RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR

by AKB eBOOKS Ashok K. Banker

  ‘I doubt that will stop them from swallowing you whole if you attempt to swim across that ocean.’

  Kambunara gazed placidly at the endless horizon-spanning expanse of bright blue water. ‘We did not say we wish to do it, we only said we shall do so if Lord Rama insists upon us doing so.’ He added tartly, ‘And we wished you to know that bears can swim.’

  ‘Yes, but can they float? That’s the question.’

  Rama broke in hurriedly before Lakshman’s natural tendency to sarcasm got him into something more than a mere argument about the swimming talents of bears. ‘Jambavan, why are you opposed to the notion of building ships?’

  Jambavan stopped twitching his ears and regarded Rama patiently. ‘Because, Rama, who will build these ships? Will you go to your countrymen to ask them to construct them?’

  Rama shook his head slowly. ‘Nay, my friend. That I cannot do. I am sworn not to turn back my steps until the completion of my exile.’

  ‘Then who will build them? Us bears? The vanars? You and your brilliant brother here? I do not think we could raise very seaworthy ships between us, and if you propose to teach us, it would take a very long time to build sufficient numbers of ships to convey such a large force, will it not? And even supposing we were to achieve this miracle somehow, no bear will set foot upon one of those water-defying monstrosities.’

  Rama frowned. ‘All your reasons are undisputable, Lord Jambavan. I have no argument with any of them, but for the last. Why would bears not sail upon ships?’

  Jambavan snorted as if the thing were self-evident. His entire entourage snorted in collusion. ‘My mortal friend, it is true what we hear tell of your kind, that you have grown so removed from your roots that you are willing to violate even our mother Prithvi devi herself to further your own interests. We have seen some of these ships of yours being built, for we bears dwell close by your human dwellings oftentimes, as you humans seem to multiply and spread like a plague through the world. You murder living things in order to build ships, do you not?’

  ‘Living things?’ Rama was perplexed. Then he understood. ‘You mean trees.’

  ‘Do they not breathe and grow and flower and fruit and multiply like other living beings? Do we not agree that they possess spirits and souls just as we ambulatory creatures do? And do you not hack them down with enormous bladed things, then chop their bodies into sections and then mangle and denude those sections until you finally have pieces suitable for your purposes? How many trees do you kill to build one ship?’

  ‘I … I am not sure,’ Rama admitted, completely at a loss.

  ‘You will kill none for this crossing. Let us be agreed upon that.’

  Lakshman sighed, clearly irritated by the argument. ‘In any case, there’s no possible way we can obtain so many ships, or even build rafts to carry us all across.’

  ‘Yes,’ Rama said, relieved at being given an easy escape route. He was afraid that Jambavan’s tirade would soon extend itself to mortal dwellings next, for most Arya houses were constructed of living wood. ‘In any case, we must find some other means of crossing.’ He turned to the towering vanar beside him who had stood silently all this while. ‘Hanuman, do you have any ideas?’

  Hanuman was silent for another moment. Everyone waited for his answer. Even the bears fell silent and waited respectfully.

  Rama desired greatly to know all the things that had befallen his vanar friend since taking his leave of them at Rishimukha. Not only had Hanuman changed so drastically in appearance and mental make-up, he had earned the respect of all the vanars and bears. That kind of respect was not earned easily. Nor did a mere messenger rise to the stature of more-than-a-general in so short a time by normal means. There must be a remarkable story behind Hanuman’s transformation. He resolved to learn the tale when he could.

  Finally, Hanuman shook his snout sadly. ‘I am sorry, Rama. But it cannot be done.’

  Rama’s heart fell. ‘Cannot? But it must be done! The only way to Sita is across that ocean.’

  ‘Yes, Rama, but as you have just agreed, ships are impossible to build. Swimming is out of the question. With due respect to my bear friends, Lord Varuna’s domain is no saltspring to be waded across. Why, we do not even know how far it is to Lanka. All we do know from our flying friends like the late great Jatayu, who is much mourned, and his cousin Sampati, whom we encountered in our travels—’

  ‘One moment,’ Rama interrupted. ‘You met a cousin of Jatayu?’

  ‘Yes, Rama. We did. His name is Sampati, and he gave us much useful information. It is thanks to his generosity of knowledge that we were able to detect the closest point to Lanka and find this spot, Mount Mahendra. For Ravana’s asura maya would have led us astray to a point where it would have been impossible to cross the ocean.’

  ‘But you just said that it is impossible to cross the ocean from here as well,’ Lakshman said, frowning.

  Hanuman shook his head slowly. ‘I said that it cannot be done by the means that have been described thus far. Namely, by ship or by swimming. I did not say we cannot cross the ocean at all. As Rama reminded us all, our lady Sita lies there, across this very ocean. We must cross it to free her from that demonlord’s clutches.’

  ‘Then how do you propose we do it?’ Lakshman asked, in a manner that was more challenge than query.

  Hanuman took no offence at Lakshman’s tone or manner, perhaps because, like Rama, he understood the strain under which Lakshman strived. ‘This place we see below,’ he pointed at a little jutting finger of land that stretched out from the bay below, made of the same blackrock as the cliff on which they stood, ‘marks the closest point to Lanka. From that place to the shores of Lanka is a distance of some two and a half yojanas, by our winged friend Sampati’s reckoning. At best, let us assume three yojanas.’

  ‘At best,’ Lakshman repeated sharply, ‘you mean at worst! Three yojanas would make it close to thirty miles of ocean to cross! You haven’t told us a way to get across. You have just defined how impossible it really is!’

  ‘Pray, brother Lakshman, allow me to finish,’ Hanuman said calmly.

  Rama shot Lakshman a glance. Lakshman caught the look and held his breath. Rama noted that everyone else was listening closely to every syllable Hanuman uttered.

  ‘As we already agree, it is impossible to cross that ocean. But while it cannot be crossed, it can indeed be breached. By a bridge.’

  ‘A bridge?’ This time it was Rama who spoke involuntarily. He could not help himself. The idea was so incredible. ‘A bridge extending thirty miles over the ocean?’

  ‘Just so,’ Hanuman said.

  Rama waited for him to go on. But the vanar seemed to feel he had said all that needed to be said. Rama said doubtfully, ‘Hanuman, even if our bear friends did not object to our cutting down the trees that would be needed to make such a bridge, and even if we could find a way to engineer such a great construction, there is no bridge, no matter how great or how cleverly engineered, that could stand over an open expanse of thirty miles! Even the great Mithila bridge is no more than a hundred yards in span and it is considered a marvel of architectural—’

  He stopped. Hanuman was looking at him oddly. He glanced around and saw that the others were also frowning and shaking their heads at his words. ‘Did I say something wrong?’

  ‘Rama,’ Hanuman said gently. ‘We are not speaking of a wooden bridge. We do not have any knowledge of such things so it would be pointless even attempting it. Nay, my lord. We are speaking of building a bridge of simple rock.’ He pointed down at the ground on which he stood, at a bald patch where the coal-black bedrock was exposed through the grass and weeds, gleaming dully in the harsh afternoon sunlight. ‘This hardy blackrock will serve our purpose well. Sampati said that the strait here is the shallowest for yojanas around. At places, it is only a few dozen yards deep. All we need do is break and carry the blackrock and boulders and throw them in the sea until they rise higher than the water. And we shall have our bridge to Lanka. Rama�
�s bridge.’

  NINE

  Mandodhari awakened in her bower to find the day turned to night. Or perhaps it had been night when she slept and she had slept the day away to awaken the next night. Perhaps it was really day now but appeared to be night. She could not tell the difference. The light in the tower was controlled by the Pushpak and the Pushpak had the power to make it seem night when it was day and vice versa.

  Yet at this moment, looking out from the floor-to-ceiling wall of glass at the sun newly risen above the northern ranges of Lanka in the distance, its slanting rays gleaming down upon the peaks and rooftops of the city below, it was impossible to tell whether she was seeing the true image of the world without or merely an illusion portrayed by the celestial vahan. She had ceased trying to tell the difference. It was easier to accept the evidence of her senses and live by that evidence than to question even the most fundamental realities of day and night, cold and hot, summer and winter, for within this enclosed self-sufficient universe the Pushpak controlled everything, even weather, climate and the substance of things, like a god supreme in its own plane of existence.

  Except, of course, that the Pushpak was no god, merely a god’s device, a celestial plaything. And Ravana was its master.

  She sat on the edge of her flower-soft bed. The bed itself was shaped like an enormous lotus, and felt as soft and smelled as fragrant to the senses as a giant lotus. To complete the illusion, the entire bed floated upon a pool of crystal clear water in which real lotuses drifted, their pink flowers unfurling and blossoming at the first caress of sunlight—surely the Pushpak could not trick lotuses into mistaking its artificial emissions for real sunlight? But that was assuming the lotuses themselves were real. She rose slowly to her feet, sighing softly. After only a few steps, she looked back at the bed she had just vacated. Its yards-wide yards-long expanse lay empty, as it usually was when she awoke. She never knew when her husband left her side or how long he had been gone. But his nightly disappearances was a small thing in the face of thirteen years of not having him in her bed. It was the only reason she did not question where he went or what he did and with whom, although she had a fairly good idea. He had never been a monogamous husband, for it was not the rakshasa way, and since he was not only lord of the race but its propagator as well, it was not only necessary but honourable for him to spread his seed freely. That had never troubled her. It was the suspicion of his other preoccupations that did. And it was to confirm or deny those very suspicions that she had finally let him coax her into coming to live with him here, in this towering white palace—or was it a palatial white tower?— leaving behind her more traditional rockhewn apartments in the caverns beneath Mount Nikumbhila where she had spent the past thirteen years.

  She stood and stepped off the bed onto the white carpeted floor.

  The bower was large, its ceilings vaulting, a dozen or more yards high, and circular shaped. The walls encircling it were all of the same glasslike substance, polished to near-perfect transparency, and as she left the little platform on which the lotus bed rested, her feet sank into the deep soft pile of pristine white pelt that covered every inch of the floor. The carpeting might have been snow tiger pelt, but she could not imagine where one might begin to seek out so many snow tigers bearing such perfect unblemished pelts. It would take a thousand such immaculate specimens to carpet this bower alone. And snow tigers were not found in Lanka, only in the distant slopes of the Himalayan ranges, across the ocean, and a thousand miles north. Until she came here to live in the white tower, she had only heard tell of snow tiger pelts, never seen one with her own eyes before. And even now, she reminded herself, she might not have seen one yet.

  But the illusion was perfect. Stepping barefoot across the whitefur floor, freshly risen from a deep, long sleep, she felt as if she were cloudwalking. Stepping on the insubstantial substance of the heavens themselves. This was what it was supposed to feel like to walk the roads of Swargaloka, where the paving of the paths was celestial grass, and the grass itself was burnished gold. Mandodhari walked a complete circle, circumnavigating her bower, until she had returned to the north-east facing side. She stood there a moment, basking in the sunlight, then began to prepare for her morning ritual.

  She had barely begun her first suryanamaskara, the elaborate yogic posture by which one greets the newly risen day, literally a sun-greeting, when a voice broke her concentration.

  ‘Mistress … ’

  A shudder racked Mandodhari. She faltered, caught herself in time, and gently unwound her limbs from the asana. The first time a disembodied voice had come drifting through her chambers thus, she had been startled out of her wits, spilling an entire bowl filled with pomegranate juice across herself, staining her trademark white garments beyond salvage. For all her years of being married to one of the greatest users of asura maya, she had never been able to develop a liking for sorcery, let alone embrace it the way so many rakshasas did these days. But unlike the mysterious shakti of the Pushpak, at least she understood asura maya, and was familiar with its conventions, rituals and illusions. Through the use of sacred Sanskrit shlokas, two-line rhymed verses of power-coded syllables in unique combinations, asura maya invoked the powers of various deities to achieve some specific purpose. So, for instance, a shloka praising and invoking Lord Vayu, governing deity of wind, could, if rendered correctly by the right user, persuade him to calm a storm, or raise one, depending on one’s requirement. The greater the task required to be accomplished, the more powerful the shloka required, the more dedicated the recitation, and the more powerful the incantator. So, for instance, for her own husband to attain a boon from Lord Shiva himself, the Destroyer, it took a thousand years of painful penance to obtain the required shloka, and that shloka could only be uttered over Ravana by Shiva himself. The shloka in that case had conferred the gift of indestructibility upon Ravana. There were laws governing the use and misuse of such power-wielding, and despite the difference in names, Arya shakti and asura maya were by and large the same thing.

  But this was something altogether different.

  The white tower had no doors or windows. Instead, the Pushpak sensed where one desired to go and opened routes to facilitate one’s progress. This was unsettling enough to someone who was accustomed to living in cavernous chambers carved out of solid bedrock, but more disturbing was the manner in which the Pushpak could detect when someone was seeking you out and convey that person’s voice directly to you, regardless of the distance between the two of you. So, for instance, the voice Mandodhari was hearing, she recognised as belonging to one of her sakhis, the class of inherited servitors thus euphemistically referred to as ‘friends’.

  ‘Mistress, a dream. I must have words with you at once. Pray, milady, let me in.’ She recognized the voice as belonging to Trijata, one of her oldest sakhis and a rakshasi with rare clairvoyant abilities.

  Another voice added in wary confusion, ‘Where the devil is the doorway? It was right here the last time I came, only yesterday.’ This was Vikata, a particularly ill-tempered sakhi that Mandodhari tolerated only because of her efficacy in keeping the male rakshasas of the royal household in check. She could hear other voices speaking as well: Champadari, Praghasa and Vikuti. Together, the five of them comprised her entire inner circle of sakhis, since rakshasas tended to group in packs of six, the same as the number of digits they had on each limb.

  The voices were so clear and close, they might have been only yards away. But though she was scouring the entire chamber, she could see no sign of them.

  A voice spoke inside her mind. It was the voice of the Pushpak. It used no words to communicate, yet she was able to understand its message clearly enough. It was asking her if she wished to permit entry to the five sakhis. But in place of their names, it projected images of their faces into her mind.

  She shuddered, uncomfortable at this invasion of her privacy by a thing, a machine that possessed no heart, lungs or vital organs, only pure divine shakti.

  �
��Yes,’ she forced herself to say. ‘Allow them to enter.’

  She remembered belatedly that with the Pushpak she did not even have to speak the wish aloud, simply will it. It was something else she was not able to accustom herself to.

  A portal opened in the far wall of the bower. Framed in the oval opening, five startled rakshasis stood a moment, then caught sight of their mistress within and surged forward. Predictably, fair-skinned Vikata strode ahead of the group, her thickly muscled arms swinging ponderously, her massive thighs quivering with each step. Her face was a garish painting, decorated with every unguent and cosmetic known to rakshasas. You would think she would be thought ugly, monstrous, ogress-like, and generally fearsome to most males. Instead, she was considered the epitome of desirability among the Lankans, the most pursued of all the palace sakhis. In contrast, Mandodhari herself, wheatish almost to the point of being called dark, slender and curved not unlike a mortal woman, was considered unattractive and ‘mannish’ among rakshasas.

  ‘It’s nothing, mistress. Trijata’s had another of her wretched dreams,’ Vikata said in her rasping voice, glancing around suspiciously at the bower. ‘What the devil? Mistress, this place looks different every time I come here. Have you changed something?’

  Mandodhari didn’t bother explaining—for the umpteenth time—about the Pushpak’s constant self-initiated alterations.

  Instead, she raised her arms to receive the elderly albino rakshasi who was walking with the aid of two other sakhis, visibly weakened and shaken by her sleep-vision. ‘Trijata, my dear one, was it so bad, then? Come, come to me.’

  The elderly rakshasi embraced her mistress with a fierce strength that belied her decrepit appearance. ‘Forgive me if I disturbed your slumber, milady. But I had to see you at once.’ She glanced around the chamber fearfully, not to note the change in design or decor as Vikata had done, but to make sure that the master of the house was not present. Trijata harboured a perpetual fear of Ravana, for he had a longstanding loathing of all clairvoyants and had even outlawed future-reading in Lanka. The ban went so far as to prohibit even speculative trading, the most harmless hoarding that merchants indulged in to benefit from expected price rises. The only reason Trijata was permitted to survive, and to live beneath Ravana’s own roof, was thanks to Mandodhari’s patronage. She had no doubt that the day she turned her back on the frail old sakhi, Ravana would have her fed to the wolves. Literally, for the wolfhead clan regarded living rakshasi flesh as a rare delicacy and families with egregious numbers of children, or wives, or husbands, and so on, were often known to sell off a couple or three in exchange for a fat bag of goldegles, the Lankan currency. In her more brutal moments, Vikata often reminded Trijata that she had been valued at a mere thirteen goldegles and was depreciating every passing day.