Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Ayodhyā · 16 of 50
16. Bharata comes home
Ayodhyā (अयोध्या)
Bharata is summoned from Kekaya with an urgency nobody explains. He arrives to a city that is wrong. The garlands are dead. His father is dead. His brother is gone. In the hall of his mother he hears what she has done, and she expects, for one terrible moment, that he will be pleased. She has procured him the thing a son is supposed to want.
He is not pleased. His grief for his father and his fury at his mother are the same speech. He refuses the consecration. He will not be made king by a boon that killed the king. The ministers, who need a body on the throne, press him. He calls for the army instead. If Rāma will not come back to rule, Bharata will go to the forest and ask him. The journey is a reversal of the one the city just watched. The same road, a brother going to undo a mother's success.
Kaikeyī is left with what a selfish wish looks like when the person it was for will not touch it. The poem has a severe mercy toward Bharata. He is never tempted. A reader who wants an envious brother has come to the wrong epic. His virtue is the thing that makes Rāma's refusal, when it comes, harder to bear.
नेपालीमा
भरतलाई केकयबाट बोलाइयो। उनी बिग्रेको सहरमा आइपुगे। बाबु मरेका थिए। भाइ गएका थिए। आमाले आफूले गरेको काम सुनाइन्, र भरत खुसी होलान् भन्ने आशा गरिन्। उनी खुसी भएनन्। उनले अभिषेक अस्वीकार गरे। सेना लिएर वनतिर हिँडे। कैकेयी स्वार्थी चाहनाको परिणाम लिएर बसिन्, जसका लागि चाहेकी थिइन् उनले त्यसलाई छोएनन्। भरत कहिल्यै लोभिएनन्। त्यही गुणले रामको अस्वीकृति झन् गह्रौं बनाउँछ।