The berries Shabari tasted first

She had been sweeping the same stretch of forest path for so long that the people who first laughed at her had grown old and died.

The waiting

Shabari was a tribal woman of the Bhil people, which in the arrangement of her age meant she was placed near the bottom of everything. She had come to the ashram of the sage Matanga as a girl and served there without ever being made to feel she belonged, and Matanga — who was the exception — had taught her anyway.

When he was near the end of his life she asked him what she should do without him. He told her to stay, and to wait, because Ram would come to her one day.

So she stayed. She swept the forest path every morning so that no thorn would meet his foot. She gathered berries and set them out, and when he did not come, gathered fresh ones the next day and set those out instead. Matanga's other disciples left. The years went by in the way years do when nothing visible is happening in them. She grew old on that path.

Two men on the path

When Ram and Lakshman finally walked into the clearing — worn from the search for Sita, far from anything that resembled a court — Shabari did not manage anything graceful. She fell at Ram's feet, and then she went and got the berries.

And she did what she had been doing for decades, without thinking about who was watching. She bit each ber before offering it, to be sure it was sweet, and set the sour ones aside. What Ram was handed was a pile of half-eaten fruit from an old forest woman's hands.

Lakshman's face said what a great many people would have said out loud. Food already tasted, offered by a Bhil woman, to a prince of Ayodhya. Every rule of purity in the world he had been raised in was being broken at once, and by someone who did not appear to have noticed.

What Ram did

He ate them. All of them, and with evident pleasure, and he said he had never tasted anything sweeter — not in Ayodhya, not anywhere.

The tellings do not have him lecture Lakshman. He simply ate, in front of him, which is a more difficult argument to answer.

Then he did something the story is equally careful about. He did not treat her as a recipient of kindness. He asked her to teach, and she told him what she had learned in her waiting, and in the Ramcharitmanas he answers her with the navadha bhakti — the nine forms of devotion — the fullest teaching on love that he gives anyone in the epic. Not to a sage. Not to a king. To her.

He also asked her advice on where to go next, and it was Shabari who sent him towards Rishyamukha and the vanars, which is how the road to Hanuman and to Lanka actually opens.

Shabari's meeting with Ram is told in the Aranya Kand of Valmiki's Ramayan, and expanded considerably in the Ramcharitmanas of Tulsidas, where the navadha bhakti teaching appears.