He Sees Her Jewels

They came to Pampā, and it was a place of great beauty, a lake ringed with flowering trees and singing birds, lovely in the fullness of the spring, and its very loveliness was a torment to Rāma. For beauty, when the heart is grieving, does not console; it wounds. Every flowering tree reminded him of Sītā, who had loved such things; every bird’s song, every soft breeze, every sweet sight of the spring, called up her memory and sharpened his loss.

Rāma walked by the beautiful lake and grieved the harder for its beauty, and spoke his sorrow aloud to Lakshmaṇa, and the tellers give us here a Rāma still raw with loss, for whom the loveliness of the world had become a kind of cruelty, each fair thing a reminder of the fairest thing he had lost.

We should not pass this by too quickly, for it is a true and tender observation about grief, and the story pauses on it deliberately. When we are happy, the beauty of the world echoes our joy; when we grieve, that same beauty can become unbearable, for it goes on being beautiful indifferent to our sorrow, and it calls up at every turn the memory of the one we have lost and the happiness we no longer have.

Rāma at Pampā is every grieving soul who has ever found the spring an insult, who has walked through a beautiful day with a broken heart and hated the day for its beauty. The story lets him feel this, fully, and in letting him feel it, it honours the truth of grief and the humanity of its divine hero, who suffered the loss of his beloved exactly as we suffer ours.

But above Pampā rose the mountain Rishyamūka, and on that mountain, watching, was the one whom Kabandha had named, Sugrīva, the exiled king of the vānaras, and Sugrīva, seeing two mighty armed strangers approaching, was seized with fear.

For Sugrīva lived in exile and in terror. He had once been a prince of the vānaras, but his own brother, Vāli, the mighty king of Kishkindhā, had turned against him, had driven him out, had taken his kingdom and even his wife, and now hunted him, so that Sugrīva lived a hunted fugitive’s life on Rishyamūka, the one place Vāli could not come, ringed by a handful of faithful companions, always watching, always afraid.

And now here came two strangers, armed, powerful, warriors plainly, striding toward his refuge, and Sugrīva’s fear leapt at once to the worst conclusion: that these were assassins sent by Vāli, agents of his brother, come at last to kill him even in his mountain sanctuary.

He watched them with dread, and he could not decide what to do, and it was his wisest counsellor who steadied him and resolved the matter.

For among Sugrīva’s few faithful companions was one who was more than faithful, more than wise, one who was, though Sugrīva did not yet fully know it, among the greatest beings of the age: Hanumān, the son of the wind, the vānara of boundless strength and boundless devotion and boundless intelligence, who now steps for the first time into the front rank of the story and will not leave it again, for the rest of the tale is in large part his.

Do not act in fear, Hanumān counselled his master. Fear leaps to conclusions and fear is often wrong. We do not know that these strangers are enemies; they may as easily be friends. The wise course is not to flee and not to attack, but to learn the truth before deciding anything. Let me go to them, disguised, and speak with them, and discover who they are and what they want, and then we shall know whether to fear them or to welcome them. Send me first to learn the truth, and act on knowledge, not on dread.

It was wise counsel, the same wisdom that had almost been Guha’s when he faced Bharata’s army and the same that had steadied Lakshmaṇa’s suspicions, the wisdom that says: learn before you strike, discover before you decide, do not let fear write the story before the truth has spoken. And Sugrīva, trusting Hanumān as he trusted no one else, agreed, and sent Hanumān down from the mountain to meet the strangers and learn their purpose.

So Hanumān took the form of a wandering mendicant, a humble ascetic, a disguise that would let him approach the strangers without alarming them and draw them into conversation, and he went down to meet Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, all unknowing that he was going to meet the one being to whom he would devote the whole rest of his existence, the one whose service would be his glory and his joy and his very meaning, the Lord for whom, from this meeting onward, Hanumān would do the impossible again and again, leaping oceans and lifting mountains and carrying in his single faithful heart the hope of the whole cause.

The wind’s son went down the mountain to spy out two strangers, and he came back having found his god, though neither he nor Rāma yet knew what this meeting was, or all that it would come to mean.

And there is a fitness in it, the tellers say, that Hanumān came first as a humble mendicant, in disguise, in service to another’s need, cautious and courteous and wise. For that is what Hanumān was, beneath his boundless power: a servant, the perfect servant, whose whole greatness lay in devotion, in the pouring-out of his enormous gifts not for himself but for those he loved and served.

He came in the guise of humility because humility was his truth, and he came in service because service was his nature, and the greatest of the vānaras stepped into the story bowing, in disguise, seeking not to display his power but to learn how he might help.

It is the perfect introduction to the perfect devotee, and everything that Hanumān would become, the leaper of oceans, the burner of Lankā, the bearer of mountains, was already present in that first humble, careful, self-effacing approach, the servant going quietly down the mountain to learn how he might serve.

The meeting was about to take place that would bind Rāma and Sugrīva and Hanumān together, would turn the tide of the whole story, would set in motion the great search and the great war, and would begin the friendship, between Rāma and Hanumān, that is perhaps the most beautiful thing in all this beautiful and terrible tale. Down the mountain the wind’s son went, in his mendicant’s disguise, toward the two grieving strangers by the beautiful cruel lake, and the next age of the story began.