The Conception

There is a kind of sorrow that visits only those who already possess everything else. King Dasharatha of Ayodhyā knew this sorrow well.

Ayodhyā, in those days, was among the most prosperous cities in the world. Its streets were broad and swept clean, its granaries were full of golden grain, and its people lived in peace and mutual respect. The river Sarayū flowed past its walls, carrying on its surface the reflection of temple-flags and the smoke of a thousand evening fires. King Dasharatha, of the ancient house of Ikshvāku, ruled this happy kingdom with the guidance of his ministers and his chief priest, the great sage Vasishṭha.

He had wealth, honour, and victories, for he had once fought alongside the gods themselves against the demons. He wanted for nothing.

And yet he was not content. He had no children.

Have you ever noticed how material abundance feels hollow without someone to share it with? We chase wealth and status all our lives, and only when we have won them do we discover that fulfilment lies elsewhere, in love, in continuity, in the people who will walk the road after us. So it was with Dasharatha. When the lamps were lit in the quiet chambers of the palace, and the day’s work was done, he would sit alone and feel the great house settle into silence around him. No child’s laughter came down the corridors.

He was growing old, and the line of Ikshvāku, a line stretching back past memory into the first light of the world, narrowed in him to a single thread, and the thread had no end.

One evening, after the court had emptied, Dasharatha confided his grief to Vasishṭha. "A man plants a tree not for his own shade," he said, "but for those who come after him. I have planted a kingdom, Gurudeva, and there is no one to inherit it. I have made offerings. I have prayed until prayer felt like a stone rolling back down the hill. What have I left undone?"

The sage was quiet for a while. Then he said, "There is a sacrifice, the Putrakameshti Yajña, performed for the single purpose of obtaining children. It is difficult and exact; a single misplaced syllable can undo the whole labour. But performed by the right hands, it can move even the closed gates of heaven. And for this, you will need a particular priest. His name is Rishyashringa." The name carried within it a strange and touching story, which the sage now told.

Far to the east, in the kingdom of Anga, ruled a king named Lomapāda. Upon his land a terrible drought had fallen, not for one season but for years, until the rivers shrank to threads of mud, the wells gave only dust, and the crops withered where they stood. After the cattle died, the children began to die. The cause, the brahmins said, was an old offence the king had once given to a holy man; for the deeds of a king are never private things, but ripple outward into the land itself. And the cure, they said, lay with a single person.

In the deep forest lived a young ascetic named Rishyashringa, son of the sage Vibhāṇḍaka, and this youth was so pure, so utterly untouched by the world, that the very heavens would open where he walked. Bring him into the kingdom, and the rains would follow him like a shadow.

But there was a difficulty, and a strange one. Rishyashringa had never in his life seen a woman, nor, in fact, any human being except his own stern father, who had raised him in complete isolation. The boy did not know that cities existed, or that anywhere existed beyond his grove. He would not leave willingly, because he did not know there was anywhere to go.

And his father would never permit it, for the old sage guarded his son’s innocence the way a miser guards gold, knowing that in that innocence lay a power that could shake the thrones of the gods.

So Lomapāda’s counsellors devised a plan, one that troubled some of them even as they made it. They sent into the forest a company of the kingdom’s most beautiful courtesans, women of grace and gentle art, to draw the young hermit out. Not by force, but by the sheer wonder of what he had never seen.

We should pause here, for the tale does not hide the hardness of this. That innocence should be lured from its safe grove for the saving of a kingdom, that a pure soul should be used, however gently, as an instrument, is not a clean thing. The story sets the saving of thousands against the disturbing of one, and it does not pretend the sum is tidy. So it often is with the choices of kings. Dharma in the wide world is rarely a clear white road.

More often it is a path through half-light, where every step costs something, and the wise man is only the one who counts the cost honestly and does not look away from what he has spent.

The women found the young sage gathering firewood near his grove. Seeing them, creatures of soft cloth and soft voices, unlike his grave bearded father, unlike anything he knew, he took them, in his innocence, for a new kind of hermit. He greeted them with grave courtesy and offered them fruit and clear water. They were gentle with him in return, for even a courtesan’s heart is not stone, and there was something disarming in the boy’s untouched wonder. They spoke sweetly, gave him sweet things to eat, and departed before his father returned.

But they left behind in his heart a longing without a name.

By such patient art, over careful visits, the boy was at last drawn from the forest. And where his foot fell upon the soil of Anga, the sky, brass-hard for years, went soft and grey and heavy, and the first fat drops of rain struck the dying dust. The people ran out into the downpour and wept. The land drank, and greened, and lived.

And Lomapāda, in gratitude and in wisdom, gave the young sage his own daughter Shāntā in marriage, and kept him near, honouring him, so that innocence, once drawn out of its grove, was not abandoned in the harsh world but cherished in it.

This was the man Vasishṭha named. Messengers went out, honours were arranged, and in time Rishyashringa came to Ayodhyā, no longer the wild boy of the forest, but a sage seasoned by the world, and yet with something still of that first clarity in his eyes. Dasharatha received him as a drowning man receives a reaching hand. And the great sacrifice began.

They built the sacrificial ground on the northern bank of the Sarayū, where the earth was clean and the river ran wide. For days beforehand the site was measured, marked, and purified, the altar raised course by course exactly as the ancient texts prescribed, not a hand’s breadth out of true, for in a rite of such power, a flaw in the geometry was a flaw in the prayer. Brahmins came from every quarter, grave men with the smoke of a lifetime’s fires ground into their skin.

On the appointed morning, the fire was kindled.

It began small, a single flame coaxed from the churning-sticks, nursed with dry grass and thin threads of ghee, so modest that a breath might have killed it. Then it grew. The priests fed it with clarified butter poured in long bright ribbons, and with the chanting, that deep, unbroken river of sound, older than the city itself, carried down through countless generations of faithful memory. The fire answered the chanting as though it understood.

It rose tall and golden on the altar, and its heat pressed against the faces of the watching assembly, and the smoke went up straight and white into the windless air, joining earth to sky. Dasharatha sat through the long hours with his hands folded and his eyes fixed on the flame, and he did not once look away.

And then, in the fullness of the rite, the fire changed.

It gathered and brightened past the brightness of any ordinary fire, so that men flinched and shaded their eyes. Out of the heart of that radiance a figure rose, a being of the flame’s own substance, tall and shining, the colour of molten gold, holding in its hands a golden vessel. Within the vessel was a food the colour of the moon: the divine pāyasam (a sweet dish of milk and rice), wrought in the fire itself as heaven’s answer to the king’s long grief.

"Take this," the being said, in a voice like the crackling of the fire, "and give it to your queens, for in this is the ending of your sorrow." It set the vessel in the king’s trembling hands, stepped back into the flame, and was gone.

Dasharatha carried the vessel into the inner palace with more care than he had ever given any treasure of his treasury. He divided the nectar among his three queens, and he divided it with love. To Kausalyā, the senior queen and the first of his heart, he gave half. To Sumitrā he gave a portion, and to Kaikeyī a portion. Then, moved by some tender scruple, some wish that no share should feel slighted, he gave the small remainder to Sumitrā again, so that she received twice.

It was a trivial thing, done in a moment. But the deeds of that day were seeds, and seeds keep faith with the future in ways the sower cannot see. Remember that second portion given to Sumitrā; the story will return to it in its own time.

The queens received the nectar, and in the months that followed, the long silence of the palace began at last to break.

Spring came. And on the bright ninth day of the fair month of Chaitra, under the gentle star of Punarvasu, when the sun stood high and the whole earth seemed to lean toward the warmth, Kausalyā gave birth to a son.

The child was Rāma.

Here the story asks us to hold two truths at once, and it does not try to soften the paradox. Those who first sang this tale believed, and those who tell it still believe, that here was no ordinary prince come by the ordinary door, but the Imperishable Himself, Lord Nārāyaṇa, the ground and root of all being, who upholds the worlds while He seems to sleep upon them.

He had chosen to fold His boundlessness into the small warm body of a human infant: to be rocked, to be nursed, to cry in the night for His mother, and to be human as fully and truly as any child that ever breathed. He who is beyond the reach of prayer had come to answer a prayer. He whom the gods petition had come to be a petitioner’s son. Eternity had consented to be an infant, and would consent, in the years to come, to grief, to exile, to loss, and to every wound that flesh is heir to.

And He would bear them not as a god wearing the mask of a man, but as a man, truly, so that no sorrow which finds us should ever again be a sorrow He has not known. This is the mystery the story places at its very threshold. It does not explain it, for it cannot be explained. It can only be told.

On that spring morning, such thoughts were far away, and there was only joy. The city heard, and went out of its mind with gladness. Drums began and did not stop. Flowers rained from the rooftops. The poor were fed at the palace gates, and all of Ayodhyā became for a day and a night one single beating heart of celebration.

And the old king who had sat so many evenings alone in the failing lamplight, who would have traded his whole shining kingdom for exactly this, held his son, felt the small unbearable weight of him against his shoulder, and had no words, and needed none.

Nor did the joy come singly. Kaikeyī soon bore a son, Bharata. And Sumitrā, who had drunk twice of the nectar, was delivered of twins, Lakshmaṇa and Shatrughna. Four princes now, where so lately there had been the ache of none. The corridors that had been so cruelly silent came alive with running feet and laughter.

And the four grew together, and this must be marked, for the whole story afterward turns upon it, not as rivals but as one soul housed in four bodies. Bharata could not be at ease if Rāma was troubled. Shatrughna followed Bharata like his shadow. And Lakshmaṇa, from his earliest days, fixed his whole heart upon Rāma: the child would not eat if Rāma did not eat, and cried in his cradle until he was laid down beside his brother, whereupon he was at peace. These were not four princes who happened to be brothers.

They were four faces of a single love. And anyone who wishes to understand what comes later, the sacrifice of Bharata, the long forest-faithfulness of Lakshmaṇa, must understand first that these bonds were forged here, in the cradle, in the ordinary years when nothing was yet asked of them but to grow up together in the light.

Vasishṭha took the princes in hand as they came of age and gave them the whole inheritance of their line: the Vedas and their branches, law and statecraft, the handling of horses and elephants and the bow. And beneath every particular lesson he taught them the one that was the marrow of them all, that strength is not given to a man for his own glory. "Power is only a tool," he told them, "and a tool has no virtue in itself. The sword is honoured or dishonoured by the hand that holds it. You will be strong.

See that you are also just, for strength without righteousness is the demon’s portion." The boys listened. Rāma listened most deeply of all, Rāma, who would one day be asked to pay for his righteousness a price that would have broken any man who had not learned, here in these first quiet years, that duty is the one possession a man cannot be robbed of, because it is the one thing he can only give away.

So the princes grew, the kingdom prospered, and King Dasharatha, his grief healed, his line secure, his evenings full at last of the noise he had ached for, believed, as men in the sunlight of their happiness always believe, that the hard part of his life was behind him.

He was wrong. But that belongs to a later chapter, and the light of these years was real while it lasted. It is right to let it shine a while before the shadows come.