Manthara’s Evil Counsel

Her name was Manthara, and she was the hunchbacked maidservant of Queen Kaikeyī, and she had come with Kaikeyī from her father’s kingdom long ago and served her all these years. She loved her mistress, in her way, with the fierce narrow possessive love of one who has nothing else, and she loved Kaikeyī’s son Bharata as though he were her own. And that love, twisted through her twisted frame and her sour lonely heart, was about to become the instrument of a catastrophe.

She was on the palace roof when she saw the city being decked, and she asked what the celebration was for, and someone told her: tomorrow Rāma is to be crowned Yuvarāja. And where the whole rest of Ayodhyā heard that news with joy, Manthara heard it and went cold, and then hot, and something in her that had perhaps been waiting years for its moment woke and uncoiled.

She went to Kaikeyī’s chamber. And she found the queen exactly as anyone who knew Kaikeyī would have expected to find her: happy. For this is the thing that must be understood first, before anything else, and understood clearly, because everything that follows is a tragedy and not a simple tale of a wicked woman. Kaikeyī was not wicked. Kaikeyī loved Rāma. She loved him truly, and more than that, the tellers are careful to say, she may have loved him even beyond her own son Bharata.

Rāma had always been especially dear to her; he had a particular tenderness for this stepmother; the bond between them was real and warm. When Manthara came in, Kaikeyī was glad at the news of the coronation, glad with an open heart, and she even took a jewel from her own person and offered it to Manthara as one shares a gift in a happy hour, saying in effect: is this not wonderful news, our Rāma to be crowned?

And Manthara refused the jewel, and let it fall, and began her work.

What follows is one of the most chillingly observed passages in all the epic, because it is not a tale of a spell or a poison or a supernatural corruption. It is simply a portrait of how a good mind is poisoned by patient, malicious speech, and it is terrifyingly true to life. Manthara did not shout. She did not accuse. She began softly, with a false grief, a heavy sigh, a show of pitying her mistress, and Kaikeyī, puzzled, asked her what was wrong, and so the hook was set, for Kaikeyī herself now asked to hear the poison.

Foolish woman, Manthara said in effect, to rejoice at your own ruin. Do you not see what this means? While you smile, they are settling your doom. Once Rāma is crowned, it is Kausalyā, his mother, who becomes the great queen, the queen-mother, first in all honour. And what will you be then? A lesser wife in a rival’s house. Kausalyā has waited years for this hour, and when it comes she will remember every slight, real or imagined, and you will be made to pay for having been the favourite. You will serve her.

Your Bharata, who has as much right to the throne as Rāma, will be nothing, a shadow at another man’s court, and if he is lucky he will be sent far away, and if he is unlucky, he will not be suffered to live at all, for what king was ever safe while a rival brother breathed? You are not watching a coronation, my queen. You are watching the beginning of your own slavery and your son’s destruction, and you are smiling at it.

Now every word of this was false, and we know it is false, and the story is at pains to show us that it is false. Rāma loved Bharata as his own breath; Bharata loved Rāma the same; there was not the smallest danger to Bharata from Rāma’s crowning, and Kaikeyī, in her right mind, knew it. She said so, at first. She resisted. She told Manthara she was talking nonsense, that Rāma was as dear to her as Bharata, that Rāma would never harm his brother, that she was glad and would stay glad. She pushed the poison away.

But Manthara did not stop. This is the terrible patience of the thing. She had the whole night, and she used it. Again and again she returned to the wound, pressing, twisting, painting the picture darker each time, summoning up every buried fear a second wife and a mother might carry, magnifying every shadow, until slowly, slowly, the steady drip of it began to wear through Kaikeyī’s certainty. A jealous fear once spoken cannot easily be unheard. The mind returns to it.

And Kaikeyī, lying in the dark with Manthara’s whispers coiling around her, began, against her own better nature, to be afraid. What if it were true? What if she were being a fool? What if her love for Rāma were blinding her to her son’s danger? The love did not vanish, but the fear grew up alongside it and began to choke it, the way a weed chokes a flower not by killing it directly but by taking its light and its air.

Let us name plainly what is happening here, because it is a warning every one of us needs. Jealousy is a fire, and the terrible thing about it is that it consumes first the vessel that holds it. Kaikeyī was a good woman with a real love in her heart, and that love was being turned, drop by poisonous drop, into its opposite, not by any fault in Rāma, who had done nothing but be worthy of a crown, but by the persistent whispering of a bitter soul who could not bear another’s joy.

And it worked because the poison was mixed with just enough of something real, a mother’s fear for her son, a wife’s fear of being displaced, fears that were not wicked in themselves and could be twisted precisely because they were natural. The most dangerous lies are the ones wrapped around a splinter of truth. Manthara did not have to invent Kaikeyī’s love for Bharata; it was real; she only had to convince the mother that the love was in danger, and a mother frightened for her child will do things no argument could ever have moved her to.

By the deep of the night, the change was complete. The Kaikeyī who had offered a jewel in gladness at the news of Rāma’s crowning was gone, and in her place sat a woman rigid with a fear that had hardened into resolve. She would not let it happen. She would save her son. She would save herself. And Manthara, seeing that her long night’s work had taken hold, moved now to the second and colder part of her design, for it was not enough to make Kaikeyī afraid; she had to give the fear a weapon.

And Kaikeyī, as it happened, held such a weapon in her hand, and had held it for years without ever meaning to use it.

For long ago, on a battlefield of the gods, Kaikeyī had saved Dasharatha’s life, and the grateful king had granted her two boons, any two things she might ever ask, to be claimed whenever she wished. She had never claimed them. She had had no need. They had sat unused all these years, a forgotten kindness, a sleeping debt.

Manthara now woke that sleeping debt and put it into her mistress’s hand like a blade. Use the boons, she urged. Go to the king. Ask for two things, and hold him to his word, for a king cannot break a granted boon and keep his honour. Ask first that Bharata be crowned in Rāma’s place. And ask second, so that Rāma cannot remain to threaten your son, that Rāma be sent away into the Daṇḍaka forest, into exile, for fourteen years. Fourteen years in the wilderness, and Bharata’s throne secure long before he returns, if he returns at all.

This is how you save your son. This is the only way.

And Kaikeyī, no longer herself, listened to the whole monstrous plan and did not recoil from it. She took it in. She agreed to it. And she rose, and cast off her fine garments, and let down her hair, and went to the sulking-room, the chamber where a queen goes to show her displeasure, and threw herself down on the bare floor in soiled clothes to wait for the king, with two demands ready on her lips that would shatter a kingdom, break an old man’s heart, and send the best of men into the wilderness.

The lamps of Ayodhyā still blazed outside, and the city still sang, still certain of its happy morning. It did not know that its morning had already been murdered in a dark room by a whisper.