Shravan Kumar: The Son Who Carried His Parents
A devoted son bears his blind aged parents on a shoulder-pole toward the holy places, until a king's arrow loosed in the dark turns their pilgrimage into grief and a curse.
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In the forest country near the Kaushiki and the Godavari, there lived an old couple who had grown blind with the years. They had one son, and his name was Shravan. He was their eyes, their hands, and the roof over their old age. Whatever the two of them needed, he brought before they could ask for it. When they were cold, he gathered wood. When they were hungry, he found fruit and roots and cooked for them. When they wished to sit in the sun, he led them out and settled them on clean grass. The neighbours who passed the hut used to say that the gods had given these two poor people a treasure worth more than any kingdom.
One evening the father spoke of a wish he had carried for a long time. He said that a man does not live forever, and that before the end came he longed to bathe in the sacred waters and bow his head at the holy places, to hear the temple bells and the chanting of the priests once more. The mother said the same wish lived in her heart. They were old, they said, and they were blind, and they had no way to walk such distances. They spoke of it softly, the way people speak of things they have already given up.
Shravan listened, and then he told them their wish would be granted. He cut a strong length of bamboo and hung a wide basket from each end, and he padded the poles where they would rest. He seated his father in one basket and his mother in the other, and he lifted the whole weight across his shoulders. In this way, on foot, carrying the two people who had once carried him, he set out to take them from shrine to shrine.
The road was long and the load was heavy, but he never let them feel it. He walked slowly on the rough stretches so they would not be jolted. He stopped often to rest them, to give them water, to tell them what lay around them since they could not see it for themselves. Village by village and river by river, he brought them to the sacred fords they had dreamed of. They bathed in the holy water, they touched the feet of the shrines, and their old faces shone. Shravan asked nothing for himself. To serve them was all he wanted.
One night their road ran beside a forest, and the two old people grew thirsty. Shravan set the baskets down gently and made them comfortable under the trees. He took an earthen pot and went toward the sound of water, for there was a river close by. He knelt at the bank and lowered the pot into the current, and the water began to flow into it with a low gurgling sound that carried through the quiet dark.
It happened that the young king of Ayodhya, Dasharatha, was hunting in that same forest that night. He had trained himself in a difficult skill, the art of shooting at a sound alone, without sight of the target. When he heard the gurgling at the river he took it for an elephant come down to drink, filling its trunk with water. He fitted an arrow, drew the sound into his aim, and let it fly. The arrow crossed the dark and found not an animal but the boy kneeling at the water.
Shravan cried out, and in that cry was a human voice, not the trumpeting of any beast. The king's heart turned to ice. He ran toward the sound and found a young man fallen beside a broken pot, an arrow deep in him, his life running out with the spilled water. Dasharatha fell to his knees, undone by what his own hand had done, and begged to know who the boy was.
Shravan, with the little strength left to him, did not curse the king. He said only that his blind old father and mother waited nearby, thirsty, and that they had no one in the world but him. He asked the king to draw out the arrow, for it gave him pain, and then he asked him to carry the water to his parents and to tell them what had come to pass. When the arrow was drawn, the gentle son breathed his last there by the river.
Dasharatha lifted the pot and walked the way the boy had shown him, his feet heavy with dread. When the old couple heard the footsteps they thought their son had returned, and the father called out to ask why he had taken so long, and why he had not spoken on the way as he always did. The king could not answer. At last, in a broken voice, he told them the whole of it. He said he was not their son but the king who had loosed the arrow, and that it had struck their boy at the river, and that the deed was done without knowing.
For a long moment there was no sound at all. Then the two old people asked to be taken to the place where their son lay. The king led them by the hand and set their palms upon the body of the child they could not see. They held him and wept over him, and no words could reach the bottom of their grief. They had crossed the whole country on his shoulders, and now they could not so much as look upon his face in death.
The father, when he could speak, told Dasharatha that a king who kills without malice is not free of the killing. Then he spoke the words that would outlast them all. He said that as they two were dying now from the loss of their son, so one day Dasharatha also would die grieving for a son, parted from him and broken by that parting. Having laid this upon the king, the old couple built a fire, and they gave up their lives beside the son they had loved, and passed on together.
Dasharatha carried that curse home in silence and told no one for many years. It slept in him like a seed. Long afterward, when he was old and his beloved Rama was sent away into the forest for fourteen years, the king lay down in his grief and could not rise from it, and he died calling his son's name. Only then did he understand that the old man's word by the river had come to pass, and that every deed, however dark the night it is done in, returns at last to the hand that did it.