Rāma Disconsolate

Rāma came back through the forest with a growing dread in his heart. The golden stag had been a demon, as he had feared; the false cry in his own voice had told him that some trick was afoot; and as he hurried back toward the cottage he met Lakshmaṇa coming to find him, and the sight of his brother, who should have been guarding Sītā, filled him with a terror he could not yet name. Why have you left her, he demanded. Why are you here, when I charged you never to leave her side?

And Lakshmaṇa, wretched, told him: of the cry in Rāma’s voice, of Sītā’s terror, of her cruel accusation, of how she had driven him out against his own judgment and his own charge. And the two of them, cold with fear now, ran together toward the cottage.

They found it empty.

Sītā was gone. The cottage stood open and silent, and there was no sign of her but the signs of violence and disorder, and Rāma, standing in the empty doorway of the home where he had left his wife, understood that the worst had happened, that she had been taken, that the whole cunning design of stag and cry and crossed line had been aimed at exactly this, and that he had walked straight into it, and that Sītā was gone.

And here the story shows us something it has not shown us before, for through everything that had come, the loss of the crown, the exile, the death of his father, Rāma had held to his great calm, had borne every blow with a serenity that seemed almost beyond the human. But this blow broke through. This he could not bear with composure.

For this was Sītā, his wife, his other self, the companion who had refused to be left behind, who had followed him into the wilderness for love, and she was gone, taken, carried off to some unknown fate, and the calm that had carried Rāma through every other sorrow shattered against the enormity of this one, and Rāma grieved as men grieve, wildly, helplessly, almost to the edge of madness.

He searched. He ran through the forest calling her name. He looked in every direction, in the cottage, in the grove, along the river, everywhere, as though she might yet be found, as though the horror might yet be undone if only he searched hard enough. And when the searching found nothing, he began to speak to the forest itself, in his anguish, in the derangement of his grief. He asked the trees if they had seen her. He begged the deer to tell him which way she had gone.

He questioned the river, the flowers, the birds, the very rocks, crying out to the unanswering wilderness for word of his lost wife, half out of his mind with sorrow, a great and dignified man reduced by grief to pleading with the insensible world.

Let us not look away from this, for the story does not, and there is something important in its refusal to spare Rāma this collapse. We have followed a Rāma who seemed almost too perfect, too calm, too unshakable, a man who could lose a kingdom without a tremor. And now we see him broken, wild with grief, talking to the trees, and the sight makes him human to us in a way that all his serene virtue never quite did.

For this is the meaning of the incarnation, the thing the story insisted upon at the very beginning: that the divine, in taking human form, took on human grief truly, not as a performance, not as a god pretending to suffer, but really, to the bottom, so that there is no sorrow of ours that he has not felt. Rāma’s madness of grief in the empty forest is the proof of it.

He loved as we love, and he lost as we lose, and he grieved as we grieve, past all his philosophy, past all his composure, with the raw helpless anguish of any husband whose wife has been torn from him. The perfect calm was real, but so is this; and the two together are the whole truth of him, the man who could bear anything for duty and yet could be broken by love, exactly as we are broken.

And it fell to Lakshmaṇa now to be the strong one, and this too is worth marking, for it reverses the order we have seen all along. Through the whole story it has been Rāma who was calm and Lakshmaṇa who was passionate, Rāma who steadied and Lakshmaṇa who raged. But now, in the depth of Rāma’s grief, Lakshmaṇa became the steady one, the anchor, the voice of reason and resolve.

He grieved too, and he carried besides the terrible weight of his own guilt, for it was his leaving that had opened the door to the abduction, though the fault was not truly his. But he set his own grief and guilt aside to hold his brother up. Do not despair, brother, he urged. Grief will not bring her back; grief will only unman you when you most need your strength. She has been taken, yes, but taken is not lost; she may yet be found; she may yet be rescued. Master your sorrow. Turn it into resolve.

We will search, we will find who has done this, we will follow, and we will get her back. But you must be Rāma again; you must not drown in this; for her sake, if she is to be saved, you must be strong. And by such words Lakshmaṇa slowly drew his brother back from the edge of the abyss of grief, back toward purpose, back toward the resolve that alone could save Sītā if she could be saved at all.

There is a deep human truth in this reversal, and it is one worth carrying away. Even the strongest among us have their breaking point, the one loss that overwhelms even the greatest composure; and in that moment, the strength we need may have to come from another, from one who is ordinarily the weaker, who finds in our extremity the strength to be, for once, the steady one.

Rāma had steadied Lakshmaṇa a hundred times; now Lakshmaṇa steadied Rāma; and this is how it is meant to be among those who love one another, that the strength passes back and forth as it is needed, that no one has to be strong alone all the time, that in our worst hour someone who loves us can carry us until we can carry ourselves again.

Lakshmaṇa carried Rāma through the worst of that grief, and slowly Rāma came back to himself, the wild sorrow hardening into a cold and steady resolve, the resolve that would carry him across a subcontinent and over a sea and through a war to recover what had been taken from him.

So Rāma mastered his grief, or bent it to his purpose, and the two brothers set out to search in earnest, to find some trace of Sītā, some sign of which way she had been carried, some clue to the identity of the demon who had taken her.

And almost at once, as they searched southward, the direction Rāvaṇa had flown, they came upon a terrible sight: signs of a great struggle in the sky and on the earth, scattered feathers, broken weapons, and there, among the wreckage, an enormous bird, mortally wounded, his wings severed, lying in his own blood at the point of death, but living still, clinging to life by will alone, waiting, it seemed, for them to come.

It was Jaṭāyu, and he had held to life through his agony for exactly this, to give Rāma the word that would send him after Sītā.