The Poet and the First Verse

Before there was a poem there was a question, and the question was asked by a man who made poems for a living and had never found a subject worthy of one.

The sage Valmiki lived by the river Tamasa, and one day the wandering Narada came to his hermitage, and Valmiki asked him the thing he had been turning over for years: was there, anywhere in the world, a man who was truly complete — virtuous and capable, true to his word, firm in trouble, learned, beautiful, master of himself, who when angered even the gods feared and who yet would not do a cruel thing? Not a perfect man in theory. A real one, living, that the question could point at. Narada said there was, and named him: Rama, of the house of Ikshvaku, prince of Ayodhya. And he told the whole of his story, swiftly, the way one names a road before walking it.

That should have been enough, and it was not, because a story heard is not yet a story made, and Valmiki did not yet know he was the one to make it. What made him the one was not the telling. It was an accident by the river.

Walking by the Tamasa afterward, Valmiki saw a pair of krauncha birds, cranes, courting in the shallows — and as he watched, a hunter’s arrow took the male, and the bird fell, and its mate circled the body crying a cry that went into the sage like a blade. And out of him, unbidden, not composed, came speech he had not planned: a curse on the hunter, that you shall not rest for the long years, and it came out shaped — balanced, metrical, two lines that scanned, grief that had fallen, of its own weight, into rhythm.

He stood there astonished at his own mouth. He had not made the verse; the grief had made it, and the metre was the shape sorrow took when it was true. He called it śloka, and the tradition keeps the pun the epic intends: śoka, grief, became śloka, verse. The first poem in the world was not praise. It was a lament for a killed thing, spoken by a witness who could not keep silent.

Then Brahma himself came to the hermitage and told Valmiki what he had half understood already: that the metre had not been an accident, that he was to take the form grief had just taught him and pour into it the whole of the story Narada had named — Rama’s life, entire, nothing left out, the bright and the unbearable both — and that what he did not know of it would come to him as clearly as a thing seen in the palm of the hand. So the poem was commissioned by grief and confirmed by a god, and its maker was a man who had wept for a bird.

Hold the frame, because the Ramayana never lets it go. This is a story about a man who is dharma in a body, and it is being told by a poet whose gift was born the moment he could not bear an innocent’s pain. The two facts are the same fact. The epic will spend seven books asking what it costs to be wholly good in a world that is not, and it has answered, before chapter one is over, why the asking had to be done in verse: because the true answer is not an argument. It is a lament that scans. And, the epic adds quietly, Valmiki will appear again, near the end, with two boys who sing this very poem back to the king it is about — so the story is already, on its first page, curved toward its own close. Now it begins where Narada began: with a city, and a king who has everything but a son.