Intrigue Wasted

There were duties to be done before anything else, and Bharata did them, though his heart was breaking, for that is what the noble do: they attend to what must be attended to, in order, even in the depths of grief.

First there was his father to be honoured. The old king’s body had lain preserved in oil these many days, waiting for a son to perform the rites, and now that son had come, and Bharata took up the sacred duty.

He performed the funeral ceremonies for Dasharatha with all the reverence and sorrow of a devoted son, conducting the rites on the banks of the Sarayū, giving his father at last the passage the dead require, weeping for the good old man whom he had loved and who had died calling not his name but Rāma’s, and whom he had not been able to see one last time. Whatever bitterness Bharata felt toward his mother, none of it touched his love for his father, and he mourned him fully and buried him with honour.

And there was Kausalyā to be faced, and this meeting the story lingers on, for it is tender and important. Bharata went to Rāma’s mother, to the woman his own mother had so grievously wronged, and it must have been among the hardest thresholds he ever crossed, for how could he look in the face of the woman whose son his mother had exiled? But he went. And he fell at Kausalyā’s feet, and he wept, and he cleared himself utterly of any part in the crime.

Do not think, mother, he begged her, that I had any hand in this, any knowledge of it, any share in the wickedness that was done. I was far away. I knew nothing. I would sooner have died than consent to the exile of Rāma, who is dearer to me than my own life. If I had been here, I would have thrown myself between him and this fate; I would have stopped it with my own body; I would never, never have suffered it to happen. The deed was my mother’s alone, and I disown it, and I curse it, and I am as wounded by it as you are.

Do not hold me guilty of my mother’s sin. My heart is with Rāma, wholly, and I have come home not to take his throne but to give it back to him, and I will not rest until he is restored.

And Kausalyā, who might have met him with suspicion or with bitterness, saw the truth of his grief and the purity of his heart, and believed him, and comforted him in turn, and the two of them, the wronged mother and the guiltless brother, wept together for the exile they both longed to end. It is a beautiful thing, this meeting, for it shows that the poison Kaikeyī had loosed did not spread as poison usually spreads. It might have set the whole royal house at war, mother against mother, son against son, the kingdom torn into factions.

Instead the goodness of Bharata drew the wronged and the innocent together in shared love for the absent Rāma, and contained the evil, and kept it from becoming the civil ruin it might so easily have become.

Then Bharata gathered the court, the ministers and the elders and the people, and made his will known, and it was not the will they expected. For the ministers, practical men facing a leaderless kingdom, urged him to take the throne. The king is dead, they said in effect, and the heir is in exile for fourteen years, and a kingdom cannot stand without a ruler. You are here; you are of the royal blood; the boon your mother claimed named you for the crown; take it, and rule, and give the kingdom the head it must have.

It was the sensible course, the expected course, and every practical consideration argued for it.

And Bharata refused it, absolutely, and his refusal is the heart of this chapter and one of the noblest gestures in the whole epic.

I will not take the throne, he told them. It is not mine. It is Rāma’s, by every right that gods and men acknowledge, by birth, by worth, by the love of this whole people, and no boon extracted by trickery from a grief-stricken king can make it mine or unmake it his. My mother did a monstrous thing, and I will not be the beneficiary of it. To sit on that throne would be to complete her crime, to profit from it, to ratify it, and I would rather die. Here is what I will do instead. I will go into the forest myself.

I will find my brother, and I will fall at his feet, and I will beg him to return and take the crown that is his. That is why I am here. That is the only use I will make of the power my mother’s wickedness has thrust upon me: to spend it undoing what she did. Prepare, all of you, for we march into the forest to bring Rāma home.

Consider what Bharata was rejecting, and understand the full measure of it. Manthara had poisoned Kaikeyī with the fear that Rāma’s crowning would mean Bharata’s ruin, that the brothers’ interests stood opposed, that Bharata must be protected from Rāma. And here stands Bharata, offered everything the poison had schemed to win him, the throne clear, the rival gone, the crown lawful in the letter, and he flings it all away with both hands and asks only to be allowed to give it back.

The whole vast intrigue, the whispering, the boons, the exile, the death, the ruin of a family and the near-ruin of a kingdom, all of it had been aimed at winning Bharata a throne, and Bharata did not want the throne, had never wanted it, was revolted by it. The intrigue was wasted. Every crime committed to secure Bharata’s crown was committed for nothing, because Bharata, the supposed beneficiary, would not touch the thing.

There is a bitter and perfect irony in it: that so much evil should have been done to win a prize that its intended winner rejected with loathing at the first opportunity. Manthara’s poison had achieved nothing but pure destruction, ruin without even the wicked profit it had aimed at, because it had been built on a lie about Bharata’s heart, and Bharata’s heart, when the moment came to reveal itself, proved to be the exact opposite of everything the poison had assumed.

So the great procession formed, and it was a strange one: not an army marching to conquer, but a kingdom marching to plead. Bharata put himself at its head, and he took with him the whole court and the mothers and the ministers and a great host of the citizens, and he had one purpose only, to find Rāma at Chitrakūṭa and to bring him back. He would not ride in state; the tellers say he went humbly, on foot for much of the way, in the plain dress of a mourner and a suppliant, not as a king going to command but as a brother going to beg.

And this great column of people wound out of Ayodhyā and turned south, into the forest, following the road that Rāma had taken, toward the green hill where the three exiles lived in their fragile peace, all unaware that the whole of Ayodhyā was now marching toward them through the trees.

But armies moving through a forest are seen, and a great host raising its dust and its noise as it advanced toward Chitrakūṭa did not go unnoticed. There were watchers in the wild, friends of Rāma, and one of them, seeing a mighty column of armed men advancing toward the place where Rāma sheltered, leapt to the natural and alarming conclusion, and made ready to defend the prince he loved against what looked, for all the world, like an army coming to finish what the exile had begun.