Curate, connect, and discover
For @marauderstar!
1. There are more than a few similarities between Rama’s first exile and his second.
Sita’s presence at his side is, of course, the most important: a constant of the universe save for those terrible months when it hadn’t been. Even now his stomach rebels at the remembrance; even now he reaches unconsciously for her hand to reassure himself she hasn’t somehow been stolen away once more.
The second is this: the aching, burning necessity to flee before he can be stopped. Before it had been Father’s men and the subjects of Ayodhya. Now it is no less than his own brothers. Already Lakshmana has protested loudly at not being allowed along, but Rama cannot do Urmila such injustice twice. And should he be persuaded to allow her presence, why, then there were Bharat and Shatrughan already cross at having been once left behind, along with their their wives—which didn’t even begin to account what their mothers might say. Before he knows it, Rama is sure, he would find himself housing his entire family in the woods and he doesn’t even want to begin to speculate how enormous a cottage that would require. Surely more than he and Lakshmana could assemble in a single afternoon.
No, Rama decides, and a faint smile flickers across his face (as has been the case every other time he happens to remember the swell of his wife’s stomach; a cottage for three will so quite well enough.
2. So long as he remembers he has wanted to be King.
Wanted, perhaps, is not the right word; expected is better, and expected by everyone else better still—and yet even that doesn’t explain his readiness to give it all up for a single rumor.
Ravana, he knows with bone-deep assurance, had both wanted and expected to be King, craved it to maintain his conception of the world. All too easily Rama could become much the same, and he recoils from it. Ravana was a monster for many reasons, least of which was his ancestry; and Rama would not become his shadow, not for a kingdom that turned on his wife for no fault of her own.
Not for a kingdom that wants him but does not need him, not the way it believes it does.
3. As it happens he doesn’t need to build any sort of cottage at all. Rama, who is guiltily remembering that Lakshmana was far more successful at the brothers’ architectural ambitions he last time around is not a little relieved when they stumble, almost literally, upon the hermitage of a worn wary man who calls himself Valmiki.
“I am afraid,” Rama feels the need to confess, almost as soon as Valmiki’s invitation to stay is spoken, “that we—we come bearing scandal.”
Valmiki’s mouth quirks into a sudden grin, one that was once (as Rama will discover) the terror of travelers passing alongside this road. “Rest assured,” he replies, with such good humor Rama cannot refuse him, “that I am no stranger to scandal myself.”
4. Their warm welcome, it soon turns out, is due as much to their host’s kindness as to the fact that he is composing an epic on Rama’s exploits. Rama flushes to hear of it, and all the more to listen to line after line of his supposed virtues, but Sita laughs outright–and takes impish delight in suggesting all the more wilder exaggerations when asked by Valmiki to confirm the facts as she knows them.
“This bow,” Valmiki says, “by which your husband won your hand–”
“Six feet long,” Sita replies promptly, sketching out unrealistic dimensions with her hands, “and twice a man’s weight to draw.”
Rama groans. “Half a man’s. If that much.”
“Did I say six feet?” Sita very nearly manages not to giggle. “Surely I meant eight.”
“Eight?”
“Perhaps, dear daughter,” says the poet, straight-faced; “you might be mistaken. Ten seems far more likely.”
By the time that afternoon’s composing is complete, the bow is twelve feet and Rama utterly mortified–but Sita is laughing, and Valmiki humming with satisfaction, and Rama can bear a bit of mortification for that.
5. There are two boys, not one; the first already boasting a head of dark hair that stands upright like spikes of kusha grass, the second golden and grasping for his father’s finger.
Rama reels with the wonder of it, and all the more with the knowledge that he has a lifetime with them, years to watch them grow into the men they are meant to be. This must be what his father had always wanted for him, Dasharatha who had performed a thousand prayers for just that life. He would give up a hundred kingdoms for that, a thousand; he is certain–no matter how much news might trickle out from Ayodhya that its citizens still mourn their lost son, that its King swears to perform the Aswamedha Yagna in twelve years’ time, should he be reunited with its brother by its end.
There are two boys, not one; and they are both perfect. Sita is well, and happy, and they have a home.
Rama wants nothing more.