Prologue — The First Poem

There was a rishi named Valmiki, and one morning, at his hermitage, he asked a question of a visitor.

The visitor was Narada, who went between the worlds and knew what was happening in all of them. Valmiki gave him the honors due a guest, and then put to him a question he had evidently been holding for some time.

Was there anyone alive, he asked, who was all the things a person is praised for at once? Not admirable in one way and ruinous in another, as most people are, but truthful and capable together, learned and kind together, formidable in war and restrained in anger. Someone whose conduct held up when it was examined closely.

Narada did not treat the question as impossible.

There was such a man, he said. He was of the line of Ikshvaku, and his name was Rama.

Then Narada told him the life, quickly, the way one tells a thing that is already finished: a prince, a promise, fourteen years in the forest, a wife carried off, a war across the sea, a return, a kingdom. Valmiki listened to the whole of it and let Narada go on his way.

What happened afterward was not planned.

Valmiki walked out to the river Tamasa to bathe, and near the water he saw two birds courting, a pair of cranes. A hunter shot the male. It fell, and the female cried over it, and Valmiki, watching, was overcome by a grief that had nothing to do with him. Words came out of him at the hunter, and the words came out measured, in a shape he had not intended and could not immediately explain. He stood there repeating them, trying to understand what he had just made.

That was the first verse. Sorrow had found a form.

Brahma came to him and told him what to do with it. He was to compose the life of Rama in that measure, the whole of it, including what no one had told him and what had not yet happened, and it would be given to him to see.

So Valmiki made the poem.

He would teach it, in time, to two boys in his own hermitage, and they would sing it in public before a king who did not know who they were. But that comes near the end of this book, and the boys are not born yet.

The story begins in a city on the Sarayu, in a house that wanted children.