कौसल्याया विलापः

In the previous sarga, at midnight, Daśaratha had told Kausalyā that his sight had followed Rāma and that he could no longer see her. Now that same Kausalyā, looking at the king sunk on his bed in grief, and herself stricken with sorrow for her son, spoke to the lord of the earth, and her first words were an attack on Kaikeyī. Now that she had poured her venom on Rāma, that tiger among men, Kaikeyī would roam as she pleased, like a snake that has shed its skin. She had driven Rāma out and got what she wanted; settled and content, she would go on frightening Kausalyā like a vicious snake living in the house. Her pain was twofold: she had lost her son, and she still had to live in one inner palace with the woman who had taken him. The image of venom poured out suggests that Kaikeyī's two boons were no sudden fit of anger but poison long stored up. Kaikeyī was not merely pleased but settled and firm of mind, and so Kausalyā's fear was well founded.

Better, she said, if Rāma had stayed in this very city begging his food from door to door; better even if the boon had been that her son should be Kaikeyī's slave. That boon she could have borne, for at least she would not have lost the sight of him. Kaikeyī, she said, had thrown Rāma down from his rightful place just as she liked, as a keeper of the sacred fires on the day of the parvan might fling to the demons the share that belongs to the gods. Her thoughts turned to the forest. Surely the mighty-armed hero, who walked like a lordly elephant and carried the bow, was entering the forest at that moment with his wife and with Lakṣmaṇa. The three of them had never known hardship, and it was the king himself who, at Kaikeyī's word, had given them up to life in the wilderness. What could become of them? Stripped of every fine thing, young, banished at the very season when their lives should have borne fruit, how would they live, poor things, on roots and berries? The comparison with the sacrifice is a telling one: the sacrificial portion is the gods' own, and no one has the right to give it away to another, and in the same way the office of heir had belonged to Rāma by right. "The season of their fruit" points to their age: they were sent away at the very time of life meant for happiness. Kausalyā's reasoning is plain: even slavery could be endured, but separation could not.

From here her lament turned to hope, and again and again she asked "When?" Would that kind hour ever come, the hour that would end her grief, when she would see Rāghava here again with his wife and his brother? When would glorious Ayodhyā, merely on hearing that the two heroes had arrived, be full of happy people and hung with garlands of tall banners? When would the city, seeing those two tigers among men return from the forest, swell with joy like the sea at the full moon? When would the mighty-armed hero enter Ayodhyā with Sītā set before him on the chariot, as a bull walks with his cow? And when would thousands of people shower parched grain on her two sons, tamers of their foes, as they came in along the royal road? Here grief moves from anger towards hope. The word "when" returns in five verses running, and with it the mother's mind escapes from the present into the future. The comparison with the sea at the full moon suggests the city filling with people as the ocean fills with water. That she pictures the whole city's festival, and not only her son's safety, shows the breadth of a mother's heart.

Her longing then became a picture. When would she see the two of them entering Ayodhyā in their bright earrings, their weapons and long swords held high, like two mountains with their peaks? When would the daughters of the brāhmaṇas, joyfully offering flowers and fruit, walk in procession round the city? When would he come back, that righteous man, mature in judgement and shining like an immortal in his youth, cherishing the people as a good rain cherishes the land? In the image of the rain, a prince nourishes his people by kindness, not by punishment, and like rain he falls on everyone alike. In these three verses what rises in the mother's mind is Rāma as king, not only Rāma as her son. The peaked mountains convey how tall and steady the armed brothers stood.

Then she searched for the cause of her suffering in an earlier life. Beyond doubt, she told the hero, she must once have been a cruel and grudging woman who cut away the udders of mothers while their calves were longing to drink; this, she believed, was the fruit of it. Then came the well-known image: as a lion tears a loving cow from her young calf by force, so Kaikeyī had torn her away from her son. Last came her final reason: she had only one son, a man endowed with every virtue and learned in all the sciences, and without him she had no heart to live. The words "only one son" decide everything: Kaikeyī had Bharata, Sumitrā had two sons, but Kausalyā had only one. Setting "loving" beside "robbed of her calf" is also deeply moving, for it is the loving mother who can least bear to lose her young. Blaming herself is itself a mark of grief: the sufferer looks for the cause within and so doubles the pain.

At the end she said that she had no strength left to live, since she could not see her dear son nor the mighty Lakṣmaṇa. As the sarga closes the metre changes, a longer verse taking the place of the anuṣṭubh, and in it one can hear the surge of her grief: this fire risen high in her, born of sorrow for her son and full of harm, was burning her today as the blessed sun in his surpassing splendour burns the earth with his rays in the hot season. With this sarga the poet deepens Daśaratha's grief with Kausalyā's; in the next, Sumitrā will comfort this same Kausalyā, and the healing of grief will begin. "Full of harm" shows that this grief was not mere pain but could take her life.