Chapter 62 — The Court of Yama

Narada gave Yama the warning without ornament.

“Dashagriva is coming,” he said. “He means to bring you beneath his power.”

Yama received the news in the court where he sat before Agni, the fire deity, assigning to the dead the consequences of the lives they had lived. It was not an earthly palace enlarged into a nightmare. Its business was aftermath. The dead arrived there without their armies, households, rank, or power to command obedience. What endured was what each had done.

The court held no single, level fate. Its ways opened in opposed directions. Those who had used their lives generously came to light, music, food, and fine dwellings; those who had given cattle received their abundance, those who had fed others received food, and those who had offered shelter received shelter. Others met the consequences of actions that had injured and destroyed: heat, hunger, fear, and the return of pain. Yama did not invent a new sentence in anger for each arrival. He presided over the order by which conduct bore its fruit.

Later Hindu traditions often picture Chitragupta as Yama's recorder, keeping the account of a person's deeds for judgment. He is not named here. What stands in this account is Yama before Agni and beings receiving the results of their own actions.

Then a radiance moved through the darkness at the edge of that realm. Pushpaka approached, bright as a rising sun; Ravana had brought the aerial palace he had taken from Vaishravana into a place no earthly king could claim as his own.

From it Ravana looked down upon the dead. He saw some suffering under the weight of destructive actions they had done: hungry and thirsty, driven across the Vaitarani, a terrible river of that realm; scorched, cut, and pursued. He saw others receiving the fruit of generosity—food for those who had given food, shelter for those who had given shelter—and others bright with their own earned radiance.

It was not a single undifferentiated punishment. Seeing it gave Ravana no standing to judge it. He saw a moral order that had no need of his consent.

He broke into it anyway.

With force he released beings who were undergoing punishment. For a moment, those he tore away from their appointed suffering found an unexpected relief. Their guards, the fierce servants of Yama, rushed upon him in anger. A cry rose from every direction. Weapons struck Pushpaka in a storm: spears, clubs, tridents, stones. They broke its seats and archways, but the aerial palace, protected by the power invested in it, did not fall apart.

Ravana's ministers met the guards with trees, rocks, and weapons. The battle spread around the vehicle in dust, flame, and the hard noise of metal. Yama's fighters turned from the ministers and converged on Ravana himself.

For a time their assault held him. His armor was torn away; blood ran over him. He left Pushpaka and stood upon the ground, recovering himself by force of will. Then he drew his bow.

“Stand,” he called to the advancing guards. “Stand and face me.”

He set the Pashupata upon the string: a divine weapon terrible in its force. When he released it, flame went before it. It moved through the force gathered against him and burned through the thickets and trees of the field. Yama's soldiers fell beneath its power like a forest consumed by fire.

Ravana and the ministers still with him gave a great roar. In Rama's court, Agastya let the sound hang for a moment. Ravana had torn at a realm of consequence and scattered its visible defenders. Yet he had not encountered Yama himself.