Rama

Childless after years on the throne, King Dasharatha performed a putrakameshti sacrifice at Ayodhya to win an heir, and a huge red being rose from the fire itself carrying a bowl of payasa. It told Dasharatha to divide the bowl among his three queens, Kausalya, Kaikeyi and Sumitra, and within a day all three were pregnant. Under stars read as the most auspicious in ages, with five planets in exaltation and the nakshatra Punarvasu rising, Kausalya gave birth first. She felt no pain, only the calm of a still lake, and the child born to her did not cry.

The moon moved on, and Kaikeyi's son Bharata followed, then Sumitra's twins Lakshmana and Shatrughna after a further twenty hours, each born from a share of the same bowl of payasa. Goldman's introduction to the Uttarakanda describes the four brothers as each carrying a portion of Vishnu's own power, in proportion to what their mothers drank. Ayodhya kept festival for days: drums sounded, dancers and singers filled the streets, and Dasharatha gave out jewels, silver and cattle to the crowds. On the eleventh day the sage Vasishtha performed the naming rite and called Kausalya's son, the eldest of the four and his father's favourite, Rama, upholder of dharma from that hour on; Bharata, Lakshmana and Shatrughna were named beside him.

News of Rama's coronation reached Kaikeyi's hunchback maid Manthara, who hurried to turn the queen against it. She warned Kaikeyi that once Rama held the kingdom, her own son Bharata would be finished, and reminded her of two boons Dasharatha had promised years before, when Kaikeyi nursed him back from a battle wound in the war between the gods and the asuras. Kaikeyi took the bait. She tore off her jewels, loosened her hair and lay down in the palace's chamber of anger, refusing to speak until Dasharatha came to her in alarm.

When the king begged to know what troubled her, Kaikeyi invoked the sun, the moon, the planets and every god as witness to his old promise, then named her price: the coronation prepared for Rama was to crown Bharata instead, and Rama was to live as a hermit in the Dandaka forest for fourteen years. Dasharatha begged her to reconsider, calling her heartless and pleading that he would rather give up his own life, his other queens or his throne than his son, but as a scion of the Raghu line he could not break a sworn word. Rama, sent for and told the news, accepted it without protest and made ready to leave for the forest the next day.

To make an ally against Ravana, Rama struck a pact with the exiled vanara Sugriva: Rama would help him win back Kishkindha and his wife Tara from his brother Vali, and Sugriva's monkey army would help Rama find Sita. Sugriva challenged Vali to single combat, but the two brothers looked so alike in the fight that Rama, waiting hidden with his bow, could not tell them apart and held his arrow. Beaten and bleeding, Sugriva fled back to Rama and demanded to know why he had not shot. Rama admitted the mistake and had Lakshmana hang a garland of flowers round Sugriva's neck so he could be told apart the next time. Sugriva challenged Vali again the following morning, and as the two brothers grappled once more, an arrow flew from hiding and struck Vali in the back.

Vali fell, and as Rama came forward unstringing his bow, the dying vanara accused him to his face: Vali had been fighting his own brother, not Rama, and had never wronged Ayodhya or its king, yet he had been shot down like a coward from hiding, not met face to face. His wife Tara, holding him as he died, cursed Rama for killing her husband to win the help of her rival Sugriva. Rama answered that he had acted as Bharata's representative and Sugriva's ally in a matter of dharma, and one telling has him state plainly, 'I did it,' owning the act without disguise. Sugriva took the kingdom of the vanaras from that day, and even Tara, in time, accepted him as her lord.

Rama and Ravana fought through a long night in matched chariots. Indra sent down his own charioteer, Matali, together with his chariot, bow and lightning arrows, to give Rama an equal footing against a demon king who could not be beaten on foot. The two traded astra for astra: a gandharvastra met a gandharvastra and both fell hissing into the sea, a devastra was answered by a devastra, and when Ravana loosed conjured lions and tigers out of the sky at him, Rama burned them away with an astra of fire. When Rama began to cut off Ravana's heads, new ones grew back in their place before he could press the advantage, and doubt gripped him for the first time in the fight.

Matali warned Rama that Ravana's power would only grow through the night, and that ordinary weapons would never finish him. At the charioteer's word, Rama called for the brahmastra, the terrible weapon entrusted to him by the sage Agastya, and it appeared in his hands as heavy as the sacred mountain Meru. With Sita's face fixed in his mind, Rama drew the bowstring to his ear and loosed the arrow. Thunder split the sky and, for a moment, day broke again over the battlefield as if the sun itself had returned. The brahmastra swallowed Ravana, his chariot, his horses and his charioteer in flame, burning him so completely that almost nothing of his body remained; gods, gandharvas and sages who had gathered to watch rejoiced that the rakshasa king was dead, killed at last by Rama's own hand.

In open court, one of Rama's own informers asked to speak with him alone and, once the room had cleared but for his brothers, told him that the people of Ayodhya were gossiping: they could not understand how Rama had taken Sita back after her long stay in another man's house. Rama's mood darkened. He told his brothers that as king he could not ignore what his subjects said, however unjust the talk was, since a ruler's first duty was to them and dishonour was worse to him than death. The next day he told Lakshmana to take Sita to visit the sages' wives in the forest, as if granting a wish she had voiced herself, and ordered him to leave her at the sage Valmiki's ashram and return alone.

Lakshmana drove Sita out of the city in near silence, fighting back tears he would not explain. At the bank of the river, while Sita stepped down to wash her face, he turned the chariot and drove away, abandoning her as commanded. When he finally forced himself to speak, weeping, he told her that Rama had ordered her left there because of rumours in the kingdom about her time in Ravana's house, and that his own honour as king demanded it. Sita, carrying Rama's unborn child, said she held no complaint against Lakshmana for obeying his brother's command, and sent back word that she would go on living as a faithful wife should, whatever judgement the people of Ayodhya passed on her.