Chapter 24 — Ravana

When Shurpanakha reached Ravana, she did not bring him a simple tale of a sister wronged. She came into his council wounded and furious with the destruction of Janasthana: Khara, Dushana, Trishiras, and the force that had ruled that part of the forest were dead.

“You sit among wealth and pleasure,” she told him, “while danger has risen in your own domain.”

Her accusation was political before it was personal. A ruler who did not know that his own officers and people had been destroyed, she argued, had failed at vigilance. Ravana listened, then asked for the facts. Who was Rama? What did he look like? What weapons did he carry? Why had he come into Dandaka?

Shurpanakha described two young men in bark cloth and animal skin, armed with bows, immense in force, and difficult to read as merely human. Then she described Sita: the wife beside whom they lived, more beautiful than anyone she claimed to have seen, and therefore, she urged, fitted to Ravana rather than to Rama.

“Kill the brothers,” she said, “and take her.”

The speech turned a real assault on Sita and a real military defeat into an invitation to possess what was not his. Revenge and desire began to converge.

Ravana had not come by his power easily.

His father was the sage Vishrava, son of Pulastya. His mother was Kaikasi, whose own father sent her to Vishrava out of a rakshasa line that had lost the power it once held. She bore Vishrava three sons, Ravana, Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana, and a daughter, Shurpanakha. Vishrava had an elder son by another marriage: Kubera, lord of wealth, who held the flying Pushpaka and ruled the island city of Lanka.

The brothers did not turn out alike. Ravana was fierce, ambitious, and capable of enormous discipline. Kumbhakarna was vast in appetite and strength, dangerous enough that the gods were afraid of what he might think to ask for. Vibhishana gave himself to religious practice and asked only that his mind stay joined to dharma, though he had been born among rakshasas.

Ravana had ten heads and twenty arms, a form that made his presence more than human. What he did with that body was take it into the wild and starve it. He fasted for a thousand years, and at the end of the thousand he cut off one of his heads and offered it into the fire, and then began again. He did that nine times.

As he prepared to give the tenth, Brahma came.

Ravana asked first for deathlessness, and was refused. He asked instead that no god, celestial bird, serpent, yaksha, daitya, danava or rakshasa be able to kill him. The daityas were an elder race of beings, kin to the danavas, at odds with the gods from the beginning. Human beings he did not trouble to name; he judged them too slight to be worth the words. Brahma granted him exactly what he had asked for, and restored the heads he had burned.

It made him nearly impossible to kill. It did not make him incapable of error, and it did not put him beyond the reach of what he chose.

His brothers received what they had asked for as well. Kumbhakarna was given the sleep that would take him out of the world for years at a time. Vibhishana was given his steadiness of mind. One family, and in it hunger, discipline, ambition, loyalty and self-command, each waiting to see what power would make of it.

Then Ravana took Lanka. The city was Kubera's, and Ravana sent word demanding that it be yielded to the rakshasas who had held it before him. Kubera went to their father, and Vishrava told him to leave rather than fight his brother. Kubera withdrew to Kailasa with his household, and Ravana entered as king.

From Lanka he ruled a rich island capital, gathered formidable allies, learned everything a king was expected to know, and became renowned for austerity, for command, and for war. He also took what he wanted by force, governed by fear, and turned his strength into injury again and again. The first did not cancel the second.

Once he had shaken Mount Kailasa itself, and Nandi had cursed him for it.

None of this required a false verdict on him. A person could be capable of awe, of discipline, of learning, even of profound devotion, and still make choices that destroyed other people. Ravana heard Shurpanakha's report at the moment when every one of those capacities was about to be turned to possession and revenge.

He left his court and went to find Maricha, who knew from experience what it meant to face Rama.