The Night He Asked Me If Rama Was Real

We were somewhere in the Sundara Kanda — the section of the Ramayana where Hanuman crosses the sea — when he stopped me mid-sentence. He had heard this story at least a dozen times by then, in pieces, in different versions, from me and from his grandmother's voice on the phone. 'Was Hanuman actually there?' he asked. 'Did he actually fly?' I said yes. 'But was he real?' I said nothing for a moment.

There's a version of this conversation that shuts it down. 'It's a story,' you could say. 'Like a fairy tale.' And the child nods and accepts it and moves on, and the story becomes just that — a story. The problem is that the Ramayana is not designed to be just a story. It is designed to be lived alongside. Rama's exile is supposed to mean something when you are being asked to do something hard. Hanuman's devotion is supposed to be available to you when you need to be brave. The whole machinery of myth only works if it has some claim on reality.

I told him that Rama was real the way that all very important things are real — not the way a chair is real, where you can sit on it, but the way a feeling is real, where it shapes everything even though you cannot hold it. He thought about this for about four seconds. Then he asked if Hanuman could beat Spider-Man. We moved on.

What I keep thinking about is that the question itself was the sign of good reading. He wasn't asking because he was confused. He was asking because the story had moved him enough that he needed to know what kind of reality he was dealing with. That is exactly what you want. A child who asks whether Rama was real has already, in some important sense, let Rama in.

I don't think there is a perfect answer to give. But I've become less afraid of the question. When it comes again — and it will — I want to resist the urge to deflect into either full literalism or full fiction. The honest answer lives somewhere more interesting than either of those, and a five-year-old is perfectly capable of sitting with it.