शून्याश्रमे रामस्य सीताविरहव्यथा

At the end of the previous sarga Rāma had reproached Lakṣmaṇa, and here that reproach unfolds into a string of questions. Seeing Lakṣmaṇa come without Vaidehī, downcast and empty, the righteous son of Daśaratha questioned him; "empty" says two things, that he came without Sītā and that his mind was blank. "Where is she, Lakṣmaṇa, the Vaidehī who followed me from Ayodhyā when I set out for the Daṇḍaka forest, and whom you have left behind to come here? Where is my slender-waisted companion in sorrow, who shared the lot of a man thrown out of his kingdom, wretched and wandering the Daṇḍaka woods? Where is Sītā, like a daughter of the gods, the companion of my very life, without whom I cannot bear to live even for a moment? Without Janaka's daughter, with her sheen of burnished gold, I would not want lordship over the immortals and over the earth itself." With each verse the cry "where is she?" returns, and the poet shows his distraction by it; the questions look for no answer, they are grief pouring out. They also trace three layers of his love, moving from the outward to the inward: she who followed him, she who shared his sorrow, she who shared his very life. And the epithet "righteous" shows that even in grief he did not let go of dharma.

Then Rāma's thoughts turned homeward. "Is Vaidehī alive, she who is dearer to me than life? Hero, will my exile not turn out to have been in vain?" The whole purpose of his life in the forest, he implies, lay in protecting her. "If I die for Sītā's sake, Saumitri, and you go back alone to Ayodhyā, will Kaikeyī be happy then, with her wish fulfilled? And will poor Kausalyā, an ascetic now, her son dead, wait meekly upon Kaikeyī, who has her son, the kingdom and everything she wanted?" His grief reached out to the future of his own people. Kaikeyī's name is spoken here for the first time in this episode, a sign that the old pain at the root of his exile was still alive in him, and her satisfaction is set against Kausalyā's misery. So his sorrow grew from a private one into a sorrow for his whole family. Then he made a vow: "If Vaidehī lives, I will go back to the hermitage; but if that virtuous woman has met her end, I will give up my life, Lakṣmaṇa. If, when I reach the hermitage, Vaidehī does not speak to me, if Sītā does not stand before me smiling, I shall perish." Twice he said he would die, making it plain that his life was bound to hers.

"Tell me, Lakṣmaṇa, is Vaidehī alive or not? Was she devoured by rākṣasas, poor woman, while you were off your guard? She is delicate and young and has never known sorrow; parted from me she is surely grieving, sick at heart." He spoke his guess as though it were certain, yet he still imagined only her grief, not her abduction. Then he laid bare the rākṣasa's trick. "That crooked and utterly evil rākṣasa, crying 'Lakṣmaṇa!' aloud, surely frightened you as well. I think Vaidehī too heard that voice so like mine; in her terror she sent you, and you came quickly to see me." In this way Rāma lessened Lakṣmaṇa's fault, but he could not forgive its result: "Still, it was a grievous thing in every way to leave Sītā alone in the forest; you have given the cruel rākṣasas the opening they wanted to strike back." That opening was both a breach and an opportunity, and Rāma knew that revenge for Khara's death was what they were after. The reproach returns because in his mind Lakṣmaṇa's leaving was the root of the whole disaster, and here Rāma's sense of fairness can be seen struggling with his grief.

"The flesh-eating rākṣasas were stung by Khara's death, and those terrible creatures will have killed Sītā; there is no doubt of it," Rāma concluded. Then his words turned to lament: "Ah, destroyer of foes, I am sunk in calamity on every side. What am I to do now? I fear it was bound to come to this"; he felt the pull of a fate that could not be escaped. Thinking in this way of lovely Sītā, Rāghava hurried with Lakṣmaṇa to Janasthāna. Reproaching his stricken younger brother, sighing with hunger, weariness and thirst, his mouth dry and his spirits low, he reached their shelter and saw that it was empty. He plunged into his hermitage as into deep water, for emptiness too has its depths, and went from one to another of the places where they used to walk together. Standing in their dwelling-place and saying, "This is the very spot," his hair stood on end and he was shaken with grief. That memory of the places where they had delighted together is deeply moving: joy and sorrow met in a single moment, the happiness of remembering and the pain of the present, and on that picture the sarga ends. Until now all his lament had rested on guesses; from this moment on it will rest on what he sees.