representatives, all of them acclaiming the choice with one voice, as though the king had offered them the thing they had most secretly longed for and never dared to ask. Was there any objection, the old king asked, half- teasing, knowing the answer, was there any among them who did not wish to see Rāma crowned?

And they laughed and shouted their love, and told him that the only complaint the people of Ayodhyā could possibly have was that they had waited this long, and that they wished the coronation might be tomorrow.

Dasharatha’s heart overflowed. Here was the perfect close to a long life: his kingdom and his own dearest wish in perfect accord, his people begging for the very thing he most desired to give them. He gave orders that the coronation should indeed be held at once, the very next day, before any inauspicious delay could creep in.

Let the sacred vessels be gathered, he said, the waters of the holy rivers brought, the whole city decked and lit; let Rāma keep the night’s vigil with Sītā as the rite required; and let Ayodhyā wake tomorrow to crown the prince it loved.

And the city threw itself into the preparations with a gladness that lit the night. Garlands were strung across every street until the air was heavy with the scent of flowers. Banners rose on every rooftop. The great ceremonial ways were swept and watered and spread with fresh sand; lamps were made ready in their thousands; musicians tuned their instruments; the whole capital, high and low, rich and poor, gave itself over to a single shared and mounting joy. Tomorrow their Rāma would be crowned.

There had never been such a night in Ayodhyā, so bright with lamps, so loud with happiness, so certain of its coming morning.

And here we must pause, because the story is about to turn, and it turns exactly here, at the very summit of the joy. Everything is ready. Everyone is happy. The old king has his wish, the people have theirs, the good prince is about to receive the crown that everyone on earth agrees he deserves. Nothing could seem more settled, more certain, more sure to arrive. If you did not know the story, you would expect the next chapter to be the coronation and the happy ending.

It is one of the deep truths this epic keeps returning to: that our lives can be brightest in the very hour before the darkness, that fate does its cruelest work not in the depths but at the heights, and that the distance between the summit of our happiness and the beginning of our sorrow can be a single night, a single whisper, a single bitter heart in a dark room while the rest of the city sings.

Ayodhyā blazed with lamps and rang with joy, and no one in all that happy city knew that in one small chamber, away from the light, the whole bright future was already being unmade, word by poisonous word.

For while Ayodhyā prepared to crown its prince, a hunchbacked maidservant was climbing the stairs to her mistress’s rooms, carrying in her twisted heart the ruin of them all.