The Robber Who Became a Poet

Deep in a forest, long ago, there lived a fierce robber. He waited beside the road, and when travellers came through he leapt out and took everything they had. It was a cruel way to live. But the robber told himself it was all right, because he did it for his family, to feed his wife and his children. Surely that made it forgivable.

One day an old wandering holy man named Narada came down that forest road, singing softly to himself. The robber jumped out, as he always did. But the old man was not frightened at all. He only smiled, and asked the robber a single quiet question.

“You do all this robbing, and this hurting, for your family,” Narada said. “Tell me, then. Your family shares in all the good things you bring home. But do they share in the wrong of it too? When you do a bad thing to get those things, do they carry a piece of that badness along with you?”

The robber had never once thought about it. “Of course they do,” he said. “They are my family.”

“Are you certain?” said the old man. “Go and ask them. I give you my word I will wait right here.”

So the robber went home and asked his wife, and his children, the old man’s question. Would they share in the wrong of what he did, as well as the food it bought? And one by one, they shook their heads. “Feeding us is your task,” they said. “But the wrong of how you do it? No. That belongs to you alone.”

The robber stood very still. He had been carrying all that wrongdoing by himself, for years, for people who would not carry the smallest piece of it with him. And all at once he saw his whole life clearly, and he was filled with sorrow for everything he had done.

He ran back to the old man and fell at his feet. “Help me change,” he begged. “Show me how to undo what I have become.”

Narada gave him a single holy name to say over and over, and the robber sat down beneath the trees and began to say it, and he did not stop. He sat so still, for so long, lost so deeply in his prayer, that the seasons turned around him. Vines crept over him. The little ants of the forest built their tall earthen hill, their valmika, right up and over him, until he was tucked away inside it like a seed in the ground.

And when at last he rose up out of that anthill, he was a robber no longer. He was gentle, and wise, and his heart was full of words. They gave him a new name, from the anthill he had grown out of. They called him Valmiki. And that once-fierce robber became the greatest poet his land had ever known, the very first to tell the whole great story of Rama.