‘Rama,’ he called out, loud enough to be heard over the cacophony. ‘You must come now, while there is still time. I urge you, my lord. Let me save you.’
Rama finished speaking to Nala, a pale, stunned-looking Nala who was trying his best to listen to the mortal leader while avoiding the sight of the oncoming peril visible behind Rama. Nala nodded briskly, then turned and loped away, calling out in the vanar tongue. Several of his bridge-builder chiefs listened to what he had to say and began calling out as well, passing on the words of Lord Rama. Hanuman did not know whether to feel touched by this show of obedience and faith in the face of certain disaster, or to admire the great loyalty that Rama had come to command in so short a time.
Only then did Rama turn to Hanuman. His care-worn face looked up at the vanar’s towering visage. ‘Maruti, my friend. Save as many as you can. Act now, quickly!’
‘My lord, even at my largest size, I cannot save them all. But if I save you, I may yet achieve something worthwhile. I beg you, Rama. Climb upon my hand and let me take you to the skies.’
Rama smiled wistfully, yet, Hanuman saw, his eyes remained hard and determined. This was Rama the master warrior he had glimpsed in the clearing before the battle of Janasthana, the Rama who would stand and fight to the death against impossible odds rather than flee and save himself. Rama, yodha among yodhas. ‘I stand with my brethren, Anjaneya. It is my place.’
Hanuman looked back over his shoulder. The horizon was a dense charcoal scrawl drawn by an old vanar with a shaking paw. The wave was gathering more water mass as it came, as if it knew that the longer it took to reach the shore, the greater the destruction it would unleash. A wind began to blow without warning, driven towards them by the approaching juggernaut. He felt the chill of distant polar oceans in the touch of that wind, an unnatural chill that ought never to have reached these warm tropical climes. This was no mere wind; it reeked of asura sorcery. He clenched his great teeth in chagrin at the thought of Ravana’s vile act of cowardice: for was it not cowardice to unleash death and destruction from afar, anonymously, instead of showing your opponent your face before striking?
He turned back to face Rama, folding his hands entreatingly. ‘My lord. Reconsider one last time. All these warriors,’ he indicated the melee on the beach and in the palm groves beyond as his comrades fled in as orderly a fashion as they could muster, ‘depend on your leadership. If something should happen to you, how would we go on? Who will rescue your hapless wife Sita from the clutches of Ravana? Who will avenge the wrong and dishonour done unto your family?’
The wind rose fiercely, buffeting Rama and Lakshman hard enough to make them sway. They spread their legs and stood their ground. Near their position, Hanuman saw Sakra struggling to hold his posture erect—in imitation of his brother, as usual— and failing. The little vanar tumbled several times, then regained his footing and crouched down, fighting to stay upright, issuing a string of outraged cheekas at the elements. The chaos on the beach had resolved into something resembling a battle plan, with a surprisingly large number already vanished into the groves. Yet, many remained. Far too many. Hanuman saw, unsurprised, that many of those that were still on the beach were simply standing firm, like Sakra, determined not to run so long as their lord and leader stayed. Angad and Sugreeva were among this number, as were Jambavan and his lieutenants. The bear king was closest to Rama’s position, his dark face inscrutable, bear eyes glinting in the dull, gloamy light. The wind roared, raising sand dervishes that swirled around them all.
Rama shouted to make himself heard above the roaring wind. ‘We cannot all escape in time. And I will not abandon my soldiers to save myself.’
Hanuman stared down in dismay. ‘But you may … ’ he could not bring himself to speak of Rama being killed, ‘ … you may come to harm, my lord, if you stay here.’
Rama’s answer was torn ragged by the storm, but Hanuman was able to catch the frayed words. ‘We are at war, Anjaneya. We would not flee from an army of rakshasas. Why should we flee from the lord of the ocean?’
Hanuman was spellbound by the strength of Rama’s resolve, struck speechless by his conviction in the face of imminent death.
Rama shouted again. ‘Save as many as you can. I make my stand here.’
The pitch of the wind changed then, as if protesting Rama’s unwillingness to bow down, and a veritable typhoon blew across the beach, raising a cloud of sand so blinding that all of them, mortal, vanar and bear, had to cover their eyes and mouths with the backs of their hands and struggle just to remain standing. The howls and cries of fleeing vanars and bears came to Hanuman on the wind, like the ghosts of departed souls screaming on their last journey down to the underworld. He was filled with great despair and frustration on one hand, and great pride and boundless love on the other.
He turned away from Rama and strode out into the ocean, now choppy and ragged in anticipation of the coming tidal wave. The water level had dropped to the extent that the bed of the ocean was bared for several hundred yards out, leaving gasping, thrashing fish and sea creatures beached. At the edge of the new tideline, still receding as he strode out, the foaming water teemed with frenzied sea beings, maddened by their awareness of the coming devastation. He stopped at the tideline, lowering himself to sit on the soft, yielding sand.
He expanded himself as far as he could, refusing to accept any limits. He ignored the banshee shriek of the typhoon, the fury of the ocean churning around him, the whitefins and sea serpents and other devilish creatures of the ocean that bit and stung and jabbed at his body underwater, whether on the command of the lord of Lanka or simply maddened by the storm and chaos, he did not know.
He lay on his side, putting his back to the frothing ocean. He was large enough by then that the water level only came up to his chest. A good hundred feet of his body still rose above the surface. He did not think that would be enough to stop the tidal wave, but it would surely thwart it somewhat.
He could see the beach from where he lay, could just make out Rama and Lakshman’s silhouettes in the garish crimsonand-cerulean-tinted light of the typhoon-shadowed sky. They stood like warriors at the head of an army. The way he had seen them stand on the mound at Janasthana, awaiting the arrival of the rakshasa hordes.
Then he was forced to shut his eyes to keep the wind-flung sand and brine from blinding him. The last thing he saw was the world growing dark. The roaring from behind grew too enormous to comprehend, a sound beyond deafening. His last prayer was that his gigantic body should be enough to protect Rama and the others from the worst of this calamity. Then the wave struck him with the force of a hundred thousand sledgehammers, and he saw no more.
SEVEN
Rama regained consciousness to find himself lying on a grassy patch, palm fronds scattered across his body and face, and sand in his nostrils, mouth, eyes, and ears, a veritable dune formed against the side of his body. He plucked away the palm fronds from his face to find himself staring up at an azure blue sky as clear as crystal. The sound of the ocean washed across the background of his mind, omnipresent, but the absence of other sounds was stark, chilling. No birds called out. No vanars cheekaed or chittered or yelled. No bears grunted or chuffed. No sounds of stones being thrown or sand crunching under a million paws. No sound at all, except the incessant washing of waves on the beach, and the kind of stillness that came after a bloody battle.
He raised himself slowly, seeking out any damage to his person. Apart from a bruised shoulder and several sore spots on his ribs, thighs and hip, he seemed unharmed. He pushed aside the palm fronds and debris and rose unsteadily to his feet.
The first thing that assailed him was the stench of fish. It came on the soft wind that blew from the sea, as if this were just another late summer afternoon and he were rising from an unscheduled nap. The stench was unbearable. Rotten, putrefying, stomach-churning, it resembled the gassy smell from the decaying remains of the beached sea elephant they had come across some days earlier, multiplied a thousand
fold.
He turned around, seeking to get his bearings by spying out the palm groves and the trampled debris of Mount Mahendra, then turned again a second time, until he was back where he had started, facing south. Only then did he understand that the entire landscape had been altered beyond recognition. The grassy patch where he had regained consciousness was in fact the spot where the palm grove had stood, the same bat-ridden grove in which he and Lakshman and the bear and vanar leaders had held their conferences. The grove was razed clear, every single tree uprooted or broken off close to the ground. Looking northwards, he saw that the entire shoreline with its waving masses of palms had been ravaged as well. Bare, denuded grassy patches lay open to the skies, covered with the broken remains of the trees that had once grown there.
And not all the broken remains were of trees.
Rama choked back a cry as he looked down the length of the beach. The sand was covered with corpses as far as the eye could see. It was no less than the aftermath of a battle. Vanars and bears lay alongside, upon and beneath the carcasses of a hundred different varieties of sea creatures. Some were merely fish of different sizes, shapes and colours, others were beasts he had no name for, had never known existed. They were the source of the stench. Their putrefaction was far quicker and more advanced than that of the mammalian corpses. With the sun beating down on the denuded shore, they were decomposing visibly.
Rama staggered across the ravaged beach, seeking out any who might still be alive. All he saw were the dead, shattered, broken, torn-open bodies of his faithful followers. His soldiers. These vanars and bears had dedicated their every waking minute to his work, had committed their very lives to his cause. They had been willing to venture across the most feared place of all their legends—the great sea desert—to invade the most terrible place in all the known world: Lanka. They had been prepared to battle the demon races and face beings many times their size and strength, to wage war until they were all massacred, or until the other side yielded. They had chosen to live and die fighting for him. And now, instead of dying the deaths they deserved, as brave warriors on a battlefield, they had fallen before striking a single blow, struck down by a foe that had no soul, no motive, no cause.
It was not right.
He stood in the midst of that vast desolation, surrounded by more bodies than he could see at one glance, more death than he had seen before in his life, more casualties than were caused by most battles, and he knew that it was not right.
It was not right and he could not tolerate it.
***
‘Varuna.’
Lakshman almost dropped the stone he had been lifting off the body of a bear. The stone was one of several that had been separated from the bridge and washed ashore by the incoming tidal wave. He had not thought the bear could have survived such a weight falling upon it but he had seen the poor creature’s hind paws twitch several times, and had thought that perhaps he or she might still be alive but unable to call for help. So he and a handful of vanars and bears, all ragged and each one injured in some way, had pitted their strength together to raise the slab-like stone—only to find that the bear, poor thing, was quite dead, and the twitching had been caused by a sea creature that was in the pool of water in which the bear lay, thrashing in its last throes of life beneath the bear’s corpse. It was the third such rescue attempt Lakshman had participated in, and all three had turned out thus. He was just about to lower the stone to the ground again when Rama’s cry pierced the deathly still air. The vanar beside him cheekaed, and lost its grip on the stone. Lakshman’s back strained as the extra burden shifted to him.
A moment later, bent over and straining with all his might, he released his hold on the stone at last, stood upright, and turned. His keen eyes easily found Rama’s silhouette striding across the beach, backlit by a gloomy charcoal-grey sky. The air was still rent by the moans and whimpers of thousands of injured and dying creatures, and a veritable cloud of gulls was starting to collect overhead as well as on the fringes of the arc of destruction wrought by the tidal wave. The mindlessness of their cries, seeing the devastation below only in terms of their own selfish need for food, was a cruel requiem to the fallen dead. Lakshman made his way across the beach with grim purpose, his mood matched by the gloom that had fallen upon the world in the wake of the killing wave.
At the edge of the beach littered with countless corpses and the crawling bodies of grievously injured vanars and bears, Rama stood, staring out to sea, his profile windblown and dark, dark even against the stormy grey sky.
A corona of faintly blueish light seemed to shimmer around the outline of Rama’s form, and Lakshman blinked, trying to clear his vision. When it persisted, he took it to be a trick of the erratic light. Rama’s voice rose clear and strong, buoyed by a cold, relentless rage that Lakshman had not heard in his brother’s voice for a long while.
‘Varuna, lord of the ocean,’ Rama called out, in a tone that was neither a shout nor a challenge, merely a command. ‘Show yourself to me. I, Rama Chandra of Ayodhya, son of Dasaratha and grandson of Aja, of the line of Manu and Ikshwaku, going back to Surya Himself … I command you, show yourself!’
Across the ravaged beach, and at the edges of the pathetically denuded land where thickets and groves had once stood, fallen vanars and bears began to stir. Still stunned by the disaster that had befallen them, still grieving for lost comrades and blood-kin, still reeling from the sheer scale of the calamity as well as its unexpectedness, nevertheless they all responded to the voice of their lord and leader. Perhaps some took comfort merely from knowing that Rama was alive and well, that he at least had survived the disaster. Others rallied their shaken morale around the unbowed strength of the mortal warrior.
All responded to the cold steel in Rama’s voice, that tone that could command armies and devastate entire realms, for the myth of Rama was already greater than the reality, and day by day the legends of his deeds grew, embellished and enhanced with each repetition. Regaining their feet slowly, dragging injured limbs, shaking addled heads and gathering scattered wits, they shambled towards the mortal in whose service they had come here to the edge of the known world, to this place where death had decimated their beloved brethren without so much as a battle cry for warning. Shuffling and limping they came, gathering mutely around Rama, a funeral procession with no destination.
‘Varuna,’ Rama called, and this time Lakshman felt that the very sky responded, clouds overhead churning like curds in an earthen pot. Thunder growled somewhere far across the horizon, as if giants asleep beneath the ocean stirred uneasily at Rama’s call. ‘Show yourself!’
And still the ocean remained empty.
Rama raised his hands to the sky in the universal gesture of supplication.
‘If Varuna will not hear me, then you must, O lord of Kailasha. Hear this plea of your servant and your devotee. I call upon you to mete out justice at this unholy act of cowardice. See for yourself, my lord Mahadev, what the ocean lord has wrought here upon this shore today. What destruction he has wreaked upon innocent lives. And at whose urging? Is this right, I ask? Is it meet that he be permitted to unleash such a heartless massacre on behalf of the lord of Lanka? He must pay for this act of transgression! He must pay for it by the loss of his very power itself!’
The sky boiled, clouds churning, and the very air around them all seemed to grow thick with fear. Lakshman stared at his brother in disbelief. Rama’s aspect had turned so awful, he could barely look upon his own brother without blanching. There was an aura of power around Rama that was unmistakable now. That was no trick of the light, it was Brahman shakti itself manifesting itself. He had seen it often enough before to know it for certain. Nor was Rama’s anger mere mortal rage; it was sacred fury. And the very elements were now responding to the righteousness of Rama’s appeal.
Rama went on, his voice the voice of death itself, his tone as cold as a sword’s blade dipped into a glacial pool.
‘Once, the lady Anasuya granted me
a bow,’ he said, in a voice that seemed to carry for yojanas, by what means, Lakshman knew not. He listened, enraptured by the words, and by the force of Rama’s will, speaking directly to the gods themselves. ‘She gave me that great weapon that once belonged to the lord of Vaikuntha, great Vishnu. Use it as if it were your own, she said. And she granted me use of a single arrow as well. That missile that once belonged to Lord Shiva Himself. These weapons she gifted me, and told me to use them wisely in the service of dharma only, never for personal gain or revenge. Even when confronted with an army of fourteen thousand rakshasas in the wilds of Chitrakut, I did not use those weapons. I bade her take them back and keep them safe, so that I might not be tempted to use them for an unrighteous selfish cause.
‘But today, seeing the heinous misuse of his power by Varuna and the grievous suffering of my innocent vanar and bear brethren, I call upon Anasuya the Wise and Beautiful to grant me use of those weapons again. If Varuna has done wrong, and my cause now is just and righteous, then in the name of dharma, let me have the Bow of Vishnu and the Arrow of Shiva once again!’
He was answered by the twin forces of thunder and lightning. The one boomed deafeningly in the dusky sky, so as to make the assembled vanars and bears shudder and clap paws over their eyes and ears in fright. The other snaked down like a living serpent of energy, to strike at a point on the sandy beach mere yards before Rama’s feet. The impact blazed blindingly bright for an instant, searing Lakshman’s mind with an imprint of the whole scene, as if the image were burned into the backs of his eyes themselves. The sky boiled and churned, and all grew so dark that Lakshman had to strain to keep sight of Rama. He saw his brother reach up at the instant the lightning struck, as if he knew it would strike, and when the flash had burned its brightest and faded away, leaving Lakshman dazed and dazzled, Rama stood bearing in one hand a great ancient bow and in the other a single arrow that gleamed and reflected light in diamantine hues, even though there was no light upon this dusk-enshrouded beachfront.
RAMAYANA Part 3_PRINCE AT WAR Page 51