Storm and Calm

The news went out from the chamber like a crack running through ice, and where it reached, it broke hearts. But it did not break them all the same way, and in the different ways that different people met this disaster, the story shows us their souls.

It reached Kausalyā, Rāma’s own mother, and it felled her. She had waited a lifetime to see this day, the day her son was crowned, the day her long patience as the senior but not the best-loved queen was at last rewarded; and now, in a single morning, the coronation had become an exile, and her only son was to be taken from her for fourteen years, torn away into a wilderness of beasts and demons. She collapsed under the weight of it.

When Rāma came to her, she clung to him and wept as though her heart would tear loose, and she said the thing that every mother in her place would say: if you must go, take me with you. Let me follow you as your shadow. I cannot live here without you; the palace will be a tomb; how can a mother stay behind in comfort while her child sleeps on the forest floor? Let me come, or let me die.

And Rāma had to console her too, gently, firmly, as he had consoled his father, but with a different argument, for her duty was different. Your place is here, mother, he told her. My father is broken; if you leave him now, in his grief, you will destroy him, and a wife’s first duty is to stand by her husband in his darkest hour. And there is the court to guide, and the kingdom to steady, in this time of confusion. To follow me would be to abandon the very duties that are yours. Stay, and be strong, and hold this house together until I return.

Fourteen years will pass, and I will come back to your arms. Your grief is love, and I honour it, but let it not pull you from your dharma. And by such words, slowly, he steadied her, anchoring her breaking heart to the one thing that could hold it, the quiet duty that remained to her.

But if grief was the storm in Kausalyā, in Lakshmaṇa it was fire.

Lakshmaṇa heard the news and did not weep. He blazed. All the fierce protective love that had bound him to Rāma since the cradle rose up in him now as a towering, shaking rage, and it was terrible to see, for Lakshmaṇa was a warrior of tremendous power and his fury was not an idle thing. This was injustice, naked and monstrous, and every fibre of him rebelled against submitting to it. He came to Rāma with his whole being trembling, and the words poured out of him hot and reckless. What madness is this, he demanded.

That a doting old king, besotted by a scheming wife, should throw away the rightful heir on the strength of some ancient rash promise extracted from him in a weak moment? This is not dharma; this is dotage; this is a kingdom handed to injustice because one bitter woman willed it. Why should we submit to it? Why should the best of men go into the wilderness so that intrigue may sit on the throne? Give me the word, brother, only the word, and I will set this right.

Let the old king keep his forest decree; I will guard your coronation with my bow, and any man, any faction, any power that stands against your rightful crowning will answer to me. If the whole court and the king himself resist, then let them; I do not fear them; I will make you king today over the objections of them all. Do not bow to this. Do not accept it. It is wrong, and I will not stand by and watch you accept a wrong.

It was rebellion he was urging, open and armed, and he meant every word of it, and he had the strength to attempt it. The fire in him was real and dangerous. And here the two brothers stood face to face, the storm and the calm, and how Rāma met his brother’s rage is one of the great quiet scenes of the epic.

Rāma did not answer fire with fire. He did not rebuke Lakshmaṇa harshly, for he understood that the rage came from love, and love, even when it is mistaken, must be honoured. He put his hands on his brother, and he spoke to him gently, and he reasoned with him, cooling the fever in him not by opposing it but by drawing him up toward a higher view.

Peace, brother, he said. I know your anger, and I know it springs from your love for me, and I love you the more for it. But consider what you are truly urging. You would have me seize by force a throne that my father’s word has given elsewhere. You would have me set my own desire above his honour, break the sacred word of the house of Ikshvāku, and buy a crown with the coin of my father’s disgrace and perhaps his life. What would such a crown be worth, won so?

A kingdom taken by trampling on my father’s truth and my duty as a son would be no kingdom but a theft, and I would be no king but a usurper who could not even keep faith with his own father. Where is the honour in that? You call the exile an injustice. Perhaps it is. But the answer to an injustice is not to commit a greater one. My father is bound by his word, and I am bound by my duty to him, and these bonds are not chains that shame me; they are the very things that make me who I am.

Would you have me purchase fourteen years of comfort at the price of everything I hold sacred? I will not. And there is more, Lakshmaṇa: consider that perhaps this is not mere accident and intrigue at all, but the working-out of a destiny larger than we can see, a purpose that needs me in the forest and not on the throne, for reasons that will become clear in time. Do not fight the current of a river you cannot see the end of. Trust that this exile has its place in a design, and let us walk into it with open hearts rather than clenched fists.

And slowly, as Rāma spoke, the fire in Lakshmaṇa banked and cooled. He could not argue against his brother’s reasoning, for it was unanswerable; and more than that, the sheer serene certainty in Rāma reached the place in Lakshmaṇa that no argument could have reached, and quieted it. His rage, which had been ready to overturn a kingdom, subsided into something else, into the fierce devotion that would define the rest of his life.

If Rāma would not be turned from the forest, then Lakshmaṇa knew what he himself would do, and it was the only thing he had ever really been going to do: he would go with him. He would not stay behind in comfort while his brother walked into the wild. Where Rāma went, Lakshmaṇa went; it had been true since they were children who could not sleep apart, and it was true now.

His anger became resolve, and his resolve was to share the exile, to guard his brother through every one of the fourteen years, to be the sword and the shield and the tireless servant of Rāma’s forest life. The storm had passed into steady flame, and that flame would burn faithfully all the long years to come.

So in one morning the story showed three loves and three ways of grief: Kausalyā’s, which was sorrow, and had to be steadied into duty; Lakshmaṇa’s, which was fury, and had to be cooled into devotion; and above them both, Rāma’s own, which was neither sorrow nor fury but a great calm, the calm of a man who has surrendered everything except the one thing that matters, and holds that one thing so firmly that no storm can shake him.

And by the strength of that calm he steadied his mother and quieted his brother and held the breaking house together, so that what might have become a palace revolt, a dynasty torn apart by armed rebellion, became instead an orderly and sorrowful preparation for a righteous man’s departure into the woods.