Chapter 5
The Guest of Agastya
I have set down what Agastya did at Janasthana, and I will not unsay it. But a chronicler who tells only that has not told the truth.
Lopamudra and Sita, the morning before the bow
The men had gone to sit with Agastya before the incense had even finished its first stick. Sita heard their voices low and even through the wall—Raghav’s careful questions, Luxman’s occasional sharp interruption, and beneath both, unhurried, the sage’s reply.
She had not been asked to join them, and had not minded. She followed instead the sound of a woman in the kitchen, singing something in Tamil.
“Lopamudra?”
“Yes… and you must be Sita.”
The woman who was grinding turmeric root against a stone worn smooth with use sat up and stepped closer to her, wiping her hands on a cloth.
“Oh, if I had known, I’d have come out to greet you properly. Would you like something to drink?”
She pointed to a pot of root water.
“Forgive my hands, they’re yellow to the wrist.”
Sita poured herself a cup, and they sat down together.
“My husband will talk until the sun is high. He always does when he has a soft corner for someone. We’ll eat before they finish, or we won’t eat till evening.”
A while later, a clay bowl of rice, tempered with spices, was set before Sita without ceremony.
“How long have you lived here?” Sita asked.
“Here? Four years. Before that, longer than I like counting, we lived nowhere at all.” Lopamudra settled back on her heels. “You’ve heard, maybe, that my husband was chased out of his Lankan home?”
Sita said nothing, waiting.
“Sumali’s people never forgave him for siding with Kubera. We ran to Thanjavur first—I was young enough then to think it exciting, if you can believe that—and then further south still, to the Tirunelveli hills, when even Thanjavur wasn’t far enough. We had less than this”—she gestured at the modest kitchen, the packed-earth floor—“for years. A hermit’s wife learns to be at home with very little, or she learns to be miserable. I chose the first.”
“That must have been frightening.”
“It was. It also taught him something, I think, that he still hasn’t fully learned but keeps trying to.” Lopamudra smiled toward the room where the men’s voices still murmured. “That the ones with power rarely notice what it costs the ones without it. He noticed, because for a while he had none. I remind him of that when he forgets.”
She reached over and coaxed the fire, blowing through a short bamboo pole.
“He loved that boy once, you know. Ravan. Before he was Ravan—when he was only Dashanan, Visravas’s son, good with languages the way some children are good with music. My husband used to say he’d never met a mind so quick to learn and so slow to be taught.” She shook her head slowly. “When Dashanan drove Kubera out and took the throne for himself, something in my husband gave way. Not his love—I don’t think that ever fully left him—but his hope. He told me once there’s a point past which loving someone stops being reason enough to spare them. I didn’t understand it then. I think I do now, watching what’s become of the south.”
Sita turned her bowl slowly in her hands, not eating.
“Is that why he’ll give my husband a weapon today?”
Lopamudra looked at her properly for the first time, something careful in her expression. “It looks concerning, I know. But it’s for protection, not conquest. Three of you, alone, so close to Janasthana—I’ve seen what’s out there. I don’t think he’s wrong to want you armed.” She paused. “Whether your husband uses it only for that, once he has it—that I can’t promise you. That was never mine to promise.”
“You sound like you doubt him. Your own husband.”
“I love my husband. That doesn’t mean I agree with every road his dharma takes him down.” Lopamudra’s laugh was short and warm. “Ask any wife of a righteous man. We are the ones left caring for the house while the men decide what righteousness requires.”
Outside, a peacock called twice, and was answered.
“When you leave here,” Lopamudra said, “you’ll go to Panchavati. It’s beautiful—the river runs slow there, and there’s fruit enough that you’ll never go hungry. Whatever else my husband is, remember he chose that place for you because it was gentle, not because it was strategic.”
“One more year,” Sita said quietly, mostly to herself. “That’s what we tell each other. One more year, and we’ll be home.”
“Then let it be a kind one, at least until the year runs out.” Lopamudra refilled Sita’s bowl without asking. “Eat. Whatever my husband decides in that room, it will still be true that you need your strength for the walk to Panchavati.”
Sita ate. Outside, the men’s voices had grown quieter, which she had learned by now to read as the sound of a decision arriving.
I learned, much later, from Lopamudra herself, that Agastya was once driven from his own home. Long before Raghav ever came to Dandaka, it was Sumali’s faction that forced him from Lanka — years spent as a fugitive in the Tirunelveli hills before he found safety by the Godavari. He knew exile before he ever counselled it.
He admired Ravan once, and said so plainly. It was Kubera’s fall that broke his faith in him — when Ravan drove his own half-brother from the throne and into the Himalayas, Agastya understood that Sumali had already claimed whatever in Ravan might once have been saved. He told Lopamudra there comes a point where love for a person cannot excuse what that person has become, and that Ravan had crossed it. Better, he decided, to stop him before that hunger for power spread north into Aryavarta itself.
Not the ten-headed terror the bards sing of — he was the first to tell Raghav that the heads were false, sewn trophies, and that his nephew was “every bit human, like us, with both good days and bad.” A man who tries that hard to keep his enemy human is not, I think, a man who hates easily.
I do not absolve him of Janasthana. I only say: the man who ordered it was also the man who spoke for Sita when no one else with power in that camp did, and wept, I am told, for a nephew he could not save from himself. For him Dharma was what he thought was right.