Dasharatha

The inner apartments of Ayodhya, on the night before Rama is to be crowned. Sarga 10 of the Ayodhya Kanda follows the old king in from his council, through rooms loud with parrots and peacocks, to a bedchamber where his favorite queen is missing from her bed. The doorkeeper tells him that the queen has gone into the chamber of anger, and the sinless, aged king finds his young wife on the floor in a way no queen should lie, “like a creeper torn from the tree that held it, like a fallen goddess, like a kinnari thrust out of heaven.” He bends to her, strokes her with his hands, and begins to ask. “Who has scolded you? Who has insulted you? What has brought you to roll in the dust like this, to my great agony?” And before he has heard a word of what she wants, he begins to give. “What man who deserves no death should be killed, and what man under sentence should be set free? What pauper should be made rich, what rich man reduced to nothing?” “As far as the sun’s disc shines, the earth is mine.” Then the sentence Kaikeyi has been lying there waiting for: “I swear by every good deed I have ever done that I will do what pleases you.” Dasharatha’s whole story runs in that order. The word first, the request after it, and the price last of all.

Before that night he is a king without a son. In sargas 8 to 18 of the Bala Kanda he performs the horse-sacrifice, Rishyashringa performs the rite for sons on his behalf, and out of the fire comes a being bright as flame carrying a basin of refined gold under a silver lid, full of the payasa the gods have made, milk boiled with rice and sugar. The king is “as happy to have the payasa the gods had made as a pauper is when he stumbles on riches.” He gives half of it to Kausalya, half of the remaining half to Sumitra, half of what is left to Kaikeyi, and then, after a moment’s reflection, the last of it to Sumitra once more. Four sons are born, and the father takes the same delight in all four “as Brahma, the progenitor of creation, delights in Indra, Varuna, Yama, and Kubera, the gods who preside over the four quarters.” In sargas 18 to 22 Vishvamitra comes to the gate and asks for Rama to guard his sacrifice, and the king promises first and then, at the name of Ravana, breaks: “I cannot stand against that one in battle.” The sage’s anger rises, “You promised first. You promised to grant whatever I asked, and now you want to take the promise back,” and Vasishtha’s words do what fear and love could not. “Then Dasharatha bent and breathed in the scent of the crown of his son’s head, the oldest gesture of love a father in that country has, and with a heart full of gladness he placed Rama in Vishvamitra’s hands.” At Mithila, in sarga 69, Janaka names the wedding day and Dasharatha answers, “A gift rests with the giver; I have heard that said long ago. Whatever you ask us to do, we will do.” On the road home Parashurama challenges Rama to single combat, and the old king pleads with his palms pressed together, and “Parashurama let the old king’s words pass as if he had not heard them; the king stood there with his palms pressed together, and to the ascetic he might as well not have been there at all.” At every gate this father is afraid first, and then he gives.

An Old King’s Decision

In sargas 1 to 4 of the Ayodhya Kanda the king is “old now past the measure of ordinary men,” with age heavy on his limbs and strange signs troubling the sky, and he summons the kings and ministers of his realm. Bharata and Shatrughna are away at their grandfather’s court, and the king settles it with himself that they will hear the good news afterward. He tells the assembly that he would put his eldest son in charge of the welfare of the people and take his rest, and when the whole hall answers with one voice he asks a question only this king would ask: he is ruling the earth by dharma himself, so why are they so eager to see Rama as regent? They count Rama’s virtues for him, and the last of his grief washes away. That night he sends for Rama a second time, presses him hard against his chest, and says, “Rama, I am old.” He has been seeing evil dreams; the planets stand against his birth star; tomorrow, without fail, the regency.

Sargas 10 to 12 hold the night in the chamber of anger with which this portrait opened. Only after the oath is out of his mouth does Kaikeyi name the two old boons from the war of the gods and the demons, the throne for Bharata and fourteen years of forest for Rama, and the king at first cannot tell whether “this is a daydream” or some sickness of the mind. He sits on the bare floor and sighs “like a great venomous serpent pinned to one spot by spells.” Then the anger comes. “You cruel woman of wicked conduct, bent on destroying this whole house. What wrong have Rama or I ever done you?” “Without knowing what I did, I brought a sharp-fanged serpent into my house and thought I was bringing a princess.” And then the sentence that holds the whole of his fatherhood: “The world may go on without the sun, and the crops may live without water, and life cannot stay in my body without Rama.” He touches her feet with his head. “Whatever can be had on this sea-girdled earth I will give you; only do not drive me toward the thing that ends in my death.” Kaikeyi answers with Shaibya, who cut the flesh from his own body for a dove, and Alarka, who gave away his eyes, and asks how a king who grants a boon today and repents it tomorrow will ever speak of his righteousness again. He cries “Rama!” and falls like a felled tree. All night, with his eyes fixed on the sky, he says the thing no king has ever said: “Night adorned with stars, I do not want you to turn into dawn.” And when the bards come at daybreak with the music that marks the king’s rising, Dasharatha stops it.

One Word

In sarga 14 the king is tossing on the floor and Kaikeyi is driving him “the way a rider drives a fine horse with a sharp whip,” and all he can say is, “I am bound by the cord of dharma. My judgment is gone.” Sumantra comes in singing the praises due at a king’s waking, and the king looks up at him with eyes red from weeping: “With your praises at this hour you are cutting me open, Sumantra, and you are doing it again and again.” Rama is brought, and in sarga 18 this father manages nothing more than his son’s name; grief takes his speech, he weeps aloud, and it is Kaikeyi who says the rest. Rama answers “So be it,” and the king, “already seared with grief for his son, hid himself under the bedclothes for sheer shame and misery.” At the parting, in sarga 34, he sends for all his wives, three hundred and fifty of them, because he wants to look at Rama with every one of them around him, and he lets his son go in words that do not try to hold him: “Go then, my darling, with an untroubled mind, on a road that is blessed and safe and free of every fear. You are truthful by nature and your mind is given to dharma, and your decision to live in the forest cannot be turned.” He asks only for one more night, and does not get it. When Kaikeyi brings bark cloth for Sita as well and the whole court cries shame on a king who watches such a wrong and does nothing, one prohibition at last comes out of him, “Kaikeyi, Sita does not deserve to go in a robe of kusha bark,” and one order to the treasurer, that the princess be given costly garments and jewels counted out for every year of her exile. When Kaikeyi reaches for the story of Sagar and his cast-off son Asamanja to say that Rama should go without a single attendant, “The king said one word, ‘Shame!’” and everyone in the room was ashamed for him. He follows the chariot into the street and watches its dust until there is no dust left to watch.

An Old Arrow, the Sixth Night

In sargas 57 to 64 Sumantra comes back to an Ayodhya emptied of all gladness and gives the king Rama’s message, and the king answers “in a voice so low and broken it could barely hold together.” Kaikeyi drove him to it, he says, and he took no counsel with the elders who are wise in such things; “Out of blind infatuation, to please a woman, I did this thing all at once.” Kausalya’s reproach lands on him, that only his son Bharata and his wife Kaikeyi have any joy of it, and the king cries “Rama” and faints. When he comes back he joins his hands to her: “I beg your kindness, Kausalya. Here are my hands joined to you.” And on the sixth night, past midnight, he tells her the sin that has risen in him of its own accord. He was still the prince regent then, proud of a bow that could strike an unseen mark by its sound, and in the rains, his senses off their leash, he drove down to the Sarayu to hunt by night. “In the dark I heard, from a spot I could not see, the sound of a pitcher filling with river water, and it sounded for all the world like the gurgle of a trumpeting elephant.” He loosed an arrow at the sound, and out of the dark came a human voice: “How could a weapon come down on an ascetic like me, a man who can have no enemy?” The dying boy grieved less for his own life than for his blind, old parents, waiting on the bank for the water he was bringing them. Dasharatha filled the pitcher, carried it to the hermitage, and laid his guilt bare with his own mouth, and the old man, who had the power to hurl a fearful curse, could not bring it down on a confessed sin. He asked instead to be led to his son’s body, and over it he laid the curse that could not be lifted: “As this agony of a dead son is mine at this moment, so shall you, king, meet your own end in grief for your son.” Then the two of them climbed onto the pyre. “Its bitter fruit has caught up with me at last,” the king tells Kausalya, “the way sickness follows food eaten with relish when something poisonous was mixed in.”

The end is only a few sentences long. “If Rama would lay his hand on me just once, or take back the wealth and the regency I meant for him, I think I might yet live.” “What wise man on earth would cast off a son, even a bad one? And what son, sent into exile by his father, would not lay the blame on his father?” “My mind is failing, Kausalya, and my heart is sinking.” The people who will see Rama’s face again in the fifteenth year seem to him gods, not mortals. “Ah, my strong-armed son of Raghu, you who eased all my toil, are you truly gone from my sight? Ah Kausalya, I cannot see.” And when half the night had passed, “there and then, in the dark, with two of his three queens beside him and the third nowhere in the room, he gave up his life.” At dawn the bards come to sing him awake and cannot. The body is laid in a vat of oil, messengers ride for Kekaya, and when Bharata comes home he gives him to the fire, asking the dead man what he had been thinking of, to send Rama and Lakshmana to the forest while his younger son was away. At Chitrakuta, at the door of the leaf hut, the four brothers offer this same father water with one cry.

The poem brings him back once. In sarga 119 of the Yuddha Kanda, after Sita has walked out of the fire, Shiva says to Rama, “Kakutstha, here on the crown of an aerial chariot is your father, King Dasharatha, who in the world of men was your elder.” The father sets the son on his lap as though he were a boy again, folds him in his arms, and says, “Rama, to me, cut off from you forever, neither heaven nor the honor of the gods is dear; this I tell you truly.” The word is kept now, he says; go home and take the throne. And the first thing Rama asks of him is for the woman who ruined them both: “Be gracious to Kaikeyi and to Bharata.” The father counsels Lakshmana and tells Sita that her husband is her highest deity, mounts his chariot, and goes back to the realm of Indra.

His Path

The Sacrifice for Sons, and the Birth of Rama · A basin of refined gold out of the fire, one payasa divided four times among three queens, and a pauper stumbling on riches.

Vishvamitra, the Slaying of Tataka, and the Guarded Sacrifice · A sage at the gate, a father breaking his word at the name of Ravana, and the scent of a son’s head breathed in before the giving.

The Ordeal of Fire, the Return, and the Coronation · An aerial chariot above Lanka, a grown son set on a father’s lap, and grace asked for Kaikeyi before anything else.

The Man Who Paid for a Word

Read whole, Valmiki’s Dasharatha lives under promises stacked one upon another, and each new one pulls at the one beneath it. The word given to Vishvamitra wavers at the name of Ravana and is kept at Vasishtha’s bidding; the proclamation made before the whole city collides with the oath sworn in the chamber of anger; and the oath in the chamber of anger, given before its request was heard, defeats all the others. The first sarga of the Bala Kanda asks for a man who keeps a vow once made, and the poem shows that virtue in Rama and collects its first price from Rama’s father. There is fear in this king, which speaks first before every sage, and there is love, which beats the fear every time and hands the son over; in the chamber of anger that same love, unhearing, handed him to Kaikeyi as well. He blames himself before he blames anyone else: he joins his hands to Kausalya under her reproach, and on the sixth night he remembers his old arrow unprompted, the explanation the poem itself sets down for his end. At the parting one word came out of him, and the word was his son’s name; he died calling it. When he came back on the aerial chariot above Lanka, the first grace Rama asked of him was for Kaikeyi, and the father gave that too. A man who gave all his life before he had heard the request is left by the poem giving once more.