Ten Years Pass

The years of the exile flowed by, and most of them flowed quietly, and the story, which lingers so long over single days of crisis, passes lightly over these long peaceful stretches, as memory itself passes lightly over the years in which nothing terrible happens. Ten of the fourteen years went by in the deep forest, and they were not, for the most part, years of horror, but years of a strange and simple grace.

For the exiles did not live all this while in one place. They moved through the Daṇḍaka from hermitage to hermitage, spending seasons here and seasons there, guests of the many sages who had made their homes in that wild country, and everywhere they went they were received with love and reverence, for the holy recognized the holy, and the hermits of the forest understood who it was that walked among them.

Rāma and Sītā and Lakshmaṇa became, in these years, a part of the quiet world of the forest sages, sharing their simple life, their disciplines, their devotions, moving among the scattered ashrams like pilgrims who never quite settled and never quite left.

Let us try to picture that life, for it has a beauty that the crises of the story can make us forget. Imagine the rustic peace of it: the small ashrams tucked into clearings, ringed by great trees, with their sacred fires and their gardens of herbs and their tame deer wandering among the huts. Imagine the rhythm of the days, the gathering of fruit and roots, the fetching of water from clear streams, the tending of the fires, the long evenings of talk with wise old men who had spent their lives in the pursuit of truth.

Imagine the seasons turning: the green flush of the rains, the cool clarity of the winter mornings, the heavy heat of the summer, the forest changing its dress through the year while the exiles moved gently through it. It was a hard life in its way, stripped of every comfort of the palace, but it was also a clean and a deep one, and there was a real happiness in it, the happiness of a life pared down to its essentials, lived among good people in the presence of one another and of the divine.

And the sages loved to have them, for more reasons than one. Rāma was a delight to them as a companion, gentle and reverent and wise beyond his years. But he was more than a companion; he was a protector. For the forest, beautiful as it was, was not safe. The sages who dwelt there lived under a constant shadow, the shadow of the rākshasas, the demons who haunted the Daṇḍaka and preyed upon the holy.

The demons hated the sages and their sacrifices, hated the light and the discipline and the goodness of them, and they came in the night to defile the rites, to wreck the ashrams, and worst of all to kill and devour the hermits themselves. The sages lived in terror of them, these gentle men of prayer, unable to defend themselves, their peaceful lives shadowed always by the fear of the monstrous things that hunted them in the dark.

And so, at one of the hermitages, the sages showed Rāma a thing that fixed the purpose of his forest years, and the tellers dwell on it because it is the moment that turns the quiet exile toward its violent destiny. They led him to a place and showed him the heaped bones of ascetics, a great mound of the bones of holy men who had been killed and eaten by the rākshasas over the years, the pitiful remains of the sages’ murdered brethren, piled up as a monument to the terror under which they all lived. Look, they said in effect.

Look what is done to us here. This is the fate that hangs over every one of us, every night, the fate of being torn apart and devoured by the demons who hate our prayers. We are helpless against them. We cannot fight; it is not our way; our power is in penance, not in arms. We can only pray, and die, and be added to this heap of bones. And now you have come among us, a prince, a warrior, one strong enough to stand against the darkness. Will you protect us?

Will you use your strength to rid this forest of the demons that hunt us, so that the holy may live and pray in peace?

And Rāma, seeing the mound of bones, seeing the terror of the good and gentle men who had shown him such love, took a solemn vow. He vowed to protect them. He vowed to use his strength and his weapons against the demons of the forest, to stand between the sages and the darkness that hunted them, to clear the Daṇḍaka of its rākshasas so that the holy might live unafraid.

It was the vow of a protector, the same principle that had governed his slaying of Tāṭakā long ago, now taken up as the great purpose of his forest years: that the strong exist to shield the weak, that the warrior’s duty is to stand between the predator and the prey, and that a prince who could protect the helpless and did not was no true prince at all.

But here the story gives us a quiet and a subtle moment, and it is Sītā who provides it, and it shows her wisdom and her love and a certain gentle prophetic unease. For Sītā, hearing Rāma take this vow, was troubled, and she spoke to him of her trouble, softly, as a wife speaks who does not wish to counsel her husband away from his duty but cannot keep silent about her fear. She reminded him of a subtle danger, a danger not of the body but of the soul. We came to the forest, she said, to live as ascetics, in peace, harming no one.

And here you are vowing to take up arms, to seek out the demons and destroy them. I do not question the rightness of protecting the sages; it is a noble thing. But consider: is there not a danger in going to seek out conflict, in taking up violence even for a good cause, when we came here for peace? The very carrying of weapons, the very readiness to fight, can draw a man toward fighting, can entangle him in quarrels that need not have been his, can lead, step by step, from righteous protection into unnecessary war.

I do not say do not protect the innocent. I only say: be watchful. Do not let the taking-up of arms for a good cause pull you further into conflict than the cause requires. There is a wisdom in not seeking out the fight, even when one is strong enough to win it.

It was gently said, and it was wise, and it was, the tellers note with a certain sorrow, in some sense prophetic, for the chain of events that Sītā half-feared, the entanglement in a conflict that would grow and grow, was indeed about to begin, and would lead, through one thing and another, to the very catastrophe that would engulf them all.

Rāma heard her, and honoured her wisdom, and did not dismiss it, but he did not turn from his vow either, for the mound of bones was real and the sages’ terror was real and the duty of protection was, to him, not a thing that could be set aside for the sake of a quieter life. He would protect the helpless; that was settled in him; and if protecting them drew him into conflict, then he would meet the conflict when it came.

And Sītā, having spoken her heart, said no more, and stood with her husband as she always stood, at the edge of the thing she had gently warned against, ready to face with him whatever her warning could not prevent.

And so the peaceful years turned, at last, toward their ending. Ten of the fourteen had passed. The exiles had lived their quiet forest life, moving among the sages, and now Rāma had bound himself to the protection of the holy against the demons, and the long peace was about to break.

The story gathers itself here, at the threshold of its darkest turning, and moves the three exiles toward the place where the whole tragedy would begin, toward the beautiful banks of the Godāvarī, toward the pleasant grove of Panchavaṭī, where they would build their last forest home, and where a demoness would come out of the trees and set in motion the ruin of everything.