To the Forest

The bark garments came. This was Kaikeyī’s doing too, one last cruelty pressed to its limit: she herself brought the rough valkala, the garments of woven bark that ascetics wear, and pressed them upon the three who were to go, so that they should leave not in the silks of royalty but in the coarse dress of hermits from the very first hour. Rāma took his without a word and put it on, and Lakshmaṇa his, and the two princes stood transformed, their royal ornaments laid aside, clad like forest-dwellers.

But when Kaikeyī moved to clothe Sītā too in bark, the old ministers and the elders of the court could not bear it, and there was an outcry. It was one thing, they said, to exile the prince by the letter of a rash oath; it was another to strip a princess, a daughter of a royal house who had done no wrong and against whom no boon had been claimed, of her very garments. Even the broken king roused himself enough to spare her that.

So Sītā went in her own clothes, at least, though she went; and the sight of the delicate princess preparing to walk into the wilderness wrung the whole court with grief.

And then the leaving itself, and here the story opens out from the private chamber to the whole vast public sorrow of a city losing the thing it loved most.

For Ayodhyā had learned what had happened, and Ayodhyā was in agony. The city that had blazed with lamps two nights before, certain of its happy morning, now understood that its prince, the man it had loved past all reason and longed to see crowned, was instead being driven into the forest by a stepmother’s spite and an old king’s rash word. And the people would not bear it in silence. They poured into the streets.

They gathered along the ceremonial way that the chariot must take, and they wept, and they cried out, and their grief was a living thing that filled the whole capital.

Sumantra, the faithful old charioteer and minister, brought the chariot, for the king had commanded at least that his son be conveyed with honour to the border of the kingdom before being set down to walk. The three climbed in, Rāma and Sītā and Lakshmaṇa, in their hermit dress, and Sumantra took up the reins, and the chariot began to move through the grieving city toward the gate.

And the people would not let it go. They ran alongside. They pressed against the wheels. They clung to the chariot, to its sides, to its very axles, trying by the sheer force of their love and their bodies to slow it, to stop it, to keep Rāma among them a little longer. Do not go, they cried. Do not leave us. If Rāma must live in the forest, then let the forest be here, let us all go with him, let Ayodhyā itself be emptied and follow him into the wild, for a city without Rāma is no city, only walls and dust.

They begged Sumantra to drive slowly, slowly, and he did, weeping himself, hardly able to see the road; and the great crowd moved with the chariot like a single grieving creature, and the sound of the city’s weeping rose up and filled the sky.

Think of what this crowd was. It was not the grief of courtiers who had lost a patron, nor of soldiers who had lost a commander. It was the grief of ordinary people, the merchants and the labourers and the poor, who had lost the one great man who had truly seen them, who remembered their names and their troubles, who had made them feel that the throne itself cared whether they lived or died. They were not mourning a prince in the abstract.

They were mourning a man each of them felt he had lost personally, and their grief was the truest measure of what kind of ruler Ayodhyā was losing, for the love of the common people, freely given, is a thing no king can command and no gold can buy, and Rāma had it wholly, and it was following him out the gate in a great weeping tide.

And behind them, in the palace, the old king could bear it no longer. Dasharatha, who had lain broken through the long night, dragged himself up when he understood that the chariot was actually leaving, that his son was actually going, and he came stumbling out into the open, out of the palace, into the street, an old king unkinged by grief, crying out his son’s name. Rāma, he called, Rāma, wait, stop, do not go, come back to me.

He staggered after the chariot, this ancient man who had ruled a golden age and fought beside the gods, running now on failing legs through the public street, weeping, calling his son’s name to a chariot that was already too far ahead, already lost in the crowd and the dust.

But Rāma had given Sumantra a quiet instruction, and it was a hard one, and it was mercy disguised as cruelty. Drive on, he had said. Do not stop. For if we stop, if I turn back, if I go to my father, the parting will only have to be made again, and each making of it will be a fresh wound, and my father’s grief and the city’s grief will only be prolonged and deepened. A clean cut heals better than a ragged one. Drive on, Sumantra, and let the leaving be swift, for their sakes as much as ours.

And so, though it tore his own heart, Rāma did not stop the chariot for his weeping father, but had it driven on, faster now, out through the great gate and away, leaving the old king behind in the road.

And there the tellers leave Dasharatha for the moment, and it is an image that has never left the memory of those who love this story: the great king collapsed in the public dust of his own capital, stretching out his arms toward the vanishing chariot, crying his son’s name to the empty road, abandoned by his own oath, undone by his own honour, watching the dearest thing in his life disappear into the distance and knowing, in his bones, that he would never see it again.

For that was the truth that broke him past all mending, and he was right in it: he would not live to see Rāma return. The parting in the road was the last he would ever have.

The chariot passed out of the city and into the countryside, and behind it, for a long way, the people still followed, unwilling to turn back, walking after their prince into the gathering evening because they could not bear to let him go.

And Rāma, looking back at them, at the great faithful weeping crowd that had left its homes to follow him, was moved as perhaps nothing else had moved him that whole terrible day, and he resolved to do for them the one kindness left to him: to slip away from them, so that they might be freed to return to their lives. But that belongs to the next stage of the road, to the river Tamasā and the first night of the exile, and to the quiet, sorrowful cunning by which Rāma at last released his people to go home.