“You do not have to apologize,” I said as my energy slowly returned. “I am simply trying to point out inconsistencies in your logic—and no, I do not hate you either. Rama is fallible, as are you. He has your other brothers to help him should he need it. I know the two of you are used to being together without any family to rely upon, but Rama is back in Ayodhya. Why are you so worried?”
He turned away, his expression so sorrowful that I decided not to push any further. I kept glancing over at him, but he kept his eyes on the road ahead, his throat bobbing every few minutes as though he was working up the courage to say something. Watching him, I felt a streak of shame run through me. How had I never realized?
At last, when the sun was high in the sky, we stopped for a meal. I turned away from Lakshmana to remove some food from our packs. “I don’t know,” he said suddenly, and I whirled around. “I don’t know.” His face crumpled slightly, and I put my arms around him.
“Loyalty to your family is an excellent quality, and to be commended. But you can be someone beyond your loyalty—and you should be, because you have so much to offer.”
“I feel so strange,” he said. “I don’t know what to do with myself.” Each word took him several seconds to speak, as though he was swimming through sugar syrup. My mind flashed back, strangely enough, to Ashvin, and my long-ago attempts to help him.
“I am glad you are so close to your brother. When he is king, he will need advisors he can trust. You will make a wonderful advisor, with your memory and devotion. And if you want more, you should not be afraid to ask.”
“I don’t understand.” He pulled away from me and scrubbed a hand across his eyes. “What do you mean?”
I had gone far enough for today. “We can talk about this later,” I said. “For now, we should eat.”
For the next several days, we conversed about lighter topics as we crossed into the scrublands. I figured out how to whittle away Rama’s hold on him more gently, although every time I weakened their bond, the world spun around me and I often lost my grasp on the Plane. But in between those episodes, I learned that Lakshmana’s great skill with visual memory extended to conversations—he could recall nearly everything he had ever heard. Had Dasharath known this, when he asked me to take Lakshmana along? I could not think of a better companion for such a lengthy mission.
Our path took us through the thorn forests, a place I had heard of only in scrolls. To my surprise, the short thorn trees were not all that spiky, or painful to touch, but rather dotted the landscape like large, twisted bushes. We saw herds of elephants roaming the grasses, snapping branches off the shrubs to eat. Lakshmana’s sheer delight at the sight, his whoop of excitement every time he spotted another elephant, was almost contagious.
But as Lakshmana became more friendly, more open, my heart sank deeper into my stomach. I knew I wasn’t alone in thinking of Lakshmana as shy and reserved, but clearly that was not quite the case. He was very much like Sumitra: kind, loyal, wise, free with love. And his deeply buried wit, his sense of humor, was all Dasharath. I wondered if even Shatrugna, his twin brother, had any idea of who Lakshmana was underneath his silence.
“Ma, I see you looking at me. I am not blind,” he said to me one morning. We had made good time on our journey—we were out of the scrub and on the last stretch of the winding pass through the Riksha Mountains.
They were nothing like the snowy and forbidding peaks to the north of Kosala and Kekaya, which had always reminded me of jagged teeth reaching to devour the sky. The valleys we traveled through were filled with lush forests, alive with chittering monkeys and brightly feathered birds, and even the higher passages were sun dappled and warm. When I craned my neck to look at the peaks, I couldn’t discern any snow on their crowns.
“I’m not looking at you,” I said. It was true only because I hadn’t snuck a glance at him in nearly an hour. But he was right—my eyes kept seeking him out, studying him, trying to make up for lost time by discovering what else I might have missed. Dasharath and I had estimated this journey would take nearly two moons, but we had anticipated much more difficulty in the passes than had been borne out. I had less time with Lakshmana than I thought—but the same responsibilities.
“Something is wrong with me, is it not?” he asked, sounding dejected. “You can tell me what it is. I may not have presented the best face to you, but I’m strong enough. I am.”
He said the words so earnestly that I wanted to reach out and ruffle his hair, try to cheer him up. Instead, I checked our bond, which was a shining construct of amber, strengthened over the weeks. But it held no answers.