The Ramayana

by Ramesh Menon

  “‘Vanara, you are the scion of an ancient and noble race. What have you in common with the sons of men and this prince of Ayodhya, that you bring your army to fight for him? What concern is it of yours that I have taken his woman? I have no quarrel with you; we are not enemies. Mighty son of Riksharajas, you are like a brother to me. Lanka is impregnable and I am invincible. Go back to Kishkinda and live in peace. It is not for the vanaras to take sides in this contention. Why should you risk the lives of your people for a human who treats you like a beast?’

  “Make Sugriva understand he should not meddle in this war. If the vanaras leave, two men we can easily kill.”

  Across the ocean, with sorcery, dark Suka flew quick as thinking. He flew down into the heart of the vanara camp, where Sugriva sat among his monkeys around the campfires of night. The vanaras sat singing the timeless songs of their race: of tree and forest, of jungle river and mountain cave, of the green softness of branches and the terror of the night leopard. When Suka landed suddenly in their midst, they leaped up in alarm and surrounded the rakshasa. For so he plainly was, with his crinkled hair and burning eyes and the sharp fangs in his long face.

  Sugriva motioned that they should not harm him; only restrain him, and allow him to speak. Suka did not bow to the vanara king, but delivered himself haughtily of Ravana’s message. As he spoke, the vanaras’ eyes glittered. They bared their teeth and snarled. And when they heard the cunning words about Rama treating them like beasts, the monkey folk growled in anger, for their hearts were true. They pounced on Suka, bound him, and beat him and kicked him while he lay screaming on the sand. Then Rama heard his screams and ran to the vanaras, shouting to them not to kill the rakshasa.

  The monkeys tied up the lean demon and flung him at Rama’s feet. His body covered in blood, his face bruised and swollen, Suka wailed, “I am only a messenger, Rama, don’t let the monkeys kill me. It is not my own message that I brought, but my master’s. Am I to be killed for that?”

  Rama pulled the vanaras away from Suka. With a cry of relief, Suka rose into the air in a flash, out of the vanaras’ reach. He hovered there, held fast by the long vine the monkeys had bound him with, helpless to release himself because his hands were tied as well. He cried down miserably, “Rama of Ayodhya, now I have seen you and you are noble indeed. Lord of monkeys, Sugriva, what message shall I take back to my king?”

  Sugriva shouted up to the rakshasa, “Tell your master, Sugriva of the vanaras says to him: ‘How can you be my friend? I don’t know you, nor have you ever done anything for me. Rama is dearer to me than a brother; I owe him everything I have. You are his enemy, evil one, you are the enemy of all the world. Your rakshasas kill my people in the jungle, for meat and for sport; and you and yours will die for that. The vanara army will soon arrive in Lanka. We will burn your city and you shall be a corpse among its ashes, with all your rakshasas.

  “‘You are a fool, Ravana. The Devas of light may protect you; you may hide in the sun; you may dive into Patala to seek shelter. But Rama will find you anywhere, and you will die as you deserve to. It is true you slew Jatayu; but he was old and feeble. Do not think the vanaras of Sugriva will be like him. Or have you forgotten so soon what our Hanuman did to your city?

  “‘You are a coward as well as a fool. You dare not face Rama and Lakshmana, but cower on your island and send out your spies, as you did Maricha. You do not know Rama; who he is. The hour of reckoning is near, Rakshasa, and you must pay for all the sins of your long, evil life. Prepare to die!’

  “Take my message back to your master, Suka.”

  But Angada cried, “This is no messenger, Rama; he is a spy. Let us torture him a little and see what he has to tell us. A spy should not be released. He will go back to his master and tell him all about our army.”

  He had hardly finished speaking when the vanaras lunged forward and hauled Suka down by the vine. The monkey folk would have beaten him again, but Rama stopped them, saying quietly, “Hold him if you must. But don’t hurt him; let him be like a common prisoner.”

  Thus Suka was held.

  7. Rama and the ocean

  Rama lay on the bed of darbha grass. He laid his head in the crook of his arm and lost himself in dhyana. He decided he would either cross the sea or die where he lay. The moon rose and set, and the sun rose again, always westering. Then it was noon, and evening again; Rama had not stirred, slept, eaten a morsel, or drunk a sip of water. He lay unmoving on his bed of grass, and he prayed to the Lord of the sea.

  His mind was like a lamp that did not flicker. Even the sky above seemed to strain down to the earth, when it sensed Rama’s immaculate tapasya. He had the singleness of thought that rishis who sit with their every sense stilled for a hundred years seldom achieve. For three days and nights, Rama lay in prayopavesha, in perfect prayer. Around him, the vanaras fell silent, and then mournful, as time wore on. Yet the Lord of the sea did not appear before the prince.

  The moon, which rose over the third night of Rama’s tapasya, sank into the waves in the west. Dawn flushed on the horizon and the sun appeared behind Mahendra, the vanara army, and Rama, who lay in dhyana. But at dawn of that fourth day, with sunrise, Rama’s eyes also blazed. He turned to his brother, who sat near him in padmasana, not eating or drinking himself.

  Rama said slowly, “The ocean is arrogant, Lakshmana. It seems that in this age of the world, the pacific way of sama is ineffectual. Even the Lords of the elements have regard only for violence, and honor is to be had only from fear. Varuna does not understand my gentleness, or he should have stood before us by now. But since he seems to believe I am a weakling, whose prayers are not worth hearing, I will change my method.

  “Bring me my bow, Lakshmana. Let us see what Varuna does when I make vapor of his waters with my astras, and all his fish lie heaving on an arid bed of sand. The vanaras will walk on dry land to Lanka, where my Sita waits in anguish for me.”

  Quietly, Lakshmana fetched the bow and quiver. Rama stood forth on that shore like the fire at the end of the yugas. He folded his hands briefly to the ocean. Assuming the archer’s stance, alidha, he fitted arrow after arrow to his bow, and they flashed whistling at the waves.

  The sky grew dark as twilight. Thunder echoed in the darkness, and supernaturally vivid lightning divided the sky in jagged gashes. Rama’s shafts of light and flames flew hissing into waves risen like giant shields to meet them. His arrows pierced the waves as common barbs do flesh. In amazement, in fear, Lakshmana and the vanaras heard the ocean screaming above the roar of its tide, in a cavernous voice. They heard Rama roar like an angry God. They heard the report of his bowstring, again and again.

  The earth shook. The sky was agitated and waves rose like mountains in the stricken sea, tall as Mandara or Kailasa. The monkeys lost their nerve at the awesome violence; most of them fled screaming up Mahendra. Rama stood like a flame himself on the shore. The ocean howled back at him in pain and fury. But the arrows raged from his hands, a river of fire in spate. Whales, sea serpents, and schools of brilliant fish leaped above the seething water in terror. But they could not escape; all the ocean burned. Hilly flames danced beneath its surface, in the belly of the Lord of waves.

  A shocked Lakshmana fell at his brother’s feet and clutched his hand. He cried, “Abandon this wrath, Rama! Return to the peaceful paths of our fathers. You can win this war without laying waste the sea.”

  From the dark sky there rose a great lament, and a hundred heavenly voices cried to the prince of light, “Rama, do not dry up the ancient sea.”

  But Rama heard neither his brother nor the supernal ones. He snatched his hand from Lakshmana, and the river of flames flowed again from his bow. In a terrible voice that was hardly his, gentle Rama roared, “Varuna! I will make a desert of you and the vanaras shall cross into Lanka over your dry corpse.”

  He paused his prodigious archery, then cried again, “I will consume you and the Patalas below you. All your denizens, fish and whale, shark and timmingala, will
lie rotting under the sun.”

  Then, standing like a burning rock upon the tempestuous beach, Rama invoked the brahmastra. It seemed earth and sky would crack open when he chanted the mantra to summon that weapon into his hands. The twilight of the world turned to a night of dread. The sun and moon strayed dizzily from their orbits. At midmorning, stars twinkled down clearly on the earth. A thousand meteors scorched down into the hissing water. All the slow and stable elements seemed ready to come undone, at the very quick of themselves, where the grace of creation held them bound in time. Chaos verged on the world.

  Gale winds from the sea uprooted knotted old trees and blew them about like wisps of straw. Streaks of lightning fell out of the heavens, their rutilant whiplashes seeming to begin in the stars. Woven into the roar of the storm rang the piteous cries of the beasts of the earth, among them Sugriva’s vanaras. Lions and tigers whimpered like frightened cats, and great bears wept for fear in their caves. The weaker, gentler animals were in an absolute frenzy. They dashed about blindly, shrieking, but found no refuge from Rama’s ubiquitous rage.

  As Lakshmana watched in disbelief, the ocean receded from the shore; like a whipped cur the sea fled from Rama’s fury. A yojana of dry seabed lay exposed, its pale expanse strewn with the piteous carcasses of its creatures. Dolphin and shark, great whale, whale-eating giant squid, and floundering fish of every hue and size all lay gasping their last on the desert of Rama’s anger.

  Then from the heart of the sea rose a wave loftier than all the rest, a mountain among mountains. It was cloven, and from it the Lord of oceans stood forth: Varuna Deva, tall as the sky. His body was made of water and light, his hair of shining foam. He was an uncanny sun risen in that twilight and he lit the darkened earth with his marine glory. He wore seaweed and gold on his body, pearls the size of islands and corals dark as night and bright as sunsets. The waves and the flowing locks of his hair were not separate from each other. The rivers, whose lord he was, rose around him: Ganga, Yamuna, and the others, luminous Goddesses. His people, sea serpents with flashing jewels in their heads, and his nereids and mermaid queens, all rose around that scintillant Deva. They stood treading the crests of waves.

  Varuna walked slowly out of the water, his hands folded above his head. He dwindled as he came, and prostrated himself at Rama’s feet. The God of waves cried to the Avatara, “You are the soul of peace and love; Lord, this wrath does not suit you. Whatever be your despair, it is not dharma that you should transgress the laws of the natural elements. It is the pristine and unbroken nature of the sun to shine, the wind to blow, the earth to turn around; and it is my nature that I am deep, vast, and uncrossable. Not even I can still the waves that flow from me. What could I do when you petitioned me? I cannot change my nature. I would have to destroy myself to please you, and the earth with me.

  “This is why I was silent, and not from any arrogance. What I can swear to you is this much: when the vanaras cross over me, however they do, no shark or crocodile, no whale or any other creature of the deep will harm them. It is not in my power to grant you any more, Rama, or I surely would, O greatest of all kshatriyas.”

  The ocean stood humbly, hands still folded, before the simmering Rama. But Rama said, “You were so long rising from your deeps, my lord, that I have invoked the brahmastra. The weapon must have its prey.”

  Varuna said at once, “Drumakalya in the north is sacred in my name. The Abhiras are a tribe of mayavis who obey no law of God or man. The sins they please themselves with are too monstrous to tell. They quell these crimes in the holy waters of Drumakalya, and I bear the agony of retribution for them. For eons this has continued, since evil first came into the world. My torment is endless, like the crimes of the Abhiras.

  “I beg you, prince of light, rid me of my ancient suffering with the brahmastra.”

  Rama turned his back on the waves. He drew his bowstring past his ear and the brahmastra flamed into the sky like another sun from his hands. Scorching the heavens, it flashed toward its mark.

  The incendiary weapon parted cloud, sky, and time. The earth was riven deep where the astra flared down into it, and, out of chasmic fissures in the ground, the dark waters of Patala rose glimmering to the world’s surface. The planet shuddered. The fissures cracked deeper and deeper, long after the arrow itself had bored through the earth and flew out from its other side, on an endless journey through the stars.

  The water that gushed up to fill those plumbless fiords foamed and raged like the ocean himself. Gone were the demonic Abhiras, tracelessly, absorbed into the panchamahabhuta, the original elements of creation. Their sins were burned to nothing in the realm the brahmastra slew them into. The residual heat of the astra, which by now was a galaxy away, dried up those waters, and that place was called Marukantara from then.

  From the shore of the southern sea, Rama blessed Marukantara. Sweet and sacral water, rare oshadhis, filled those clefts in the earth. Where they came from no one could tell, save that they did so by Rama’s grace. But they healed anyone who bathed in them, of any ailment. Marukantara became a sacred tirtha on earth.

  Rama’s body still glowed with the power of the astra. Varuna said to him in awe, “I have a vision, Rama. Let me tell you how you can cross over my waves.”

  The Lord of the sea pointed a long, lucent finger at a monkey who stood behind Rama. He said, “That vanara is Nala. He is Viswakarman’s son, and he carries his father’s genius in his blood. Let Nala build a bridge across my waves. I swear it shall not sink and it will bear the weight of the army of vanaras when it marches over me. I bless you, Rama of Ayodhya. My torment of ages has ended. The sins of the Abhiras are not washed in my waters any more, but in the ocean of the stars. I am in your debt, O Kshatriya; you shall cross over me with your army.”

  The sky above that shore had cleared. The storm on the sea had subsided. Varuna bowed to Rama; his smile dazzled the quarters. He turned back into his waves and slowly sank beneath them again with his people, into his submarine domain. Soon the sea was as placid as a lake.

  Rama heaved a sigh and turned back to the vanaras.

  Nala stood shyly at his side, a slim, elegant monkey. He said, “What the ocean said is true. I have my father’s gift. I will build the bridge for you, Rama, and it will sink only if Varuna wills it to. For my bridge shall be strong.”

  Not the sea, not the earth, not the wind or the sky ever forgot the wrath of gentle Rama on that wild shore.

  8. Nalasetu

  Nala stood beside Rama on the southern shore of Bharatavarsha. The young vanara had a smile on his face, and Rama asked him, “What makes you smile, Nala?”

  Nala replied, “My lord, I was just thinking that danda, the way of force, is the best way to achieve what one wants. Whatever he might have said, it was your arrows that fetched Varuna out of his deeps. I did think, earlier, that I might build a bridge to make the crossing to Lanka. But then I wondered how we would keep it afloat. And it would take much longer than a month to build a bridge that rests on the bed of the ocean. But now Varuna has promised to keep our bridge above water. Shall we begin, Rama?”

  Rama said, “Let us begin at once.”

  The vision of a natural bridge came to Nala in inspiration, and he began to issue instructions. It seemed as if the little wood at the foot of the mountain had grown there just to help build this bridge across the sea. The vanaras pulled up its trees, and then the trees that grew on Mahendra. They carried them to Nala, who was busy now, shouting where each trunk should be laid.

  They must first make a pile of rocks on the shore, to be the bridge’s support. Some of the vanaras grew on Mahendra’s slopes: Hanuman and Dwividha, Neela, Angada, and Mainda. Effortlessly they hefted huge boulders and threw them down the mountain, where others caught them as if they were little stones. Nala was everywhere, at the head of the bridge, at its base, in between, telling the vanaras which tree trunk should be set where, and which rock.

  Soon, the foundations of rock and stone had been la
id and shored with timber. Then came the task of extending the bridge across the waves. And now, subtle magic was upon the sea where the vanaras worked. Varuna kept his word to Rama: a channel of perfectly still water stretched away to the horizon before the busy monkeys. No ripple stirred along that channel; it was like a mirror, though on both sides of it the waves swept on as always. In the tranquil groove across the water Sugriva’s people labored, scurrying back and forth between the bridgehead and the land with trees and rocks. Quickly the bridge to Lanka took shape.

  Not a twig of that bridge did the ocean disturb. Under the sun, and later the moon, the monkeys worked tirelessly. On the first day they built fourteen yojanas, and the far end of the bridge was barely visible from the shore any more. Nala neither slept nor rested, and Rama and Lakshmana stood beside him in turns, to encourage and advise him; though he seldom had any doubts about what he was doing. It was as if the undertaking was blessed, indeed: every rock, tree trunk, and branch seemed to have a preordained place, where each one fitted perfectly.

  Those who saw Nala’s bridge say that it spanned the ocean as the Milky Way does the sky. On both sides of it the waves roared; but no spray wet the still channel, and no branch was washed away, no stone sank. The zone in which the vanaras toiled was utterly calm; not even the wind blew there.

  On the second day, growing more expert with every hour, they built twenty yojanas; though now the distance between the shore and the bridgehead was great, and the monkeys formed a long chain to carry their loads.

  At noon of the third day, they saw Lanka’s tallest mountain, Suvela, on the horizon and set up a cheer. But Rama said, “Let us rest now and work again after night falls. If we can see Lanka from here, the rakshasas can see us from Lanka.”

  The Devas of light and the rishis of Devaloka had gathered invisibly in the sky to watch Nala build his bridge. They smiled among themselves that it looked like a parting in a woman’s hair, whose tresses were the endless waves. That night the bridge was completed, and the final rocks and trees were carried across to lie on the Lankan shore. The moon was high above, and the vanaras gathered on the beach at Bharatavarsha.