A Palace Glows Inside Guha's Memory
Ayodhya Kanda, Doha 90
Doha 90 · Movement 2 of 2
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As the forest keeps its midnight silence, Guha evokes chambers pure, intricate, and filled with every comfort. Flowers breathe fragrance through the rooms. Lovely beds wait beneath the steady radiance of lamps made bright with gems.
The verse lets abundance gather detail by detail, but nothing of that palace stands before Guha now. Its beauty survives only in recollection, set against kusha grass, tender leaves, and the sleeping form beneath a riverside tree. What is absent becomes almost painfully luminous.
This remembered interior is not offered to condemn the forest. It shows how completely Ram has stepped away from ease. The Lord who could rest among perfume and jeweled light accepts the bare night without diminishing. Splendor belonged to his surroundings; serenity belongs to him.
Far from Ayodhya, every jeweled lamp remembered by Guha makes Ram's untroubled sleep beneath the branches shine more deeply.
Read the passage from the Manas
सुचि सुबिचित्र सुभोगमय सुमन सुगंध सुबास। पलँग मंजु मनिदीप जहँ सब बिधि सकल सुपास।।90।।
Those chambers, so pure and wonderfully made, full of beautiful comforts, fragrant with flowers. Lovely beds and gem-lit lamps on every side; every kind of ease was found there.