Chapter 90 — The Child at the Gate

After Shatrughna had gone back to Madhura, Rama continued to rule the kingdom in contentment. His rule was ordered by dharma: the wide and demanding order of duty and right conduct by which a ruler's power was meant to be used and judged.

The years that followed were quiet ones for Ayodhya. Far from it, in Valmiki's hermitage beyond the Ganga, Sita's sons were growing up among the students there, learning what that place had to teach. No word of them reached the city.

Then grief came to the gate of the palace.

An aged brahmin stood there carrying the body of his son. The child was five years old. He had not reached youth. His father held him close and wept aloud before the king's door.

“My son, my son,” he cried.

The words returned again and again, not as ceremony but as a father trying to call back someone who could not answer. He asked what wrong he had done in some former life, that he should see his only child dead. He said the boy's mother and he could remember neither speaking a falsehood nor committing violence. Yet their child had died before the time the father believed a child should die.

“You were only five,” he said. “You had not reached youth. Now your mother and I will die of grief for you.”

His lament did not remain private. A king's rule was not only a matter of administration. The order kept in his realm reached into the working of things, and people lived out their proper span or failed to according to whether that order held. The father turned his grief into an accusation.

“I have never seen or heard of such a thing,” he said, “as death before its time in Rama's realm. There must be some great fault in the king. Restore this child who has gone under the power of death.”

He spoke of the years in which the people had lived securely under Rama's protection. Then he said that the kingdom had become without a guardian. A ruler's defects, he declared, brought ruin upon people when they were not governed by the proper order. If wrong actions went unchecked in city or country, and protection failed, untimely death could come.

The charge was terrible because it was made from love and helplessness. The father did not know why his son had died. He named no crime, no enemy, no sickness. He put the child's body before the palace and laid the burden of meaning on the king.

“You have been our protector,” he cried. “Do not become the destroyer of children.”

Still he did not go away. He held his son and lamented at the gate, speaking against Rama again and again in the extremity of his sorrow.

Inside the palace, Rama heard every word. A death that had not been explained now stood at the threshold of his rule, and the grief outside could not be left outside.