The Sacrifice and the Four Sons

While Dasharatha’s fire burned in Ayodhya, the gods were holding a council of their own, and the two stories meet over a bowl.

Their problem had a name: Ravana. The rakshasa king of Lanka, ten-headed, vast in power, had won from Brahma a boon that no god, no demon, no divine being could kill him — and, in the contempt that always rides such power, he had not troubled to ask protection against mere men, or against animals, beneath his notice. He had used the boon exactly as such boons are always used in these epics: to make himself unbearable, to drive the gods from their stations and the sages from their rites and to bend the three worlds to his appetite. The gods went to Vishnu, because the loophole in Ravana’s invulnerability was the size of a human being, and asked him to take birth as a man and do what gods were forbidden to.

So the Ramayana sets its deepest engine quietly and early, and then mostly hides it for six books: the man whose completeness Valmiki went looking for is the divine consenting to be limited — to be born, to not always know, to grieve a wife, to be bound by a father’s word — because only something that accepts the limits of a man can reach what a man’s enemy left unguarded. The epic will rarely remind you of this. It wants Rama mostly as Rama. But it is here, under everything, the reason a story about obedience is also a story about God choosing to obey.

In Ayodhya the rite reached its fruit. From the sacrificial fire, the texts say, a radiant being rose bearing a vessel of payasam, divine sweetened milk, and gave it to Dasharatha to share among his queens. He divided it with an old man’s careful love: a large portion to Kausalya, a large portion to Kaikeyi, and from each of theirs a share to Sumitra, so that she received twice and from both. The arithmetic is not idle. It is why Sumitra’s two sons will each be bound, for life, to one of the other queens’ — the proportions of a dessert deciding the architecture of loyalty for the whole epic.

In due season four sons were born. Kausalya bore Rama. Kaikeyi bore Bharata. Sumitra, who had drunk twice, bore the twins Lakshmana and Shatrughna. They were, the epic says plainly, one being in four bodies — but the bond fell along the lines the payasam had drawn: Lakshmana attached himself to Rama from infancy as if there were no daylight between them, and Shatrughna to Bharata the same way, two pairs welded before any of them could choose. Ayodhya went joyful in a way the poem describes at length, because it is the last unshadowed joy the city will have and Valmiki wants it remembered at full brightness.

The four grew — strong, learned, beautiful, Rama first among them in every quality without ever once making the others feel it, which the epic notes as the rarest of his gifts. The city loved him with the uncomplicated love people give to someone in whom they cannot find a flaw. It was, for a while, simply a happy story about a good king’s good sons.

Then a sage walked into Ayodhya’s court — fierce, formidable, not to be refused — and asked the king for one of those boys. And Dasharatha, who would later be destroyed by a promise he could not break, here makes his first reluctant gift of a son, and learns, in small, the lesson the whole epic will teach in full: that for a man of his house, a word given is a thing already gone.