RAMAYANA SERIES Part 4_KING OF DHARMA by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

Urmila. They had seemed stiff together, awkward, ill at ease, moving and speaking like strangers at a formal event. Fourteen years … half a lifetime … And they had known each other barely days before that cruel separation. They were strangers in all but name. Time had bent and twisted their marriage into a crooked river that lay still and muddy now. Time alone could bring it back onto its natural course—if such a crooked bend could be corrected at all. Perhaps if Urmila’s womb had quickened before they had left, things would be different. Worse? No. Better. Definitely better, she thought. Children brought beauty and permanence to a marriage. Always.
    She touched her gently risen abdomen. She still was not showing overly much. She feared that might be due to her months of privation. First in those last few horrific days at Janasthana, before that final battle against the ragged remnants of Supanakha’s brother rakshasas, then in captivity in Lanka where she had been too mistrustful of her captors to eat freely, too harassed to eat at all sometimes. But in between those years of battle and those weeks of captivity, there had been a brief season of rest, a few pleasurable days of idle pasture, when Rama had shown more tenderness toward her than ever before, as if he somehow sensed her condition. She knew he did not actually know of her pregnancy, for he was guileless in that sense, her Rama, a quiet reserved man who held himself too closely at times but could never deceive her or lie openly; he did not know of her pregnancy, then in its early weeks, almost too early to be sure, although she was sure, but perhaps some part of his acutely perceptive mind sensed her need for gentleness, for caring, for nourishment both emotional and physical. He had fed her like a honeymooning husband—literally as well as emotionally—and she had relished every morsel, for it was his love she was truly tasting, his enduring affection. For all his formidable skills as a warrior, Rama Chandra could be as formidable a husband, when time and circumstances permitted him to be. Perhaps he was compensating for the years in exile, years of hardship and battle, and constant fear and struggle, blood and disease and slaughter. Perhaps he was simply celebrating the imminent closure of that part of their lives: it had been only weeks before the end of their term of exile after all. Whatever the reason, she had loved that brief season of respite. It was what had sustained her through the weeks of torturous captivity that followed, through the taunting of the rakshasis, the mental torture of Supanakha and Ravana, her constant fear of Ravana’s asura-maya, his dark, terrible sorcery, and later the horror of knowing that tens upon tens of thousands were dying for her sake, in a pointless battle that she would never have permitted Rama to wage had she been by his side. But that was the point, wasn’t it? He waged that war because she was not by his side, because she had been taken from him, and because it was the only way to get her back.
    She watched him sleeping, hand outstretched in search of that ever-present sword, and could not bring herself to believe that he would ever have resorted to such tactics: raising an army, crossing an ocean, invading another sovereign realm, slaughtering lakhs, destroying a city, a kingdom, almost an entire race… He would never have done it had she been beside him. Her taking had been the tipping point in a life filled with unrelenting conflict, struggle, bloodshed. He had gone all the way because he was already far down the path of violence.
    But had it not happened, had she not been taken, had Ravana not usurped the one thing that could drive Rama to war and invasion, she felt certain he would have remained that peaceable, loving husband. That Rama she had known for those glorious few days in the forest, in the hut by the river, in the last days of their exile. That man with the rough chin and soft touch. Strong