Kaikeyi - Blog Posts

Rama and Sita never overhear the dhobi before her pregnancy comes to term

1. Most of Kaikeyi’s power died with Dasharatha and his love with her, but still she has enough influence to overhear the rumors that spread through the city–and, more importantly, to ensure that the wells and taverns that Rama visits in disguise do not mention them. 

Let him confront those ugly truths once his wife delivers Ayodhya its heirs and if he should object, then let him consider: she has done him so many offenses already; what is one more?

2. The child – no, children, and fine sons, too!–are born, and Kaikeyi lets it be known that to challenge their legitimacy would be to deprive Rama of the heirs he loves so well. For a time, it works: Ayodhya loves Rama enough to allow him his happiness.

But all too well she knows it will not last. Did she love him, too, and still prove the cause of fourteen years’ unhappiness? So too will they turn on him, and his blameless queen; unless Kaikeyi can seek to do otherwise. 

3. Crowds always need a scapegoat, and too well Kaikeyi knows one that will suffice. Public opinion has forgiven only because of Rama’s request; and so it is all to easy to sow a word here, a suggestion there, that all the rage and mistrust they feel towards Sita ought to be directed towards the real instigator of mischief, who lives in the palace still, having escaped any punishment for her crimes. 

It works; of course it does. Kaikeyi has lived in Ayodhya for almost forty years, and knows it like the palm of her hand; and just as in the palm of her hand, she can read the signs of her downfall in the crowds’ angry faces. 

4. Before Rama must answer that he allows the criminal responsible for his father’s death to live simply because she is his stepmother, Kaikeyi volunteers herself to return to Kekaya. Too long she has lived apart from her mountains, she says wistfully; and her brother longs for her company. 

She will listen to no protests, not from Rama, nor her fellow wives–and Ayodhya, pleased with itself, forgets its complaints against its queen entirely. 

5. The night before she is to leave, Bharat comes to her for the first time in fifteen years. He knows, of course; any son of hers must. She managed to teach him at least that much. 

“If you expect me to forgive you, simply for what you did for bhabhi-”

“I did nothing but act according to my own nature,” Kaikeyi interrupts coldly. As much as she longs for Bharat’s return, she does not want it to be under such terms. “Manipulation is my only skill; surely I must use it to relieve my own boredom.”

“You’ll never change,” he declares, and still his voice is thick with anger. But he touches her feet before he goes, and in the morning, stands on the stairs and watches Kaikeyi’s departing palanquin until it fades out of view. 

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