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Ayodhya Kand · Episode 4
Unable to bear the loss of Rama, Dasharatha dies calling his son's name — undone by a curse he earned in his youth.
*Unable to bear the loss of Rama, Dasharatha dies calling his son's name --- undone by a curse he earned in his youth.*
After Rama left, the palace did not fall silent. That would have been merciful. Instead, it filled with a sound worse than silence --- the low, continuous keening of a man whose heart was being pulled apart by its own beating.
Dasharatha did not leave his bed. He did not eat. He did not wash or dress or receive ministers. The great king of Ayodhya, who had once commanded armies across the four quarters of the earth, who had ridden his chariot into the ranks of demons and emerged victorious, now lay on his side in a darkened room, his face turned to the wall, his lips moving ceaselessly in a single word.
*Rama. Rama. Rama.*
The attendants came and went in whispers. They brought water he did not drink, food he did not touch, news he did not hear. Kausalya sat beside him through the first night, and the second, and the third, holding his hand and watching the life drain from him like water from a cracked vessel.
"You did this to yourself," she said, and there was no cruelty in her voice, only the exhaustion of a woman who had spent her entire marriage sharing her husband with two other wives and had now lost the only prize that made the arrangement bearable. "You gave her those boons. You let that woman ---"
"Do not," Dasharatha whispered, and even that small sentence seemed to cost him an enormous effort. "Do not blame Kaikeyi."
"Then whom shall I blame? The gods? Fate? Myself?"
"Blame me. It was always going to be me."
And then, in the guttering lamplight of that miserable room, Dasharatha told Kausalya a story she had never heard --- a story he had buried so deep that even he had almost forgotten it, until Rama's departure dragged it back to the surface like a body from a river.
He had been young then. A prince, not yet a king, famous across the land for a singular skill: he could shoot an arrow by sound alone. In the dark, blindfolded, guided only by the rustle of a leaf or the splash of water, Dasharatha could put a shaft through a target that he could not see. The skill was called *shabdabhedi*, and it was his pride and his vanity.
One night, hunting alone near the banks of the Sarayu, he heard a sound --- the gurgling of water being drawn from a river. In the darkness, it sounded exactly like an elephant drinking. Dasharatha nocked an arrow, drew, and released.
The scream that followed was not an elephant's.
He crashed through the undergrowth and found a boy --- a young man, really, barely past adolescence --- lying on the riverbank with an arrow through his chest. Beside him, a water pot lay overturned, its contents mixing with the blood that was spreading across the sand. The boy's name was Shravan Kumar.
Shravan was a son of extraordinary devotion. His parents were old and blind, and he had dedicated his life to their care. He carried them everywhere on a simple wooden frame balanced across his shoulders, taking them on pilgrimage, fetching their water, feeding them with his own hands. He had come to the river that night to fill a pot for his thirsty parents, and the sound of the water entering the vessel had been his death sentence.
"My parents," Shravan gasped, looking up at Dasharatha with eyes that held no anger, only a desperate, fading concern. "They are waiting in the grove. They are blind. They cannot --- they will not ---" He coughed blood. "Please. Take them water. Tell them ---"
He died without finishing the sentence.
Dasharatha, shaking, carried the water pot to the grove where Shravan's parents waited. They heard his footsteps and smiled, thinking their son had returned.
"You took so long, child," the old mother said, reaching out her hands. "We were worried."
When Dasharatha confessed what he had done, the sound that the blind couple made was unlike anything he had ever heard --- a sound beyond weeping, beyond rage, a sound that seemed to come from the very marrow of the earth. The old father held his dead son's body and rocked it, and the old mother clawed at the ground as though trying to dig a grave with her bare hands.
Then the father spoke.
"You have killed our son," he said, and his blind eyes were turned toward Dasharatha with an accuracy that needed no sight. "Our only son. The boy who was our eyes, our legs, our reason to breathe. And so I curse you, prince of Ayodhya: you too will die of grief for your son. You will lie in a dark room and call his name, and he will not come, and the calling will kill you."
The old couple died that night, one after the other, unable to survive without Shravan. Dasharatha buried all three of them by the river and rode home in silence, and he never spoke of that night again.
Until now.
Kausalya listened with her hand over her mouth. The story explained everything --- not just Rama's exile, but the helplessness with which Dasharatha had submitted to it. He had known, somewhere in the locked chambers of his memory, that this was coming. The blind father's curse was not a random cruelty; it was the completion of a circle that Dasharatha himself had drawn, decades ago, with a single thoughtless arrow.
"You should have told me," Kausalya said.
"What would it have changed?"
Nothing. That was the honest answer. The arrow had been loosed. The boy had died. The curse had been spoken. And now, as surely as water flows downhill, the consequence arrived.
In the days that followed, Dasharatha deteriorated with a speed that frightened even the palace physicians. His body, once powerful enough to bend the great war bow of the Ikshvaku dynasty, wasted as though consumed from within. He stopped speaking in full sentences. Then he stopped speaking in words. Then he stopped speaking altogether, except for that one name, repeated endlessly, a prayer and a wound and a final breath all at once.
*Rama.*
Kausalya held him through the last night. The room was dark --- she had ordered the lamps extinguished, because the light seemed to cause him pain. In the darkness, she could almost pretend they were young again, before the co-wives, before the court politics, before the boons and the exile and the curse. Just a man and a woman, holding each other against the dark.
Near dawn, Dasharatha's breathing changed. It became shallow, irregular, each breath a small battle that his body was losing. Kausalya leaned close.
"Rama is well," she whispered into his ear. "He is in the forest with Sita and Lakshmana. He is strong. He is at peace. He holds no anger against you."
She did not know if any of this was true. She said it anyway.
Dasharatha's lips moved one final time. The word was barely audible, more a shape of the mouth than a sound.
*Rama.*
And then the great king of Ayodhya, sixty thousand years descended from the Sun, was gone.
The palace erupted into mourning. The conch shells blew the death note, a long, low drone that carried across the sleeping city and woke every soul in Ayodhya to the knowledge that their king had died. Women tore their hair. Ministers wept openly. The sacred fires in the royal temples were banked and covered.
Kausalya sat beside the body for a long time, holding the hand that was already growing cold. She did not weep. She had spent all her tears in the days before, and what remained was something harder than grief --- a clarity, bitter and absolute, about the cost of broken promises and buried sins.
Somewhere in the Dandaka forest, far beyond the reach of conch shells and palace fires, Rama slept on a bed of leaves and dreamed of his father. In the dream, Dasharatha was young and laughing, lifting his son onto the back of a white horse, and the sun was warm, and the city was golden, and nothing had yet gone wrong.
He woke with tears on his face and did not know why.
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