Rāma Leaves Home

We must go back a little, to the leaving itself, for a journey is not only where it arrives but how it begins, and the beginning of this one deserves its own telling.

When the two boys walked out of the southern gate of Ayodhyā behind the sage, they walked out of the only world they had ever known. Think of what that city had been to them. Every stone of it was familiar. They knew which terrace caught the morning sun and which fountain ran sweetest and where the old gatekeeper kept the sweets he pretended he did not keep for them. They had never slept a night outside those walls.

And now the walls fell away behind them, and ahead there was only the road, white with dust, running on into country that grew stranger with every mile.

At first the change was gentle. The road out of the capital ran through prosperous villages, and the people, recognizing the princes, came out to bless them and stare. But by the afternoon of the first day the villages had grown poorer and fewer, and by the evening they had stopped altogether, and there was only the forest, breathing its green breath around them, full of sounds they could not name. The boys walked closer together than they had at noon. This is no shame to them.

The bravest heart feels the pull of home when home first drops out of sight; courage is not the absence of that pull but the choosing to keep walking against it.

They came to the banks of the Sarayū, the same river that ran past their own city far to the north, and here Vishvāmitra called a halt. There was something he wished to give them before they went further, he said, and he had waited until they were clear of the noise and comfort of settled land, for what he was about to teach could only be received in a certain stillness.

"You are the sons of a king," he said, "and you have been trained as princes are trained. But the forest is not a palace, and the demands it will make on your bodies are not the demands you were bred for. There will be days without food. There will be nights without sleep. There will be marches longer than any you have walked, against enemies who do not tire as men tire. I will not have you fail for want of a strength I could have given you.

So I am going to teach you two mantras, and they are called Bala and Atibala, Strength and Beyond-Strength. Learn them, and hunger will not weaken you, nor thirst parch you, nor weariness slow your hand. You will not age while they are with you as other men age. They are the mothers of all the powers, and I received them from a high source, and I give them now to you."

He taught them the sacred words, and the manner of their saying, and the discipline of mind that must go with them, for a mantra is not a trick but a training, and its power lives in the purity of the one who holds it. The boys learned quickly. Rāma learned as though he were remembering something rather than learning it new, and perhaps, being who he was, he was. And when the lesson was done, something in the two of them had changed. The tiredness of the long day’s walk had lifted clean away.

They felt light, clear, tireless, as though they could walk to the edge of the world and turn and walk back.

They bathed in the cool river as the light failed, and made their beds on the clean sand of the bank, under the open sky. And here is a thing worth noticing, small but not trivial. These were princes who had slept every night of their lives on soft beds in guarded rooms. That night they lay down on sand, with the river talking beside them and the enormous star-crowded dark overhead, and they were not miserable. They were happy.

There is a freedom in the simple life that the palace, for all its comforts, cannot give, and the boys tasted it that first night and never entirely forgot the taste. The forest, which their father had feared for them as a place of only danger, was also this: clean water, open sky, the good tiredness of an honest day, the nearness of a wise man who asked nothing of them but that they grow.

For grow they did, and quickly, and it was the bond between the three of them that grew fastest. On the road there is no rank the way there is in a court. A prince and a sage walking the same dusty miles, eating the same plain food, sleeping under the same trees, come to know one another in a way that palace ceremony never allows.

Vishvāmitra, who had come to Ayodhyā as a figure of terror before whom a king had trembled, became to the boys something else on that road: a teacher, yes, and a stern one, but also a companion, a keeper of stories, an old man who noticed when they were footsore and shortened the march without seeming to. And the boys became to him something he had perhaps not expected to feel again after his long solitary austerities: sons of a kind, young lives to pour his knowledge into, a reason to be gentle.

We should let ourselves feel the sweetness of these days, because there will not be many like them. Much of what is coming in this story is hard. There is exile ahead, and abduction, and war, and grief piled on grief. But right here, on the road south, before any of that has begun, there is only a bright morning and three travellers and the whole adventure still ahead of them and none of its cost yet paid. Rāma is not yet the sorrowing exile, not yet the grieving husband, not yet the lonely king.

He is a boy on a journey with his brother and his teacher, strong and glad, walking toward the first test of his life with a light step and an easy heart. Let the picture stand a moment before the road carries them on.

Vishvāmitra watched the two of them go ahead of him one morning, laughing at some private joke between brothers, their new mantras making their steps light, and he thought, as old men think watching the young, of all that lay in wait for them down the road, and he did not tell them, because it was not yet time, and because there is a mercy in not knowing. He only followed after, and let them laugh, and kept his knowledge to himself.

The land ahead grew harsher. The green forest gave way to a stretch of dead and blasted country, where nothing grew and the very birds fell silent, and the boys’ laughter died on their lips as they felt the change come over the land. Vishvāmitra’s face grew grave. They had reached the borders of a cursed place, and the first of Rāma’s labours was waiting in it.