your bridge home
The Great Epics
She never held the throne. One conversation changed who would sit on it.
Kaikeyi's first reaction to the news was delight. She took off a necklace and gave it to the woman who brought it. That woman threw it on the floor.
Manthara had come to Ayodhya with Kaikeyi.
She was from Kekaya, Kaikeyi's father's kingdom, and she had come north as part of the bridal party when Kaikeyi married Dasharatha, a servant attached to a young queen in a foreign court, whose entire standing depended on her mistress's standing.
Valmiki calls her kubja, hunchbacked, and the later tradition made a great deal of that, in ways that say more about the later tradition than about her.
She had raised Bharata. She had been in that household for decades. She had no rank of her own whatsoever.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.