Left Eyelids Throb

As the brothers pressed southward through the wild, they met another of the forest’s monsters, and as with Virādha, the monster proved to be a cursed soul in disguise, and its slaying proved to be a liberation, and its dying proved to be a signpost pointing the way onward.

His name was Kabandha, and he was a horror to look upon: a huge, headless thing, a monstrous trunk with a great mouth set in its belly and a single eye, and immensely long arms with which it seized whatever came within reach and drew it to that devouring mouth. It caught Rāma and Lakshmaṇa in its terrible arms, one in each, and drew them toward its maw, and for a moment the two brothers, who had faced armies, were in real peril from this grotesque and mindless-seeming thing.

But they kept their heads, and each of them, with his sword, cut off one of the monster’s great arms, freeing themselves, and so overcame it.

And as Kabandha lay dying, the same wonder happened that had happened with Virādha: the monstrous shape fell away, and a being of light rose out of it, freed from a curse. For Kabandha too had once been a celestial being, a Gandharva of great beauty, and had been cursed into that hideous headless form, condemned to wander as a horror until Rāma should slay him and release him.

His death at the brothers’ hands was his liberation, the breaking of his curse, the restoration of his true and radiant nature, and he rose up grateful and blessed, freed at last from his long monstrous imprisonment.

But before he ascended, Kabandha, in gratitude, gave Rāma counsel that would prove crucial, and it is the reason his episode matters to the forward motion of the story. You seek your wife, he said, and you cannot recover her alone, for the power that holds her is very great. You need allies. Go, he told Rāma, to the mountain Rishyamūka, near the lake Pampā, and there seek out Sugrīva, the exiled king of the vānaras, the monkey-people. Make him your friend and your ally.

He too has been wronged; he too has lost, for his own kingdom and his own wife have been taken from him by his brother; and in your shared misfortune you will find a natural alliance. Sugrīva commands, or should command, a vast host of vānaras, who can range across the whole earth in search of your Sītā. Seek his friendship; help him regain what he has lost; and he will help you regain what you have lost.

This is the road to Sītā: not through your strength alone, great as it is, but through alliance, through the friendship of those who can search where you cannot and fight beside you when the time comes.

It was wise counsel, and it set the course of everything that followed, for the whole next movement of the story, the alliance with the vānaras, the great search, the building of the army, flows from Kabandha’s dying advice. Rāma, who might have thought to storm Lankā alone in the strength of his own overwhelming bow, was turned instead toward the path of alliance and friendship, toward the gathering of allies, and it was the right path, for even Rāma could not cross the sea and take the golden city alone.

He needed friends, and Kabandha pointed him toward the friends he needed.

And on the way toward Rishyamūka, following Kabandha’s direction, the brothers came to a place that gives this chapter its tenderness, the hermitage of Shabari, and her story is one of the most beloved in all the telling, a small quiet jewel of pure devotion set amid the gathering darkness of the tale.

Shabari was an old woman, a tribal woman of humble birth, who had lived her whole long life in the forest as the devoted disciple of a sage, and who had waited, for years upon years, for one thing only: the coming of Rāma. Her guru had told her, long ago, that Rāma would one day come to that hermitage, and she had held to that promise through her whole long life, waiting, serving, keeping the ashram, growing old in the single hope of one day seeing her Lord with her own eyes.

And now, at last, in her extreme old age, the promise was fulfilled, and Rāma came.

And Shabari, overwhelmed with joy, wished to offer him the best she had, and the best she had was the fruit of the forest, wild berries, and here she did a thing that has moved and troubled and delighted the tellers of this story ever since.

She had gathered berries for her Lord, and wishing to offer him only the sweetest and the best, she had tasted each one first, biting into it to be sure it was ripe and sweet, and setting aside any that were sour or unripe, so that she offered Rāma only berries she had already partly eaten, half-eaten berries, tasted and approved, the sweetest she could find.

Now by every rule of ceremony and purity, this was wrong, and Lakshmaṇa was taken aback by it, even offended. To offer a guest, above all to offer Rāma, food that had already been bitten, tasted, half-eaten, was by every convention an insult, a defilement, a breach of everything propriety required. Lakshmaṇa saw the half-eaten berries and was scandalized.

But Rāma saw something else entirely, and his seeing is the whole point of the story. He saw not the broken rule but the love that had broken it. He saw that Shabari had tasted each berry not out of disrespect but out of the deepest respect, out of a longing to give her Lord only the very sweetest, out of a love so pure and so anxious that it could not bear to offer him a single sour fruit.

The half-eaten berries were not a defilement; they were an offering of perfect love, and the tasting that made them impure by the rules made them precious by the only measure that finally counted. And Rāma took the berries from the old woman’s hands, and ate them, and declared that in all his life, at all the royal feasts he had ever attended, he had never tasted anything so sweet, because nothing had ever been offered to him with such pure and selfless love.

Let us hold this small scene close, for it contains the whole heart of what this story understands about devotion and the divine. Shabari was old, humble, of low birth, unlearned in the rules of ceremony; by every worldly measure she was nothing, and her offering, by every rule of purity, was worthless, even offensive.

And Rāma received her and her half-eaten berries as the most precious offering in the world, because the divine, this story insists again and again, does not look at our status, or our learning, or the correctness of our ritual, or the worldly value of our gift. The divine looks at the heart. It looks at the love with which the offering is made. A king’s golden sacrifice offered without love is nothing; an old tribal woman’s half-eaten berries offered with a whole heart’s devotion are everything.

This is the great democratic truth at the centre of the story’s spirituality: that the way to the divine is not through wealth or birth or learning or the perfection of ritual, but through the purity of the heart, and that this way is open to everyone, to the humblest and the lowest as fully as to the highest, and more fully, often, for the humble come with fewer of the barriers that pride and position raise.

Shabari, waiting her whole life in the forest, offering her half-eaten berries with perfect love, is held up by the story as one who found the divine more surely than many a great king, and her sweet berries are remembered and cherished when a thousand grand sacrifices are forgotten.

Blessed by Rāma, her life’s one hope fulfilled, her long waiting rewarded, the old woman was ready at last to depart, and she gave up her body and ascended to the higher regions, complete, her devotion crowned, going to her reward having seen with her own eyes the Lord she had waited a lifetime to see. And Rāma and Lakshmaṇa, having honoured her, went on, toward Pampā, toward Rishyamūka, toward Sugrīva and the alliance that would carry the search for Sītā into its next great movement.

There is an old belief, the tellers add, that gives this chapter its curious name: that when good fortune approaches, the left eyelid throbs, a sign of coming joy. And as Rāma neared Pampā and the meeting with the allies who would help him recover Sītā, such signs of coming fortune are said to have stirred, small omens that the long night of pure loss was ending, and that the road, though it still ran toward war, now ran also toward hope, toward friendship, toward the gathering of the forces that would one day cross the sea and bring Sītā home.