For many years, my day has started with a long conversation with my mother. Some conversations with her begin with the most ordinary things and, without warning, take us somewhere deeper. Yesterday morning, while my mother and I were talking about routine family matters, the conversation drifted toward the poetry she grew up with. She suddenly began reciting four lines from Goswami Tulsidas’s Kavitavali –

पुर तें निकसी रघुबीर-बधू, धरि धीर दए मग में डग द्वै।

झलकीं भरि भाल कनी जल की, पुट सूखि गए मधुराधर वै॥

फिरि बूझति हैं, “चलनो अब केतिक, पर्नकुटि करिहौं कित ह्वै?”।

तिय की लखि आतुरता पिय की अँखियाँ अति चारू चलीं जल च्वै॥

Pur ten nikasi Raghubeer-badhu, dhari dheer dae mag mein dag dvai.

Jhalkeen bhari bhaal kani jal ki, put sukhi gaye madhuradhar vai.

Phiri boojhati hain, “Chalno ab ketik, parnakuti karihaun kit hvai?”

Tiya ki lakhi aaturata piya ki ankhiyan ati chaaru chaleen jal chvai.

My mother explained the scene to me. Rama, Sita and Lakshmana have just left the royal gates of Ayodhya to begin their fourteen-year exile. Sita, accustomed to the comfort of palace life, gathers her courage and takes just a couple of steps onto the rough, dusty forest path. After just two steps. Beads of sweat appear on her forehead. Her soft lips dry up. She turns to Rama and asks, with heartbreaking innocence, “How much further do we have to walk? Where will we build our little hut of leaves?”

Rama has remained composed through the sorrow of leaving Ayodhya. But seeing Sita struggle with a hardship she has never known, he cannot hold himself together. Tears flowed from his beautiful eyes.

The verses my mother remembered stayed with me, quietly, long after our conversation ended. Perhaps that is what great literature does. It takes a story we think we know and, with a few precise details, makes us see it again. A palace behind them. A forest ahead. Two small footsteps on a road with no end in sight. Sweat on a forehead, lips gone dry, a simple question about where the hut will be. And then Rama’s eyes. Sita had taken only two steps into the forest. But in those two steps, Tulsidas had made us feel the distance between everything she had known and everything that lay ahead. Somewhere in those tears is the whole tenderness of love, not in suffering together, but in being unable to bear the other person’s suffering.

Perhaps that is why, centuries later, those two steps remain with us.