When the rains had gone and the nights grew mild again, an old woman in the hill country lit a small oil lamp and set it between herself and the child at her knee. The lamp smelled faintly of sesame. The stone floor had already given up the day’s warmth. Outside, the leaves of the jackfruit tree rubbed against one another in the cool dark with a dry, secret sound. The child held a little garland of green leaves not yet wilted, and the old woman touched it once with the back of her finger.
“Listen,” she said. “This is the tale of the brother who lost a kingdom at the mouth of a cave.”
—
In the days when Rama walked the forests in sorrow, searching for Sita of the bright eyes, there was another exile hidden among the hills.
His name was Sugriva.
Once he had walked openly beneath banners, with courtyards behind him and servants at his word. But all that had been taken away. Now he lived upon Mount Rishyamuka where the rock rose steep and the wind carried every sound far off. There he slept lightly. There he woke at the crack of a twig. There he turned his head whenever a bird broke from a branch too suddenly.
Fear had made a second skin for him.
He did not wear jewels now. He wore dust. His hands were hard from gripping stone. His throat was often dry. Sometimes, in the early morning, he would climb to a shelf of rock and stare across the trees toward the lands that had once obeyed him. Then his mouth would tighten, and he would come down again before the sun was high, as though even longing might betray his hiding place.
With him stayed Hanuman, wise in speech and deep in strength, whose mind was clear when other minds darkened. Hanuman kept watch. Hanuman brought fruit and water. Hanuman listened when Sugriva’s thoughts ran in circles like trapped animals.
For Sugriva had not lost his kingdom in battle before a thousand witnesses. He had lost it in a narrower place.
There had been a demon once, a roaring thing called Mayavi, who came to challenge his brother Valin in the night. Valin went out to meet him, fierce with wrath, and Sugriva followed close behind. The demon fled. The brothers pursued. At last the creature vanished into the mouth of a cave from which there came a wet wind and a smell like old blood on stone.
Valin turned then and said, “Wait here. If I do not return, you will know what has happened.”
So Sugriva waited.
He waited one day and part of another. He heard sounds from within: blows, cries, a noise like rock split by iron. Then there came a rush of blood from the darkness. It ran over the cave floor and touched his feet.
Sugriva stood in dread.
He called his brother’s name. Nothing answered him but the cave’s own deep mouth.
At last, shaking with grief and terror, he heaved a great stone across the entrance. Then he went back alone.
But Valin had not died.
He had slain the demon and lived. When at last he forced his way out and returned to the city, he found the gates guarded, the court in confusion, and his younger brother in the place where a king’s kin stood nearest to the throne. Then all tenderness burned out of him. He did not ask what fear had done at the cave mouth. He did not ask what blood had said. He saw only treachery.
He drove Sugriva out.
He took the kingdom.
He took Ruma too, the wife whom Sugriva loved, and placed her under his own roof.
So the younger brother fled to Rishyamuka, for there alone Valin could not follow. A curse hung over that mountain. If Valin set foot there, death would take him. Therefore the stronger brother raged below like a storm checked by an unseen wall, and the weaker brother hid above, breathing in short measures, living from day to day under mercy he had not made.
This was the shame that lived with Sugriva.
Not that he had lost.
That he could not prove what had happened in the dark.
—
One day, while the light thinned under the trees and the hills held the afternoon in cool green folds, Hanuman, keeping watch from a high place, saw two men moving through the forest below.
They were dressed as ascetics, in bark cloth and with their hair bound, yet no ascetics ever walked like that. They bore bows in their hands. Their shoulders were broad. Their steps were light upon the leaves, but every leaf seemed to know them.
One was dark as rain-rich earth under evening light. The other was fairer, sharp as a drawn blade.
Hanuman looked long.
Then he went to Sugriva and said, “Two strangers come through the lower wood. They are armed. They are noble. They search for something, or someone.”
At once Sugriva’s heart knocked hard within him.
“He has found me,” he said.
Hanuman did not answer at once. He laid one palm against the rough rock between them.
“Valin does not walk in bark cloth,” he said. “Let me go and hear their speech.”
So Hanuman went down the mountain in a gentler shape, with courteous words ready in his mouth. He came before Rama and Lakshmana and greeted them with such wisdom and grace that Lakshmana’s hand eased on the bowstring at once. Then he asked who they were, and Rama answered plainly.
He spoke of exile.
He spoke of the stolen Sita.
He spoke her name as a thirsty man speaks of water.
Hanuman listened, and when he understood what sorrow stood before him, he bowed his head. Then he led them upward to the hidden place where Sugriva waited.
The path was steep. Loose stones shifted beneath their feet. Thorn branches brushed their arms. The smell of crushed leaf rose fresh and bitter where they passed. Above them the hill opened in shelves of rock and hanging roots, and there, under a wide tree whose leaves made a trembling roof of green light, Sugriva stood.
He stood ready to flee.
It is one thing to hope for help. It is another to see it coming toward you with a bow in its hand.
Rama stopped a little way off. Lakshmana stood beside him, still and watchful. Hanuman waited between them like a bridge that had not yet been crossed.
Sugriva’s fingers had already gone white around the branch he held.
Then Rama set down his bow.
It was a small thing, and a great one.
The leaves moved overhead. A bird called once and was silent.
Sugriva looked at the bow on the ground. Then at Rama’s empty hands. Then at Rama’s face, still as a man who has walked a long way with sorrow and not put it down.
Something in him loosened, though not much.
He stepped forward.
They sat together beneath the tree on the mountain ledge, while wind passed through the leaves and the late light turned them thin as green glass. Hanuman brought water in a leaf-cup. Sugriva took it, but his hand shook and spilled some over his wrist. The water ran cool down to his palm.
Then Rama told his sorrow first. He spoke of the deer that had drawn him away, of the false cry in the forest, of the empty place where Sita should have been, of the ornaments dropped from the sky by desperate hands. He took out those ornaments then, wrapped in cloth, and placed them before Sugriva.
At the sight of them Hanuman bowed his head, for he had seen such jewels fall through the branches days before, flashing once through the leaves like tears of the sun.
Sugriva touched one anklet lightly.
“We found them,” he said. “They fell near these hills.”
Rama closed his eyes a moment, and that was answer enough.
Then, because grief answers grief more quickly than splendour, Sugriva began to speak in his turn. He did not shape himself into innocence. He told of the cave, the blood, the stone. He told of Valin’s return, of his wrath, of the blow that fell before any hearing could be given. He told of Ruma taken from him. He told of the mountain and the years of listening for danger.
As he spoke, his voice roughened. Once he stopped altogether and pressed his knuckles against his mouth.
“I do not know,” he said at last, looking not at Rama but at the bark between his own bare feet. “I do not know whether I failed my brother in that darkness, or whether fear only looked like betrayal when the light returned. I know only what happened after. He hunted me. He took all that was mine. I have lived like a broken thing among rocks.”
The leaves trembled overhead.
Lakshmana’s eyes had grown bright with anger. But Rama did not speak at once. He looked at Sugriva as one exile looks at another and knows the taste of dust.
At length Sugriva lifted his head. Shame and need were both plain upon his face.
Then he said, “Help me, and I will be yours.”
The words fell softly. They did not ring like a king’s command. They came low, like a hand laid down empty.
After he spoke them, he bent his head and waited. A drop of water still clung to the heel of his palm. One leaf came loose above and landed against his shoulder.
Rama reached out and took Sugriva by the wrist.
His grasp was warm and steady. Sugriva flinched first from old habit, then stilled. Rama did not let go.
“I will help you,” Rama said. “And you shall help me. Let the grief between us be made into friendship, and let that friendship hold.”
The wind moved once through the branches.
Hanuman drew a long breath, as though some cord pulled tight in the world had slackened a little.
Lakshmana rose and broke a fresh bough heavy with green leaves. Hanuman wove them swiftly, his fingers sure. There on the mountain, beneath the listening branches, he made a garland and laid it in Sugriva’s hands.
The leaves were cool. Their scent was sharp and living.
Sugriva looked down at them as if he had forgotten that anything still green in the world might belong in his keeping.
Then Rama took the garland and placed it over Sugriva’s neck.
No drum sounded. No conch was blown. Only the leaves moved overhead, and the vow stood among them.
The sun had lowered by then. The ledge had grown cold underfoot. Sugriva stood and led them to the place from which Valin’s lands could be seen through a break in the trees. He pointed with a hand that trembled less than before. He spoke his brother’s name, and this time the name was not only fear. Grief was in it. Wrath was in it. Something steadier had entered it too.
Night came slowly.
When the first star showed pale above the black line of the hill, they made ready to descend from the ledge to a sheltered place below. Sugriva went first, then checked himself, as though unused to leading anyone toward danger. The path was steeper in the dusk than in the light. Once his foot slipped on a scatter of dry leaves and his palm struck stone. He drew in breath through his teeth, then straightened and went on without a word.
Behind him came Rama.
Behind Rama, Lakshmana and Hanuman.
By the time the moon had risen, silver and thin, four shadows moved together where before there had been one hiding among rocks.
—
The old woman fell silent.
The lamp between them had burned lower, and now the room smelled more strongly of warm oil and a little ash. Outside, the night leaves still whispered in the dark. The child had not moved. The leaf garland lay across both small hands.
After a while the child touched one of the leaves and said, very softly, “Did he stop being afraid?”
The old woman smiled, but only a little.
“No,” she said. “He found a hand to take.”
Then she lifted the lamp, and the light ran gold across the green leaves, still cool.