Sumantra Returns Alone

At Shringaverapura, before Ram crossed the Ganga into the forest, he had asked Sumantra to take the chariot back to Ayodhya. Sumantra had driven the three of them all the way from the city, and his heart stayed with them even as he turned the horses around. He waited near the river bank for a while, hoping he might yet be called back, but at last there were messages to carry to the king and the mothers, and an empty chariot does not wait forever.

Every turn of its wheels on the road home seemed to repeat the parting.

Near Ayodhya, people recognised the royal chariot from far off and ran toward it, expecting to see Ram, Sita, and Lakshman come home. When they reached it and found it empty, they crowded around Sumantra with questions he could not answer in a way that eased them. The city had already gone quiet. Flags from the coronation that never happened still hung in some doorways. Markets stood half-shuttered, and a crowd had gathered at the palace gates before he even arrived. He came in with his eyes down, feeling that to return without Ram was itself a kind of failure — though he had done exactly as Ram told him.

Dasharatha would not let him rest before he had heard everything. Sumantra told him of Ram's respectful greetings to each of the mothers, his request that his father not give way to grief, and his word that Bharat should be honoured and obeyed in his place. He described Sita's calm and Lakshman's constant care. At the Ganga the three of them had turned once, together, to look back at the city before the boat pulled away.

Sumantra did not soften the hardship of the road ahead of them, but he did not make them sound frightened either. They had gone into the forest as three people building a life together, not as three people running from one.

Kaushalya's grief broke into words — some aimed at Sumantra for bringing back only an empty chariot, some at Dasharatha for having let this happen at all. She regretted the sharpest of them almost as soon as they were spoken. Sumantra stayed and answered every question a second and a third time, until at last he could tell her plainly what he believed to be true: that Ram, Sita, and Lakshman were well, and that in the forest they would look after one another.

It was not the homecoming Ayodhya had prepared for. But it was, for one more night, something to hold onto.