Chapter 65 — The Women Ravana Took

Ravana left Varuna's dwelling pleased with himself. He had not met the lord of the waters, but he carried away the sound of his own name as though it were proof enough. Pushpaka turned toward Lanka, bright above the roads and kingdoms below.

Along that return, his violence took another form. When Ravana saw a woman he wanted—among human beings, nagas, yakshas, rakshasas, daityas, danavas, or the communities of the gods and gandharvas—he seized her. When her kin resisted, he killed them and had her placed in Pushpaka. The aerial palace filled with women taken from homes, households, and journeys interrupted by force.

Their grief did not disappear into the splendor of the vehicle. They wept for parents, brothers, husbands, children, and the households torn apart behind them. Some asked what injury in another life had brought them to this ruin. Others spoke more clearly of the injury before them: a powerful being who called his violence strength and could not recognize the wrong he did.

“He will die because of a woman,” they said among themselves. The passage allows their condemnation to stand. Ravana entered Lanka amid welcome from his own people, but the women he had taken had already named the consequence that would one day return to him.

At the palace, his sister Shurpanakha came before him in grief. This was not the Shurpanakha whom Rama would later meet in Dandaka, where her own desire, anger, and choices would help drive a catastrophe. In Agastya's account she first appears here as a widow accusing her brother.

“You have made me a widow,” she said. “Among the Kalakeyas you killed Vidyujjihva, my husband. In battle you were no protector to your own kin.”

Ravana did not deny the killing. He said that in the fury of combat, bent on victory and loosing arrows, he had not distinguished his own people from his enemies. The admission was not an apology equal to the loss. He promised her wealth and honor, then proposed another arrangement.

Her cousin Khara, a formidable rakshasa, would rule beside her. Ravana sent him at once to Dandaka, the vast forest region in which Rama, Sita, and Lakshmana would later live in exile. Dushana would command Khara's forces: fourteen thousand shape-changing rakshasas, sent to hold the forest for their lord.

Khara went with that host. He established his authority in Dandaka, and Shurpanakha remained there. Agastya's backward-looking story paused on a fact that had long been hidden beneath the later forest encounter: the force Rama would face had been planted there by Ravana's earlier campaigns, and its beginning lay in violence Ravana himself neither repaired nor understood.