Chapter 72 — Hanuman Before the Sun

When Agastya had finished the story of Vali, Rama spoke with Hanuman before him. Vali and Ravana, he said, had possessed extraordinary strength; yet no strength, no speed, no judgment seemed to equal Hanuman's. Hanuman had crossed the ocean when the vanara host had despaired, entered Lanka alone, found and spoken with Sita, and returned through the enemy's fire. He had carried Rama's ring to the captive queen and brought back her answer; he had stood beside Lakshmana in battle and had borne the mountain of healing herbs when time was closing around his friend. Why, then, had he not known the whole of his power when Sugriva suffered under Vali?

Agastya answered that the reason lay in Hanuman's childhood.

Kesari, he said, ruled among the vanaras on Mount Sumeru, and Anjana was his beloved wife. Vayu, the Wind, became father to their son. The child was not born into a quiet inheritance. He had movement in him from the beginning: the restlessness of wind, the quickness that later carried him across the sea, and a force too large for the small body that first contained it.

One day Anjana went into the forest to gather fruit. The child was left hungry. The morning was newly opened over the heights, and when he looked up he saw the rising sun, red as a great blossom or a ripe fruit at the edge of the sky. He did not know distance. He did not know what heat or height could do. He saw only something bright enough to desire.

He leapt for it.

The child flew upward with a force that astonished gods, danavas, and perfected beings who saw him. The slopes and trees fell away beneath him; the sky opened without a road before him. Vayu followed his son, keeping the air around him cool against the sun's heat. The Sun also saw that the child did not understand his danger and did not burn him. Higher and higher Hanuman went, reaching toward the brightness that had caught his hungry eye.

That same day Rahu, a celestial being associated with eclipses, had come toward the Sun. Hanuman brushed against him, mistaking him in turn for something he might grasp. Frightened, Rahu fled to Indra. The complaint was not merely that a child had startled him. In the order of the heavens, Rahu had come for what was assigned to him; now another being had reached toward the Sun in his place. He told Indra that a second Rahu had taken his food.

Indra, king of the gods, went to see. He rode Airavata, his great elephant, with Rahu before him. Airavata's vast pale body moved through the upper air, four-tusked, adorned like a royal creature of the divine court. Hanuman saw it and again thought of fruit. The hungry child left the Sun for this greater shape and rushed toward it.

Indra saw the danger of the charge. He was not enraged beyond measure, but he struck the child with the vajra, his thunderbolt weapon. The blow sent Hanuman down upon a mountain. His left jaw was broken in the fall.

The event carried a wound into the name by which the world would know him, but at that moment he was only a child fallen from the sky. Vayu reached him first. He gathered the wounded child into a cave and held him close. The force that had followed Hanuman upward in protection now faced a harm it could not undo by speed alone.

Grief turned to anger. Vayu withdrew from the living world, and breath left its creatures. Bodies stiffened; rites fell silent; gods, humans, gandharvas, and other beings knew the pressure of air no longer moving within them. Wind is the life-moving breath within bodies. Without it, the living world became still as wood and the ritual sounds that bind a community to its duties could no longer be made.

The beings afflicted by this stillness went to Brahma, the creator, with hands joined. They asked what had brought the suffering upon the worlds. Brahma told them the cause: Indra had struck down Vayu's son after hearing Rahu's appeal. Then they went with Brahma to the father whose anger had stopped the breath of all creatures.

So Brahma led the gods, gandharvas, serpent-beings, and other gathered powers to the cave where Vayu held the child. The injury to one small body had revealed how much of the world depended on his care. There Agastya paused: the injury had been done, but the answer to it had not yet been given.