Chapter 4 — The Arrival of Vishvamitra

Dasharatha's thoughts had turned toward the marriages of his sons. He had begun to consider them with his teachers and relatives: the four young men were no longer children, and the future he had once feared he would never see seemed to be opening before him.

It was then that Vishvamitra came to the palace.

The sage stood at the gate and asked that the king be told that Gadhi's son, of the line of Kushika, had arrived. The gatekeepers hurried inward. The name carried its own force. Dasharatha rose at once, with Vashishta beside him, and went out to receive the visitor.

Vishvamitra was an ascetic whose discipline seemed to gather brightness around him: matted hair, a body marked by austerity, and a presence before which the court's ornament and ceremony seemed suddenly small. Such discipline was called tapas: restraint, study, and ritual held to over years, sometimes with severe bodily hardship. It was not private devotion only. Tapas gathered power, and a man who had gathered enough of it could compel an answer from the gods themselves. It could also win him worlds of his own: realms beyond the earth, held as surely as a king holds land and entered when he left his body. Dasharatha greeted him with the formal offerings due an honored guest: water, a seat, and an arghya, the ritual welcome by which a host acknowledged the dignity of one who had come under his protection. Vishvamitra in turn asked after the king's welfare, and after Vashishta and the other sages present.

When all had taken their places, Dasharatha spoke with the relief of one who had received a blessing he had not expected. The sage's arrival, he said, was like rain in a dry land, like the recovery of something thought lost. Whatever Vishvamitra desired, the king would do.

The promise came easily. Its cost had not yet been named.

Vishvamitra told him that he was undertaking a sacred observance. For ten nights its rites had to be kept without interruption, but two rakshasas—a class of powerful, shape-shifting beings who could threaten both people and sacred rites—Maricha and Subahu, came when the offering was under way and defiled it. They acted at the urging of Ravana, lord of the rakshasas.

“Give me Rama,” Vishvamitra said.

He did not ask for an army. He asked for the eldest prince, still young enough to wear the side-locks of youth. Rama, the sage said, would be safe in his care. He would defeat the attackers, and through the work before him gain a renown that would endure.

For a moment Dasharatha could not answer. The air of the court changed; the gift he had offered in welcome had returned to him as a demand. Then the king who had welcomed the sage with such joy seemed to lose the ground beneath him.

“Rama has not yet reached sixteen years,” he said. “How can he face rakshasas in battle?”

The words came from a father who saw, not the prince praised throughout Ayodhya, but the son for whom he had waited so long. Rama did not yet know the strength and weakness of such enemies, Dasharatha said. He was not prepared for their hidden ways of fighting. The king offered what he could command instead: his full army, its four divisions, and himself at its head. Let Vishvamitra take any force he needed; only let him not take Rama.

He asked who these enemies were, what power they possessed, and how they might be met. Vishvamitra answered that Ravana, born in the line of Pulastya, held a boon from Brahma and oppressed the three worlds with many rakshasas around him. Yet Ravana was not himself coming to the sacrifice. Maricha and Subahu were the ones who would come, sent to spoil it.

Dasharatha heard the name Ravana and became more afraid, not less. If gods and other great beings found that enemy difficult to face, what could a boy do? Again he pleaded for Rama. Even for a moment, he said, he could not endure being separated from him.

Vishvamitra's face changed. The king had promised before he knew the request; now he sought to take the promise back. The sage answered that this did not befit the line of Raghu, Dasharatha's own royal house and its inherited claim to keep its word. If Dasharatha chose to break his word, Vishvamitra would return by the way he had come, and the king might remain content with his household and kin.

The force of his anger shook the gathering. The earth seemed to tremble; the gods and the sages were disturbed. Dasharatha stood silent, caught between the promise he had made and the terror of giving up his son.

Then Vashishta spoke.

He did not tell Dasharatha that his grief was small. He told him that a king who had given his word in a matter of dharma—the order of duty and right conduct by which power was judged—could not abandon it when the cost became clear. More than that, he said, Vishvamitra was no helpless petitioner. The sage knew weapons of extraordinary power and the means to call them back. He had the strength to protect Rama. Dasharatha should not let fear make a lie of his promise.

The counsel did not remove the king's pain. It gave him a path through it.

Dasharatha sent for Rama, and Lakshmana came with him. The brothers entered the court where their father's joy had become a hard stillness. Before either could know the full request, the faces around them made clear that this was no ordinary summons. They received the blessings of their parents and of Vashishta. Auspicious words were spoken over them. Dasharatha drew Rama close, breathed in the scent of his son's head, and entrusted him to Vishvamitra.

The princes were dressed for the road. They carried bows, quivers, and swords; their hands were protected for the pull of a bowstring. They were young, but they did not leave unarmed.

As they went out, a gentle wind moved through the city. Flowers seemed to fall from above, and sounds of celebration were heard in the air. The signs did not change the fact of parting. They accompanied it.

Vishvamitra walked first. Rama followed him. Lakshmana followed Rama.

Together they passed beyond the palace and began the journey that would carry the two brothers out of Ayodhya and into a world their father could no longer keep at a distance.