Chapter 18 — The Death of a King

In Ayodhya, Dasharatha could not find rest after Rama had gone. The palace had become a place of lamps burning through the night, attendants moving quietly, and rooms made vast by the absence of the son for whom the king called.

His grief carried him back to an act from his youth. Before he was king, he said, he had gone out at night to hunt. He had been proud of the skill of shooting by sound. At the riverbank he heard water filling a vessel and took it for an elephant drinking. He released an arrow into the dark. When he reached the water, he found not an animal but a young ascetic who had come to draw water for his blind parents.

The youth was dying. He did not name his parents' pain as an abstraction: they were waiting for water and for the son who guided and sustained them. He asked Dasharatha to carry the vessel to them and to tell them what had happened. Dasharatha did so. The old couple heard that their son was dead and, overwhelmed by grief, cursed the young prince: he too would die through separation from a son.

Dasharatha did not tell this memory as a way to excuse the present. It came to him now because his own loss had made the old parents' grief newly terrible. He had lived long enough to become the father he had once bereaved.

He called out for Rama. He called for Sita and Lakshmana. Kausalya heard the names that the empty rooms could not answer. In the night, with her near him and the palace in mourning, the king died.

The court did not immediately choose a successor. Vashishta, the royal priest and elder counsellor, directed that Dasharatha's body be kept in oil while the absent sons were summoned. The care was both ritual and practical: a king was dead, and the kingdom could not pretend that the break had not occurred.

Messengers were sent at once to Kekaya, where Bharata and Shatrughna were staying with their mother's family. They were told to urge Bharata's return, but not to reveal Dasharatha's death or Rama's exile on the road. The news would meet him in Ayodhya.