PRINCE IN EXILE Read online

  Jatayu issued further sounds of incredulity and amazement, its oozing wounds momentarily forgotten as it marvelled at the perfection and beauty of the flying vehicle.

  Vibhisena gently repeated his last question. ‘How did you survive, my friend? What miracle shielded you from the devastation wrought by the Brahm-astra?’

  Jatayu explained how it had been flying with its warrior brethren high above the clouds on Ravana’s instructions–so as not to be seen by the mortals until the very time of the attack. How it had issued the order to descend and fall upon the city of Mithila, and had seen its fellows plunge down steeply, itself staying back the better to watch the first wave of assault and judge the results. How the towering blue wave had appeared, sweeping across the assembled asura hordes, blasting them on contact into wheeling clouds of grey ash, destroying Jatayu’s winged brethren as well, and of how the bird-lord had watched, dazed and amazed, until the instant the wave had passed immediately below, striking it with a force like it had never felt before in all its centuries of existence. The next thing it knew was that it was many hours later and it was lying woefully wounded upon a rocky clearing scores of miles away, being fed upon by ravenous asura parasites, stragglers that invariably followed in the wake of the asura armies and fed upon the mortal and asura dead alike after battles. If Vibhisena counted them as survivors, then those offal had survived, only because they followed so slowly and far behind that the Brahman wave had not reached them.

  Vibhisena nodded, sighing as the bird-lord finished hoarsely with a string of curses directed at the rodents who had assaulted his unconscious form. Jatayu was crouched over the side of the Pushpak, its vulturish head craned down to Vibhisena’s face level.

  It asked in a cracking voice, ‘And what brings you to this site of devastation, brother of the Lord of Lanka? Did you seek to count the dead? They are gone! Washed away by ganga-jal like chimney soot in a monsoon thundershower.’

  Vibhisena shook his head, gesturing at the ground below. ‘Nay, lord of skies. I am here on a request from my sister-in-law Mandodhari, who asked me to seek out my brother and ascertain his demise, if so.’

  ‘Ravana is dead,’ replied Jatayu sharply, his bird eyes glinting in the brightening sunlight, their wide orbs catching and throwing back the glitter of the golden flanks of the Pushpak. ‘He was on the ground, right in the path of the Brahm-astra’s assault. No asura could have survived.’

  ‘And yet,’ Vibhisena said softly, ‘my brother is no ordinary asura. That is why, even though a mere rakshasa, by no means the most ferocious or lethal of the asura races, he has reigned supreme for so many millennia.’

  Jatayu snorted, flecks of blood-tinged emission dripping from its nostrils. ‘Supreme or no, he is gone now. I tell you, not a single one survived. Every last one of our forces was turned to ash the instant the wave touched them.’

  ‘And you saw my brother turned to ash as well, with your own eyes?’

  Jatayu paused, rubbing at an oozing wound over its right eye with the underside of one enormous wing. ‘There was nothing to see. One moment there was an asura army as had never been assembled since the beginning of time; the next instant it was a wasteland of ashes and dust.’

  Vibhisena sighed, resting his hand on the railing of the Pushpak. ‘Even so, my friend, I must search a while longer. My good sister-in-law Mandodhari refuses to grieve until she sees her husband’s corpse with her own eyes. And until she grieves, all of Lanka must wait in stasis.

  Jatayu craned its neck suddenly, its many itches and wounds forgotten again as if some new thought had occurred to it. ‘You say you are Ravana’s brother? Does that make you his heir as well? Is not a brother ahead of a son in line of succession?’

  ‘It is as you say, bird-lord. If Ravana is indeed dead, then I shall ascend to the throne of Lanka. Even after me, Ravana’s sons would not yet ascend, for we have one more brother.’

  ‘One more?’

  ‘Yes. But he sleeps incessantly, so he would have escaped your sight on your infrequent visits to Lanka, sent forth on Ravana’s orders to spy on the mortals as you often are. His name is Kumbhakarna and he is the youngest of us three, so I am ahead in line of succession.’

  The expression that appeared on Jatayu’s face at these words was not one that Vibhisena could have put a name to. Neither human nor birdlike, it was a strange mixture of anger and frustration, greed and hope. ‘So then you will be my new master? You will raise a new army in time and lead the asuras again against the mortals?’

  Vibhisena smiled gently, his face warm in the sunshine. ‘Nay, my winged one. I am no warrior. Nor do I have any enmity with mortals. I will be content to turn my people towards penitence and tapasya, in the hope that some day the devas may forgive us our many transgressions and restore us once more to the status of demi-mortals. Part of the great cycle of karma and dharma again.’

  Jatayu gazed at the rakshasa for so long, Vibhisena began to fear the bird-beast had lost its damaged voice at last. Then the vulture-king said, the wonder in its tone unmasked by the harshness of its voice, ‘How could a fiend like Ravana have a brother such as yourself?’

  Before Vibhisena could reply, the Pushpak came to a halt with a shuddering motion. At once, a terrible grinding sound began to rise from the earth below, and the sky-chariot was buffeted by winds as fierce as any ocean gale.

  THREE

  Jatayu screeled and released its hold on the top railings, flapping its wings hard, adding to the force of the wind already blowing. Vibhisena clutched the railing tightly with both hands, fearing he would be blown out of the vehicle. He called out to the bird-lord, shouting above the screaming of the wind.

  ‘Fear not, my friend. Pushpak is attuned to the heartbeat of its master. Its stopping here can only mean one thing, that it has found Ravana’s remains.’

  Jatayu’s answering cry was louder and harsher. The bird-beast sounded enraged at Vibhisena’s words. The wind of its wings battered Vibhisena hard, threatening to cast him overboard. Yet the rakshasa held on staunchly, and after a moment the wounded bird-beast regained its perch atop the flying chariot with a final screel of reluctance.

  Vibhisena braced himself to look down. With an instinctive gesture of appeal to the devas he worshipped in defiance of all the laws, traditions and sentiments of his own race, the pious rakshasa gazed over the side of the Pushpak at the ground below, seeking out his brother.

  A wind rose from nowhere, bringing a chill that made a mockery of the bright spring sunshine. Clouds appeared in a clear sky, racing across the sun, casting giant monstrous shadows across the land. The new tendrils of growth shooting up out of the ground slowed and ceased their emergence. The stench of death, blood and iron and the pungent reek of male seed rose like a miasma from the patch of earth beneath the hovering Pushpak. Vibhisena stared down, unable to believe his eyes.

  ‘Ra-va-na!’

  Jatayu’s plaintive cry filled the air for miles around, rising to the cloud-enshrouded sky like a lament to broken gods. The cry sent a chill through Vibhisena’s heart. He felt the bird-lord’s frustration and rage. Only moments ago, Jatayu had been dreaming of freedom; freedom from Ravana and his Prithviconquering ambitions, his sadistic and humiliating leadership, his brutal ways and indomitable will. Vibhisena himself had been dreaming similar dreams; not just for himself the way Jatayu had, but for all Lanka. He had had a dream, a dream of a Lanka that lived in harmony with the rest of Prithvi-lok, that some day, through the goodness of its actions and the sincerity of its reparations, rejoined the rest of the mortal plane and abjured its demonaic history for ever.

  Now he feared that he might have dreamed too much too soon.

  Vibhisena continued to gaze down from the Pushpak. The chariot hovered in mid-air, about five yards above the surface of the ground. The area below the vehicle was unlike the rest of the land around it. While the rest had been cleansed of its asura ash by the purifying waters of the Ganga rain, this patch remained ash-grey, scorched and charred. T
he patch was no more than six yards long by three yards wide, yet it was a blot on the entire gangetic plain. The wisps of fetor that rose like steam off its scarred and ruined surface withered the stalks of new shoots nearby, wilting newborn buds before they could bloom, rotting holes in newly grown leaves. There was no question at all that whatever lay here, it was neither purified nor cleansed. If anything, it still retained the potency to corrupt the land entire, like a seed of blackness waiting to sprout and darken the earth.

  Even sacred ganga-jal and Brahman power could not cleanse this patch. Such is the power of Ravana, even in death. Deva save us all from his tyranny.

  Vibhisena felt his voice tremble as he issued a command to the flying chariot in the secret code-tongue that Ravana had taught him. At once, the underside of the Pushpak began to glow with a fierce white light, the beam directed downwards at the patch of blighted earth. The beam shone as thickly as a shaft of solid whiteness, a perfect marblesque pillar with only a shimmering at its periphery to indicate its lack of substance.

  The pillar of white light descended solidly to the ground, then made contact with the surface.

  A deafening impact exploded into the morning sky. Suddenly, the world turned dark as twilight, the sun blotted out by a force as powerful as the Brahman mantra that had brought the gangajal rain only hours earlier. The sky rolled and seethed with ominous colours like a vast backlit cyclorama in a Sanskrit drama: some tragic epic of warring devas and asuras. Colours at the lower end of the spectrum–garish crimsons, purples, cerulean blues–flashed and rolled across the horizon. Explosions of blinding white light burst from the pores of the patch of blighted earth as the pillar of light bored its way relentlessly into the ground. As the pillar went down, penetrating the protesting earth, ash-grey dust billowed up, spattering Vibhisena and Jatayu, blinding their vision. The giant bird-beast screeled in terror and panic and flapped its mighty wings again, churning up even more dust and ash and earth. Still the pillar of light went down, down. Sods of blighted earth began to fly up, as if churned by an invisible plough, coating the burnished gold of the celestial chariot, besmirching Vibhisena’s face and person, drawing enraged cries from the bird-lord perched above.

  With a final burst of effulgence, the drama of light and noise reached a climax, and as suddenly as it had begun, the spectacle ended. The world was abruptly still. Like the stillness after the first blow of a hurricane and before the arrival of the true storm. The calm at the centre of the eye of chaos.

  Vibhisena forced himself to look down again, struggling to see through the suddenly dense and polluted air. He was about to call to the Pushpak to cease drilling when the chaos below resolved into a clearer insight. What he saw stilled his speech and froze his heart.

  At the bottom of a deep pit scored by the pillar of white light there lay a block of what appeared to be solid red marble. Its surface was criss-crossed by a fine tracery of pink veins that glowed from within. Inside this illuminated slab lay an object, trapped like a primordial insect in crimson amber. As Vibhisena watched wordlessly, he heard a choked cry from Jatayu above him. The bird-beast had seen it too.

  The beam from the Pushpak grew unbearably strong, too bright to look into directly, and Vibhisena had to shield his vision and squint until his eyes were thin slits. A grinding sound rose from the pit, as if the pillar of light were grinding away the sides of the ditch, widening them to allow room for the stone block to be raised. And the earth itself seemed to resist. As Vibhisena strained to see through the flying mud and dust and searing light, he saw the earth on all four sides of the stone block falling into the ditch now, filling it as fast as the light pillar could excavate it. Yet the pillar continued its work relentlessly. Mud and sods flew out of the ditch in an endless upward rain as the celestial vehicle and the very earth battled. But why would the earth resist? Why would it want to keep that object within its belly?

  The answer came to Vibhisena as another flash of searing light exploded from the ground below.

  It’s Prithvi-maa herself, the spirit of the earth. She seeks to swallow up the remains of Ravana whole, to digest them and send them deep down into the bowels of her planetary body. To bury them for ever.

  And yet, even as the realisation came to him, the earth shuddered one last time with a moan of protest that was shockingly human, and the stone block came free of the soil in which it was imbedded with a sudden jerk. It rose slowly on the shaft of white light, that now acted as a passageway. As the stone slab moved steadily upward, Vibhisena saw that even now the earth still fought to retain hold of it, to bury it again. Soil rained down on it from every side with the ferocity of waterfalls tumbling from a Himalayan glacier. But the shakti of the celestial chariot was beyond resisting now, and the stone block rose inexorably.

  Finally, the block emerged out of the ditch. The instant it rose above the surface, the hole it had left behind filled rapidly, growing brimful with earth. The surrounding earth seeped across the blighted patch like water spilled across a spot of wine, diluting and cleansing the darker soil. The purified earth overwhelmed the ruined soil, scouring it clean as effectively as the rain of ganga-jal had scoured the entire country earlier. With it, the very last traces of the asura invasion passed for ever into oblivion. The earth replenished itself.

  Only then did Vibhisena have a chance to look closely at the stone block. It was rising higher, even as the Pushpak itself rose higher. The chariot shot upward into the sky a hundred yards, then a thousand, then two thousand, pulling the stone slab beneath it. Then the world became a blur and Vibhisena was forced to close his eyes to keep from fainting dead away. Above him, Jatayu’s head was forced down over the side of the sky chariot, compelled by the pressure of their rapid ascent. For once, no sound escaped the bird-beast’s beak, but its eyes met Vibhisena’s and the rakshasa saw that the bird-lord was terrified witless.

  He dreads what lies in that stone block more than he feared being destroyed by the Brahm-astra.

  After what seemed like an interminable time, Vibhisena dared to open his eyes once more.

  The Pushpak had risen to a great height, far above the clouds. And now it was travelling southwards, acting of its own volition as it sometimes did. Even as he looked down in amazement, the celestial vehicle gained speed until it was shooting along with a velocity even an arrow would have been hard pressed to match. The earth blurred beneath its passing. Glancing back over his shoulder, Vibhisena saw that the gangetic plain had once more returned to its normal state, green and replete with new growth everywhere, the sky brilliantly sunlit and cloudless for as far as he could see. It fell behind with dizzying speed, and he turned to look ahead. A pale blue line blurred past below, and he knew that they had passed the Ganga and crossed over into the wild lands south of the Arya nations. A faint sensation of regret plucked at his heart. He had come so close to finding salvation … Now, the humps of hill ranges, the green carpet of forests, the steely-blue of lakes all shot past below at a blinding pace. Had the Pushpak not been capable of protecting its passengers from the force of its passage, he would been blown off the helm of the vehicle.

  He glanced up at Jatayu and saw that the bird-beast too was secure in the protective shield of the chariot, its large scarletand-black claws clinging fiercely to the top railings.

  At this rate, Vibhisena knew, they would be in Lanka before noon, perhaps even earlier if the chariot increased its speed. It did not surprise him; the vehicle had brought him north just as rapidly earlier this morning.

  At last he was able to spare a moment to look down at the burden they carried. Still fixed to its underside by the supernatural pillar of white light, the stone block rode beneath the chariot as if fixed with invisible ropes. Vibhisena leaned over the edge, unafraid of falling, knowing that the Pushpak would protect him, and examined the stone block closely.

  It was the size that the patch of land had been, about six yards by three. But the being trapped within it like an insect in amber was relatively smaller, perha
ps three yards in length, and a yard wide. At one end, though, the creature was much wider, almost twice the width of its body. This was its head; or rather, as Vibhisena corrected himself, its heads.

  The still form of Ravana, Lord of Lanka, master of the asura races, bane of all existence, lay trapped within the block of stone. As best as Vibhisena could tell, his demon-lord brother was still and unbreathing, all his ten pairs of eyes closed in peaceful repose.

  FOUR

  Rama Chandra, rajkumar of Ayodhya, prince-heir of the Kosala kingdom, and Rajkumari Sita Janaki of Mithila, princess-heir of the Videha nation, were married with great pomp and ceremony. The marriage was held on the day after what came to be known as Siege Day. Even though the princess had chosen Rama at the Swayamvara, garlanding him as her chosen betrothed, it was still customary to formally ask for the groom’s hand. This request, as tradition demanded, was forwarded by Maharishi Satyananda, spiritual adviser of Maharaja Janak, to Guru Vashishta at Ayodhya. Guru Vashishta accepted the request and dispatched the messenger back to Mithila before informing Maharaja Dasaratha, still recovering from his series of calamities, and the titled queens, Rani Kausalya, Rani Kaikeyi and Rani Sumitra. Arrangements were made to take a splendid groom’s procession, the traditional groom’s procession, from Ayodhya to Mithila.

  The baaraat that arrived at Mithila had spectators gaping mutely. Never before had such a lavish procession of luxury and wealth been seen in the liberated city. If the Vaidehans were ahead in their accretion of spiritual and moral enrichment, then the Kosalans had the upper hand in material and aesthetic prowess. The five-mile-long procession took several hours to pass through the city gates. One bemused portly Brahmin who watched in envious delight estimated that over fifty thousand Ayodhyan bellies would have to be fed by their Mithilan hosts that night. He promptly turned the head of his ass and joined the rear of the procession, chuckling and rubbing his enormous paunch as he contemplated the joys of feasting on the special savouries that the groom’s baaraat alone was privileged to be served. He got his wish and was unable to walk for days afterward; every time he belched, he tasted the wedding feast again and blessed both groom and bride fervently. It was the best and biggest feast he had partaken of in his avaricious life.