I gave my word when it was easy, and now honouring it will cost me dearly.

Look at the scene those lines come from. It is the eve of Rāma's coronation — the happiest night of King Daśaratha's life — and he finds his favourite queen sulking in the anger-room. Kaikeyī reminds him of an old debt: two boons, promised long ago, never claimed. Here is the detail the poet refuses to soften: the king raises the offer. Don't accuse me of holding back, he laughs — ask four instead of two. Then he states the family law, and swears it — disastrously — by Rāma himself. A blank cheque, signed in a happy hour. And the image the epic gives us for what comes next is one of its coldest: the king's joy a lovely grove full of birds, and Kaikeyī, like a huntress, loosing the falcon of her word into it.

The epic is not scolding him for keeping promises. It is photographing the moment every expensive promise is born: warmth, confidence, a little vanity, and no imagination for bad weather. That is how you came to owe so much on words that took two seconds to say. A promise is always priced later. It is cheapest on the day it is made.

The falcon lands: crown Bharata, and send Rāma to the forest for fourteen years. The king is destroyed — he begs, offers anything but this — yet he never denies the word. Then comes the move the epic pivots on: the debt is paid by someone who never signed it. Rāma, hearing that his father's word is at stake, treats it as his own — and walks out of a coronation and into fourteen years of exile that same morning, so calmly that the poet says he smiled within. For the house of Raghu, a given word is not a private contract between two people. It is the family's spine, and any member will carry it.

That is where the verse's strange arithmetic comes in. Heap up millions of guñjā seeds — bright little rosary-peas — and the pile never weighs what a mountain weighs. The line is aimed at the exit-drafting voice, because that voice never tells one big lie; it collects small true things. Circumstances did change. It wasn't in writing. Nobody would blame you. A whole heap of them. On the other side of the scale sits one large thing: you said you would. The heap does not outweigh it — because truth, says the verse, is the root out of which everything else you build must grow. And the epic is honest about the price: Daśaratha does not survive the separation, and Rāma spends fourteen years paying a bill with his father's name on it. This is not a story about integrity being cheap. It is a story about a family that decided, once and for all, that it was worth it.

Write down the promises currently open in your life — said aloud or shaken on — and circle the ones that have quietly turned expensive. Then put one clean question to each: who gets hurt if I keep it? If the answer is only me — my comfort, my money, my plans — the tradition's counsel is stark and strangely freeing: pay. And pay like Rāma, not like a man under audit. A promise kept resentfully is paid twice — once in the keeping, once in the poisoning of it. The calm is not a bonus; it is half the keeping.

If keeping it would now genuinely wrong someone else — the deal that would harm your family, the favour that has become someone's exploitation — the answer is still not the technicality. Go back, face to face, and renegotiate in the open: this is what I said, this is what has changed, this is what I can do. People forgive a renegotiated promise far more readily than a wriggled-out one; one respects the word, the other dissolves it. And the Raghu rule has two halves. Precisely because the word cannot be taken back, it must be given slowly. 'Ask four!' is generous — and it is the whole catastrophe. The family that will pay any price for its word should be the slowest family alive to pledge it.