PRINCE IN EXILE

by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

  Where was that deva now? The sky had turned dark and pressed close upon his face, threatening to suffocate him.

  He sat up slowly. Sita was instantly alert and whispered, asking for the third time that night if he would eat something before they left. He had already told her twice earlier that he would take only water until they were in Dandaka-van and he had fulfilled Kaikeyi’s orders to the letter. He made no answer this time, and crept quietly to the tree trunk against which Lakshman sat, watching. Lakshman turned his head before Rama could touch his shoulder and rose to his feet.

  They went down the far side of the knoll, walking through the grove until they found the open spot where Sumantra waited with the chariot and a lantern set to the smallest wick to prevent the light from being seen by any of the commonfolk. He raised the lantern, twisting the knob that widened the wick slightly, producing a brighter spill. Rama saw that the pradhan-mantri had already harnessed the horses in preparation. His lined face gazed at Rama silently, with the faintest trace of hope.

  ‘We must leave now, Sumantra,’ Rama said very softly, putting to rest any further arguments. ‘We will lead the horses as far as we can, then ride. If it is all the same to you, I will take the reins.’

  Sumantra offered no argument. Since sunset, the prime minister had settled into a kind of resigned acceptance that was in some ways worse than his earlier resistance. They walked for about a mile, far enough to be out of easy hearing of the crowd by the river. When they were all mounted and ready to ride, Rama looked at Sumantra by the light of the lantern.

  ‘Old friend, perhaps you should stay here and reassure the people when they awaken. Your place is with them, not in the jungle where we go now.’

  Sumantra looked ahead at the dark, narrow mud-path winding between closely pressing rows of dense forest.

  ‘I don’t know where my place is any more,’ he said in a broken voice. ‘Or even if I still have a place in this world. If I do, then that place is with you, Rama. I will ride with you as far as you will let me.’

  He turned to look at Rama, his eyes rheumy and jaundiced in the yellow glow of the lantern. ‘If you command me, I will dismount at once.’

  ‘No,’ Rama said. ‘It is our privilege that you ride with us tonight on this last journey out of Ayodhya.’

  He raised the reins, making sure that the team understood his intent and were ready to obey. They had settled well since the brush with death and the river. They raised their heads, snorting softly, awaiting his command. He tugged the reins, then flicked them forward, giving the animals their head.

  ‘To Dandaka-van,’ Rama said, to nobody in particular. The lead horse, Kamabha, whinnied softly, as if acknowledging their destination. This time, he seemed to say, I will not let you down, my lord. Rama flicked the reins again, setting the chariot into motion. Ride then, my beauty, ride with all your strength and speed.

  The chariot moved forward, rolling quietly into the dark night.

  ***

  The very humility in the queen’s face, the abject self-effacement of her deglamorised appearance and apparel, all brought home the change in her with painful impact. Could this truly be Kaikeyi? Proud, beautiful, arrogant Kaikeyi? She of a thousand charms and a million desires? No. This is Bharat’s mother Kaikeyi, Dasaratha’s wife, my sister-queen, Kausalya thought.

  ‘Please,’ Kaikeyi repeated. ‘I only wish to say—’

  Dasa sat up in his bed, sweat flying off his face. ‘Get this woman out of my sight at once. Guards!’ he roared. ‘Take her away.’

  Kaikeyi ran to the bed, breaking away from the guards before they could take proper hold of her. ‘Please! I beg you. All I ask is your forgiveness. I knew not what I was doing.’

  ‘You did it,’ he said savagely. ‘That was enough.’

  She stared up at him as the guards descended on her, grabbing her by either arm, remorselessly. Every soul in the palace knew the details of what had transpired in the kosaghar last night and early this morning; Kaikeyi’s own guards had made certain of that, turning coat upon their own sigil in sheer disgust at the monstrous injustice wrought by their clan-queen. Kausalya would have stopped them, or at least ordered them to handle her less roughly, but Kaikeyi worsened her own lot by straining at their muscled arms, crying out to the bed-ridden maharaja with all the manic hysteria of a crazed woman.

  ‘I RELEASE YOU,’ she cried. ‘I RELEASE YOU OF YOUR BOONS!’

  ‘Ah,’ he said, as if a dart had found its way to his heart. ‘But that release is no longer yours to give, my beautiful one.’

  ‘I love you, Dasa,’ she sobbed then, as the guards began to drag her away by the arms, pulling her across the floor to the entrance. ‘I love you, my prince!’

  For a moment his face crumpled, and Kausalya bent forward, thinking to catch him before he fell. But he only swayed from side to side momentarily, like a drunken man staggering at the threshold of his home, and grinned a lopsided maniacal grin. ‘If only that was all it took to make the world turn,’ he said. Then, to the guards, ‘Hold her a moment. I wish to speak words.’

  They stopped at once, but retained their iron grip on Kaikeyi’s arms. She flopped miserably like a rag doll in their grasp. ‘Scribe,’ Kaikeyi heard one of the guards say, turning his head to address one of his fellows outside the door. Almost at once, a court scribe appeared, his pigtail bobbing upon his shaven pate, the wooden scribe-board, scroll and other instruments clutched eagerly. He sat down on the floor at the foot of the bed, virtually out of sight of the king and Kausalya, and was ready to take dictation in a moment. Scribes were ever present to transcribe the maharaja’s words, but tonight, Kausalya guessed, they were that much more alert. Tonight they would transcribe a maharaja’s last words.

  Dasaratha bent his head for a moment, as if in some deep contemplation. When he raised his brow again, Kausalya saw, he almost appeared normal. Her Dasaratha. The maharaja who looked exactly this way when he pronounced judgement in his court on any one of the innumerable cases brought before him in his decades of service as a king of the realm.

  ‘Rani Kaikeyi, I divorce myself of our nuptial bond. From this moment on, you are no longer my lawfully wedded wife, nor I your lawfully wedded husband. You are free to return to your father’s roof, or to any other place you desire. You have no place here henceforth. In my reckoning, you have broken the vrath you made at our nuptials, so many years ago. You have brought great pain and humiliation and shame to me and to my family, as well as to my people. I do not wish to see you ever again, whether I live a thousand years more, or merely another instant. Go from my sight, and do not return. This is my aadesh, my royal decree, both as your husband and as your king. For a king is always king first, husband second.’

  And he turned his face away from her, towards Kausalya.

  Kaikeyi screamed. Her long wail of grief rang through the corridors of Suryavansha Palace and passed out into the late-evening air. The scream lingered in Kausalya’s memory a long time after the Second Queen was dragged away by the guards, long after the scribe had picked up his implements and returned to the antechamber, long after Dasaratha reached out to her and gripped her arm with shaking hands. Dragging himself across the bed, he laid his head upon her lap. A sigh rose from him, as a traveller might make when laying down his head at the end of a long, arduous journey.

  ‘How could I grant her forgiveness?’ he said in a voice that shook as much as his hands. ‘I who am so urgently in need of being forgiven myself.’

  She laid a hand upon his brow, feeling the intense heat of his fever, her heart aching to imagine the blazing agony of his condition. From time to time he writhed and twisted, racked by pains within his vitals. ‘You have no need of forgiveness,’ she said, breathing warm and soft upon his unshaven cheek. ‘You have redeemed yourself already a thousandfold.’

  She felt him struggle to turn, even this simple action suddenly become too great an effort. His heart broke at last just now, she

  thought. It broke when he sent
Kaikeyi away and accepted his

  own responsibility for all that has happened.

  ‘Redeemed myself?’ he stuttered. ‘H-h-how?’

  She wiped the sweat from his brow, pushing his straggly grey hair back off his face. ‘The day you fathered Rama.’

  He grew suddenly still, and remained that way for a long time. When he spoke again, it was in the whispering tone of a much older man. ‘He will return, will he not? To succeed me? To accept his place as king of Ayodhya?’

  ‘I vow to you that he will,’ she said. She, who never made a vow idly. ‘Rama will return and be crowned king of Ayodhya.’

  His breathing seemed to grow easier then, less ragged. His shaking gradually ceased. His writhing stopped. He lay peacefully with his head upon her lap a long time, perhaps hours or minutes, she could not tell. Outside, the sky grew dark and night fell upon Ayodhya, upon them all.

  Sometime towards morning, he took one final gasping breath, said a single word, and died. The last word he spoke was the name of his eldest son.

  ***

  It came first to Rama as a sense of breathlessness, a choking sensation that threatened to drop him there and then, at the helm of the chariot. His hand shook, and he almost jerked it to the right, almost twisted the tightly held reins the wrong way. Had he done so, he would have turned the heads of the team, driving them off the edge of the ghat they were travelling over now. Chariot and all, they would have plunged into the valley below. And would that be so bad? Better a sudden quick death than fourteen years of slow dying.

  Then a wave of black despair passed over him like a monsoon cloud over a mountain, engulfing him, smothering him with darkness. He cried out despite himself, and the reins jerked again. This time, the horses did turn, and the chariot veered towards the edge, closer to the crumbling rim of the dirt-path cut into the side of the ghat, shifting towards the yawning gulf. Lakshman came to his rescue. He snatched the reins from Rama’s hands, shouting to Sumantra and Sita to grab hold of Rama. It was well they did so, for the next moment Rama all but collapsed in the well of the chariot. His legs lost all strength and he slumped down. Sita gripped his arms with fierce strength, squatting down to put herself between him and the open rear of the swaying, bumping chariot. Looking at the road fleeing behind them, Rama saw the course of the chariot change slowly, steadily, as Lakshman drove the team with the practised expertise of one who had loved and communicated well with animals all his life. The chariot regained its position in the centre of the mountainous path, out of harm’s way.

  Sita peered into Rama’s eyes as if she would see right through into his mind. ‘What is it?’ she asked urgently. ‘What’s happening, my love?’

  He shook his head, opening his mouth, but found himself unable to speak. He tried to gesture with his hands, but it came out only as a fish-like flopping. She frowned, struggling to understand him.

  ‘What is it? Say something, Rama.’

  He tried to open his mouth again, but no words emerged. It was as if the cloud had enfolded him in its cold wet embrace, and darkness filled his brain and vision, a roaring emptiness that threatened to wash him away, dash him on the rocks of oblivion and shatter him to fragments. He moaned, clutching his head with both hands, and Sita cried out with alarm. She shouted something to Lakshman that Rama did not catch above the noise of the chariot and the roaring in his own head. But several moments later the chariot began to slow, until finally it rolled to a gentle halt.

  Rama tried to stand. Sita and Sumantra helped him, clutching his arms. His vision swam as he rose to his feet, his knees buckling. He managed to get to the edge of the chariot with their aid, then off it and on to the ground.

  They had stopped almost at the top of the ghat, near the peak of the dusty mountain marg. Looking back, he could see the dust-cloud of their trail still hanging in the air. Far beyond and below was the vast undulating northern forest they had ridden through the night before. Somewhere beyond that were the rivulets Vedasruti, Gomati and Syandika which they had crossed without any difficulty in the early hours. They were well beyond the borders of Kosala now. They had mounted these ghats an hour ago. Beyond them lay the Ganga valley, and the glade of Sringaverapura, also known as Hunter’s Glade. In less than an hour, at the rigorous pace they had maintained all night, they would breast that peak and ride down the far side, into the sacred arms of the Ganga.

  He realised that it was almost daybreak; that was how he was able to see so far.

  He also realised that his limbs had stopped trembling and had lost their gelid weakness. The cloud still loomed over his mind and soul, but the physical debilitation was gone. He could stand and speak again.

  They were all staring at him, concerned, frightened. Sumantra had his hands clasped, like a man standing before a deity with only one desperate prayer.

  Rama braced himself, taking a deep, long breath before saying what he knew to be truth with every fibre of his being. Only Lakshman’s face suggested that he had some inkling of what his brother would say next, as if he too had been brushed by the belly of the same cloud.

  ‘Our father is dead,’ Rama said. ‘Maharaja Suryavansha Manu Ikshwaku Raghuvamsha Aja-putra Dasaratha is no more. I felt his aatma pass me only moments ago, on its way to Swarga-lok.’

  FIFTEEN

  It began to rain as they entered the Ganga valley. A rain-cloud appeared out of the clear dawn sky, showering them with a gentle drizzle. Lakshman was driving the chariot still, to give Rama a respite. Sumantra, standing beside Rama and Sita, raised his arms to the sky, sending up a prayer, and voiced his thanks to the gods, his tears mingling freely with the first droplets. It was considered very auspicious for rain to fall on a death day; the Brahmins took it as an omen that the person’s aatma would certainly ascend to the heavenly realms for the duration of its stay between worlds, until the time of its next rebirth. The devas crying, it was called in Mithila. Sita licked a droplet that fell on her upper lip and felt that no water ever drunk had tasted so pure and sweet.

  The devas cried all the way to the Ganga. When they came within sight of that great concourse of water, even Rama’s heart seemed to lift. Sita sensed it immediately, as if he felt not happier but less burdened. Another auspicious omen, for to visit the Ganga after a loved one’s death was to wash oneself clean of the detritus of past lives and gain forgiveness for any wrongs or hurts one might have committed against the departed one.

  The lush green valley glowed with fertility in the dawn light. Everything was wet and fragrant with the natural aromas of earth and fresh rain, flowers and growth. The air above the river was filled with life: swans, cranes, cakravaka birds and a wide assortment of songbirds flew in great wheeling circles, celebrating the new day’s dawning. As they rode the path alongside the river itself, Sita saw the shapes and colours of a multitude of life forms in the waters: porpoises performed their sinuous gleaming dance, crocodiles crawled lazily on their long bellies on the mudbanks, kachuas floated upstream sleepily. And fish of course, a teeming myriad of species and sizes, turning the river into a glittering silver necklace.

  They halted the chariot at a small Gangetic settlement that was more resting area than village. It was an outpost of the Nisada clans, Sumantra informed Sita, who hadn’t visited these parts before. There were rishis and sadhus and Brahmins of all orders sitting and walking about the few timber-plank structures beside a wide, slow section of the holy river. Most of them were engaged in their morning acamana, either about to enter the water or emerging dripping from it. A stone stairway, ten yards wide, descended gradually into a small pool that drained off the main river, lagooned by a border of time-eroded stone blocks. Even so, the fauna of the river could easily have slipped over the stone border, like the water that constantly slopped over its top, to find easy pickings in this pool. But it was a well-known fact that even predators did not prey on those who came to the Ganga with genuinely repentant hearts. Gazing across the river at the line of crocodiles lying on its banks, Sita wondered
at the truth of that belief. In any case, she would have a chance to verify it herself in a few moments.

  They took their acamana together, the Brahmins around them unperturbed by the presence of a woman in their midst: all were as one here in the arms of the blessed Ganga. Brother and sister suckled together at the breasts of the divine mother. Sita was astonished at the purity and clarity of the water. How could there be no mud or silt? And with so many bodies wading in and out at all times, what kept the water so clean? She had a feeling that if she were to ask those questions, she would not receive a satisfactory rational answer from even the wisest Brahmin present.

  As she immersed herself in the waters, a great calm came over her. Beneath the surface of the river, sitting cross-legged on the stone steps, Rama to her left, Lakshman beyond him, she felt a sense of elevation that transcended the mere physical sensation of the water pushing her upwards. Speaking the sacred Gayatri maha-mantra in her mind, she felt tranquillity pervade her pores, releasing the unbearable stresses that had ravaged her mind this past night and day. At the very end of the last recitation, when her held breath ought to have been exhausted, she felt as though she could go on thus indefinitely, breathing the very molecules of the river to gain the nourishment she needed. It was only when both Rama and Lakshman got to their feet, breaking the surface, that she thought she ought to rise as well. But just before she did so, something caught her eye, at the extreme periphery of her vision. She turned, seeking out the distraction, but saw nothing. She continued turning, executing a full circle. All she saw was the rough-cut stone of the steps, worn smooth in the centre by the treading of countless feet over the centuries. She saw the dhoti-clad legs of Rama, standing on an upper step, saying the end of his prayer as he offered water to Surya-deva. She completed the turn and finished the circle. That was when she saw it, or thought she did, just for a flash of a second.