The Young Son Tries to Cheer His Weeping Family
As the family weeps together, overcome by the daughter's grim logic, their young son watches. He does not understand the crisis. He sees only that everyone is crying, and he decides to fix it with the only tools he has: a smile, a mumbling command, and a single blade of grass.
The father, mother, and daughter were weeping together, bound in shared grief after the daughter’s speech. Then, on seeing all of them cry, their young son uttered mumbling words, his eyes wide open.
“O father! O mother! And you too, O sister!” he said. “Do not cry.”
Saying this, he smilingly came to each of them. He picked up a blade of grass. Holding it, he again spoke happily. “I will kill the man-eating rakshasa with this.”
He was a child. The rakshasa was the supernatural terror threatening their lives, the source of the impossible choice that had his family in tears. The boy’s solution was simple, direct, and utterly impossible: a single blade of grass as a weapon.
Though they were overcome with grief, hearing the mumbling words of the child, they were cheered up. His innocence created a breach in the despair, a moment of impossible lightness. It did not solve the crisis. It suspended it.
Knowing that this was the right time—the moment of respite, the family momentarily drawn out of their sorrow by the child’s gesture—Kunti went to them and spoke. Her words would come like ambrosia reviving the dead.