Ayodhya and the Childless King

The poem begins, as Narada had, with a city, and it describes Ayodhya the way you describe something you already know is going to be lost.

Ayodhya was the seat of the Ikshvakus, the solar line, a city laid out broad and bright on the Sarayu, gated and gardened and walled, its storehouses full and its people, the epic insists, content — not merely prosperous but well: truthful, unhungry for what was not theirs, devoted to their elders and their work, a population that matched the order it lived under. The Ramayana spends real attention on this because it is building the standard everything later will be measured against. When the epic wants to say how far a thing has fallen, it will mean: fallen from this.

Its king was Dasharatha — “ten-chariots,” a name won in war, an old warrior now, just, generous, beloved, who had ruled long and well and was missing exactly one thing. He had three queens — Kausalya, the eldest and first; Sumitra; and Kaikeyi, the youngest, the one he loved with the particular helpless fondness an old man keeps for his last and brightest attachment — and by none of them a son. A line of kings that traced itself to the sun had, in him, no one to carry it forward, and a kingship without an heir is, in this story’s logic, a lamp running out of oil however bright it burns now.

It is worth pausing on what the epic is doing. It opens its hero’s story with an absence — the way the Mahabharata opened with a vow and a river. Both great epics begin not with a birth but with a lack that a family will spend everything trying to fill, and the filling will be the beginning of the ruin. Here the lack is gentle and the king is good and there is no villain in sight, and the epic wants you to feel that: that what is coming does not need a villain, only a good man’s longing and a word he will later give without seeing where it leads.

Dasharatha resolved on the remedy his world prescribed — a great rite to ask the gods for sons, the ashvamedha, and within it the more pointed putrakameshti, the sacrifice performed precisely for the desire of a child. He gathered the priests and the materials and the holy men, and the chief of the rite was to be the sage Rishyashringa, whose own story the epic tells in passing: a boy raised in such pure seclusion that he had never seen a woman, brought to a drought-stricken kingdom because his mere presence was held to bring the rains — a small folded-in tale whose point is that purity, in this poem, is a force with real weight in the world, not a decoration.

So the fires were laid and the rite begun, a good king asking heaven for the one thing his goodness had not given him. The Ramayana lets the moment be entirely hopeful, with no shadow on it yet, because it knows what we do not feel until much later: that this answered prayer is the hinge of everything, that the sons it brings will be the joy of the city and then the breaking of the king, and that the same love which is now praying for children will, in a few books, be the love that cannot refuse a wife two boons. The fire was lit. Out of it, the story now turns to say, something came.