Sage Vishvāmitra

Twelve years passed, and they passed happily. Rāma grew from an infant into a boy, and from a boy into a youth on the edge of manhood, and the whole of Ayodhyā watched him grow as though he belonged to all of them and not to the palace alone. He was gentle, and he was strong, and the two things sat easily together in him, which is rarer than we think. The old king, watching his sons at their lessons and their games, believed the gods had at last grown tired of testing him.

Then one morning a visitor came to the court, and nothing was ever the same again.

The gatekeepers came running ahead of him, pale and stammering, for they hardly knew how to announce a man before whom the very air seemed to bend. It was the sage Vishvāmitra. Now Vishvāmitra was no ordinary hermit. He had been born a king, a great one, and had turned from his throne to the harder conquest of the spirit, and he had won it through penances so severe that they had frightened heaven itself. Power came off him like heat off a coal.

When he entered the hall, the courtiers rose without being told to, and Dasharatha came down from his seat to receive him with his own hands.

The king was overjoyed, and he showed it. He washed the sage’s feet, offered him the honours due to the highest guest, and spoke the words a host speaks when he wishes to seem generous before he knows what is being asked. "Your coming honours my house, great sage," he said. "Your penances have made you feared by the gods. What could such a one need from a mere king? Ask, and if it lies within my power, consider it already given. There is nothing I will refuse you."

It is easy to be generous before you know the price. We have all made such promises, in the warmth of a good moment, and we have all felt the floor tilt beneath us when the moment came to keep them. Dasharatha was about to learn this lesson in its cruelest form.

Vishvāmitra took the king at his word, exactly as he had offered it. "I am glad to hear you say so," he said, "for a king’s word, once given, cannot be taken back. Here is my need. In the forest where I perform my sacrifices, two demons, Mārīcha and Subāhu, defile my fire. Each time I bring the rite near its completion, they rain down flesh and blood upon the altar and undo the labour of weeks. I cannot strike them myself, for I am bound by my vows during the sacrifice, and if I break my penance in anger, all its accumulated power is lost.

I do not want your army. I want one thing only. Give me your son Rāma. He alone can guard my fire. Send him with me into the forest, and I will return him to you."

The hall went silent. And the king who had, a breath before, sworn there was nothing he would refuse, felt the whole weight of his own words come down on him at once.

Something broke in Dasharatha’s face. All his royal composure, all the practised ease of a lifetime on the throne, fell away, and what was left was simply an old father who had waited decades for this child and could not imagine parting with him. "Ask me for anything else," he said, and his voice was not a king’s voice anymore. "Ask me for my treasury, my kingdom, my own life. But not Rāma. He is barely more than a child. He has never seen war. These are not village bandits, great sage; these are demons who have terrified even the gods.

I will come myself. I will bring my whole army. I am old, but I can still hold a bow. Only do not ask me for my son."

He went on, pleading, and the more he pleaded the more he unraveled, until he was saying things that did him no credit, half-promises and evasions and the small desperate bargains of a frightened heart. And here is the pity of it, and the truth of it: Dasharatha was not a coward. He had faced demons on the field of the gods and not flinched. But there is a courage a man can summon for his own danger that deserts him entirely when the danger is asked of his child. Fear for oneself is one thing.

Fear for what one loves is another, and it is far harder to master.

Vishvāmitra’s patience, which had never been deep, ran out. His eyes kindled, and the temperature of the room seemed to rise with them. "You gave your word," he said, and the quiet of his voice was more terrible than any shout. "You gave it freely, before the whole of your court, and now you would take it back. Is this the truth of the house of Ikshvāku? Is this the honour of the line that has never broken a promise? Then keep your son, King, and keep your shame with him.

I will go as I came." And the very stones of the hall seemed to darken as his anger gathered.

It was Vasishṭha who saved them all. The old family priest, who had watched Dasharatha’s whole life and now watched him drowning, stepped quietly between the two men and spoke to the king in the low, steady tone one uses to a man on the edge of a great mistake.

"Listen to me, old friend," he said, "for I have never given you counsel that harmed you. You are looking at this the wrong way round. You see Vishvāmitra taking your son into danger. I see him offering your son a gift you could never give him yourself. Do you imagine this sage cannot destroy those demons with a glance? He does not need Rāma’s arm. He is offering Rāma his blessing, his instruction, the whole armoury of divine weapons that no teacher in your kingdom could bestow.

Rāma came into this world for a purpose larger than the walls of Ayodhyā, and that purpose is beginning now, today, whether you are ready for it or not. To hold him back is not to protect him. It is to keep a lamp under a jar for fear the wind might touch its flame. Let him go. He will return to you greater than he left, and no harm will come to him under that protection."

The king heard him. It did not make it easy, but it made it possible, and sometimes that is all wisdom can do for us. The difference between a wise counsellor and a mere comforter is just this: the comforter tells you the thing you want to hear, and the wise man tells you the thing you need to do, and helps you find the strength to do it. Dasharatha bowed his head, and after a long moment he gave his consent, though his heart went with the words and left him hollow.

Rāma was brought. And when the boy heard what was asked of him, he showed none of his father’s fear. He was calm, almost glad. There was in him, even then, that quality that would define his whole life: when duty came to him clearly, he did not argue with it. He went to his father, touched his feet, took the old king’s trembling hands in his own young ones, and said only that he would go gladly, and that his father should not grieve.

And Lakshmaṇa, of course, would not be left behind. He had not been asked for; no one had thought to ask for him; but the idea that Rāma should walk into the forest while he stayed safe at home was so absurd to Lakshmaṇa that he simply gathered his bow and took his place at his brother’s shoulder, and no one who knew the two of them wasted breath trying to stop him. Where Rāma went, Lakshmaṇa went. It had been true since the cradle and it would be true to the end.

So the two boys knelt for their mothers’ blessings and their father’s, and Vishvāmitra turned toward the gate, and they followed him out of the palace and out of the city, into the wide bright morning and the long road south. Dasharatha stood on the high terrace and watched them until the dust of the road had swallowed them, and then a while longer, watching the empty place where they had been.

He did not know it, but he was watching the shape of his whole future walk away from him. This was the first parting. There would be a second, and the second would not spare him. But that is far ahead, and for now there was only a father on a terrace, and two boys on a road, and an old sage leading them toward the first of the labours for which one of them had been born.