The Brothers Meet

The suspicion that had touched Guha touched Lakshmaṇa too, and more fiercely, for Lakshmaṇa’s love was fiercer and his temper quicker.

They had seen the signs from the hill: the dust, the noise, the approach of a great host through the forest below. And Lakshmaṇa, ever watchful, ever the guardian, climbed high into a tall tree to see what was coming, and when he made out the banners and knew them for the banners of Ayodhyā, and saw Bharata at the head of the host, the same dark suspicion that had seized Guha seized him, and it kindled him to fury. He came down from the tree with his blood up and his hand already reaching for his bow.

It is Bharata, he told Rāma, his voice shaking with anger. Bharata, come with an army, into the forest, straight toward us. Do you see what this means? His mother stole your crown and drove you into exile, and now her son comes armed to hunt you down and kill you, so that no rightful heir survives to trouble the throne they stole. He is not content to have banished you; he means to make an end of you. Well, let him come. Let him come and find that we are not so easily murdered.

Give me the word, brother, and I will meet this Bharata and his army, and I will avenge every wrong that has been done to you, and I will make the forest floor red with the blood of this treacherous house. He came for your life; let him lose his own. Only say the word.

And Rāma, calm as ever, quieted him, and rebuked him gently, and would not for a moment believe the thing that Lakshmaṇa believed.

Peace, brother, he said. You wrong Bharata, and you wrong him deeply. I know Bharata. I have known him since he was a child, and there is no truer or gentler heart in all the world. Bharata would no more come to kill me than you would. Do you truly imagine that Bharata covets the throne, that he would murder his own brother for a crown? You have let a suspicion poison your judgment. Look again.

If Bharata comes, he comes not to harm me but for some other cause that we do not yet know, and I will wager my life that his heart is as loving toward me as it has ever been. Put up your bow. We do not draw weapons against our brother. If Bharata is here, then something has happened in Ayodhyā that has brought him, and we shall greet him with open arms and learn what it is, and I will hear no more talk of blood between brothers.

And Rāma was right, of course, as he was always right about the hearts of those he loved, for his own heart was so clear that it could read others truly, where Lakshmaṇa’s, clouded by protective anger, had read only shadows.

This is worth marking, this difference between the brothers even in their virtues: Lakshmaṇa’s love expressed itself in suspicion and readiness for violence, always scanning for the enemy, always poised to strike in defence of what he loved; Rāma’s love expressed itself in trust, in the refusal to think ill of a good man on the strength of mere appearances. Both loves were real.

But Rāma’s was the wiser and the larger, for it did not let fear rewrite its knowledge of a brother’s heart, and it was vindicated, as trust in the truly good is usually vindicated, while Lakshmaṇa’s suspicion, like Guha’s, was about to be shamed by the truth.

For Bharata came. And he did not come as Lakshmaṇa had feared. He left his army behind and came up the hill on foot, humble, grieving, and when he saw Rāma at last, when he saw his beloved brother standing there in the bark garments of an ascetic, his hair matted, his royal beauty clad in a hermit’s poverty, exiled and wronged and yet serene, Bharata’s heart broke entirely, and he ran forward and flung himself down and fell at Rāma’s feet, weeping, unable at first even to speak for the force of his grief.

And Rāma raised him up, and embraced him, and held his weeping brother, and the two of them clung together, and any last shadow of Lakshmaṇa’s suspicion died in that instant, shamed into nothing by the plain sight of Bharata’s love. There was no army here come to murder. There was only a brother, broken with grief, come to find the brother he adored.

But the reunion, sweet as it was, carried a terrible cargo, for Bharata had news that Rāma did not yet have, and it fell to Bharata to break it. Through his weeping, he had to tell his brother that their father was dead. That Dasharatha, the old king, had died of grief for Rāma’s exile, calling his name to the last, and was already burned and gone, his rites performed, while Rāma lived on in the forest not even knowing that he was now a fatherless son.

And this news broke Rāma’s calm as nothing else in the whole story had broken it. He had borne the loss of his crown without a tremor; he had walked into exile with a light step; he had comforted everyone else’s grief while showing none of his own. But this he could not bear so lightly, for this was his father, dead, and dead of grief for him, and gone forever, and Rāma had not been there, had not known, had not said goodbye.

The strong calm that had carried him through every other blow gave way, and Rāma grieved, truly and deeply, for the father he had lost and would never see again, and the three brothers and Sītā wept together on the hillside for the good old king who had died calling for the son he had been forced to send away. And when the first storm of grief had passed, they did what the loss required.

There on the banks of the forest river, in the wilderness, with none of the pomp of the capital but with all the love of true sons, Rāma and his brothers performed the water-rites for their dead father, the tarpaṇa, the offering of water to the departed spirit.

Rāma, the eldest, the exiled heir, gave his father in the forest the offering he had not been present to give in the palace, standing in the running water with his brothers beside him, sending the sacred libations after the old king’s soul, mourning in exile the father whose love had been so great and whose end had been so sorrowful.

It was a grief shared and a duty done, and it drew the brothers closer even in its sorrow, for they mourned as one, the four sons of Dasharatha, or the three who were present, united at last not in the joy that had been planned but in the grief that had come instead, and bound together by it against whatever was still to come.