The King's Lap
King Uttānapāda had two wives. The elder, Sunīti, was gentle and devout; the younger, Suruci, was beautiful and proud, and it was Suruci who held the king's heart. Sunīti's son was named Dhruva; Suruci's son was Uttama. Both were boys of about five years. One day the king sat in his great hall with little Uttama on his knee. Dhruva, watching from the doorway, felt the natural longing of a child — he too wanted to climb into his father's lap. He ran forward and began to clamber up. Suruci saw him and struck like a snake. 'Child,' she said, her voice cold enough to frost the pillars, 'you may not sit on the lap of the king. That seat is for my son. You were not born of my womb. If you wish to sit upon a throne, go and worship the Supreme Lord, and perhaps in your next life you will be born to a queen.' The king sat silent. That silence was the deepest wound of all. Dhruva climbed down. His lips trembled, his breath came fast, and without a word he walked out of the hall, through the palace, to his mother's chambers. Sunīti took him onto her own lap — the lap no court could deny him — and he told her everything, weeping. Sunīti held him close. 'My child,' she said, 'do not hate your stepmother. Pain follows us from our own past deeds; to hate another for it is to hate the fruit and keep planting the tree. But this much is true in what she said: there is a Lord who hears. If you want a seat no one can take from you — not your stepmother, not time, not death itself — then worship Him. Your grandfather Manu found everything by worshipping the Lord's lotus feet. Go, my son, and may the Lord protect you.' The boy stopped crying. Something in his mother's words had lit a lamp in him. 'Then I will go,' said Dhruva, 'and I will not come back until I have seen the Lord with my own eyes.'
✦ Visual cue — A five-year-old boy being pushed away from a king's lap by a proud, jewelled queen in a pillared palace hall; the king looking away; the boy's face resolute through tears.