Last Moments

Having told his secret at last, having laid down the burden he had carried in silence for so many years, Dasharatha had little strength left, and what little remained ran out quickly now, like sand through the last narrow of the glass.

The palace lay under a heavy stillness in those last hours. The lamps burned low. The servants moved on quiet feet and spoke in whispers, for everyone knew that the old king was going, and a hush had fallen over the great house as though it were holding its breath. Kausalyā sat by him, and Sumitrā, and they watched the life ebb from the man who had been the centre of all their lives for so long, and there was nothing they could do but be there, and hold his hands, and listen.

For at the end he spoke only of Rāma. The name was on his lips continually, a murmur, a litany, the single word around which his whole failing consciousness now turned. Rāma, he said, and Rāma, and Rāma, as though by saying the name he could summon the son to him, or reach across the miles of forest to where the boy now was, or simply hold, in the sound of the name, the presence that his eyes would never see again. He relived the parting.

He saw again the chariot passing out of sight, and stretched out his arms to it in the empty air of the sickroom, and called after it, and wept the slow exhausted tears of the dying. Where is Rāma, he asked the darkness. Bring me Rāma. Let me see his face once more before I go. And there was no Rāma to bring, only the forest, and the fourteen years, and the great distance that his own word had opened between them, and that no strength of his could now cross.

Let us sit with the sorrow of this, for it is among the most human sorrows in the whole story. Here was a man who had everything the world can give, a great king at the end of a great reign, and he was dying of a broken heart, and the one thing he wanted, the only thing, was to see his son’s face, and he could not have it. All his power, all his wealth, all the might of his throne, could not buy him that one small mercy.

He had sent his son away by his own hand, bound by his own honour, and now he was dying, and the son could not be recalled in time, and the last sight the father would carry out of the world was not his boy’s living face but the memory of a chariot vanishing into dust. There is no grief quite like the grief of a parting that cannot be undone, a word that cannot be unspoken, a last chance that has already slipped away, and Dasharatha died in the full bitterness of it, reaching for a son who was not there.

And so, in the quiet middle of the night, with Rāma’s name on his lips and Rāma’s face before his closing eyes, the old king let go, and his long life ended, and the curse of the blind sage on the far bank of the Sarayū was fulfilled to the letter: he died of grief for his beloved son, parted from him at the last, measure for measure, exactly as had been decreed so many years before. The circle closed. The debt was paid.

And the great Dasharatha, conqueror, ruler of a golden age, father of the avatar, passed out of the world alone in the dark, undone by his own honour and his own long-ago sin, and the palace of Ayodhyā woke in the morning to find its king dead.

The morning brought a new kind of horror, the practical, disorienting horror of a kingdom suddenly without a head. For consider the situation the death revealed. The king was dead. The rightful heir, Rāma, was in the forest, fourteen years away. The son who was to be crowned in his place, Bharata, was not even in the city, for he had been away all this while visiting his mother’s family in the distant kingdom of the Kekayas, and knew nothing of any of it, not the coronation, not the boons, not the exile, not now the death.

Ayodhyā woke to find itself a great kingdom with a dead king, an exiled heir, and an absent successor, leaderless, rudderless, plunged from the height of its expected joy into confusion and dread within the space of a few days.

And there was a grim practical problem that the ministers had to face at once, and it tells us something about the disorder of the moment. A dead king’s body cannot simply wait; there are rites that must be performed, and the chief mourner, the one who must light the funeral fire and perform the sacred duties for the dead, is by right and custom the son. But which son? Rāma was in the forest. Bharata was in the Kekaya kingdom, days of hard riding away. There was no son present to perform the rites for the dead king.

The ministers, wise old men suddenly bearing the whole weight of a decapitated state, made the only decision they could: they had the king’s body preserved, laid in oil to keep it from corruption, and they sent swift messengers riding hard for the Kekaya kingdom to summon Bharata home, as fast as horses could carry the news.

But the messengers were charged, on the ministers’ careful instruction, not to tell Bharata why he was so urgently summoned, not to speak of the death or the exile or any of it, but only to say that he was needed at home without delay. Let the terrible news be broken to him in Ayodhyā, they reasoned, and not flung at him on the road where he could do nothing with it but grieve alone.

And so the kingdom held its breath a second time. The old king lay preserved in oil, unburned, his rites unperformed, waiting. The city mourned its dead ruler and its exiled prince together, a double grief.

And far to the west, the messengers rode day and night toward the Kekaya kingdom, carrying a summons without a reason, to fetch home a young man who had left Ayodhyā when it was happy and secure, and who did not yet know that in his absence his mother had destroyed it, his brother had been exiled, and his father had died calling for a son who could not come.

Bharata was riding, all unknowing, toward the ruin of his whole world, and toward a homecoming that would test him as few men have ever been tested, and reveal him, when it came, to be one of the noblest souls in all this great story.