The Sacrifice Protected

They reached Vishvamitra’s hermitage, and the sage entered into the great rite, and for six days and nights Rama and Lakshmana stood guard over it with their bows, two boys keeping watch so that an old man’s discipline could run unbroken.

On the sixth day, at the rite’s climax, the sky darkened and the rakshasas came — Maricha and Subahu at their head, an air full of them, raining down the foulness that breaks a sacrifice: blood, flesh, filth flung onto the fire to ruin it at the exact moment ruin would cost the most. This was the whole purpose Rama had been brought for, and the epic stages his response as a demonstration of the restraint the weapons came with.

He did not annihilate them. He had the arms to turn the sky to ash and did not use them so. To Maricha — the leader, the one the story is quietly saving — he loosed not a killing weapon but the manavastra, a weapon of mere overwhelming force, and it took Maricha and flung him bodily a hundred leagues out over the ocean, hurled clean off the board without his life taken. Subahu he killed with fire; the lesser swarm with wind. The proportioning is deliberate and it is the chapter’s point: Rama uses exactly as much as the duty requires and not a measure more, sparing where sparing is possible, killing only where it is not. The Ramayana is establishing, in a skirmish, the principle by which it will judge every later violence in the poem — including the ones it cannot make come out clean.

And the sparing of Maricha is the epic loading a weapon it will fire in the worst chapter it has. Maricha, flung to the sea and living, carries away a terror of Rama and a debt to Ravana, and he is the one who will, books later, take the form of a golden deer and lure Rama away from the hermitage so that Sita can be taken. Valmiki does not mention this now. He simply declines to let Rama kill him, and lets the reader find out, much later and too late, why. The Ramayana, like the Mahabharata, files its causes early and collects on them without warning.

The rite, guarded, completed itself. Vishvamitra had what he came for, and the boys had done the thing they were fetched to do. The errand was, in its own terms, over — and the epic could have sent them home. It does not. Vishvamitra had heard of something to the east, in Mithila: King Janaka was holding a gathering, and there was at his court a bow — the bow of Shiva himself — and a daughter, and a condition. The sage proposed they go and see it. The protection of one sacrifice has quietly become the road to a marriage, and the marriage is the one that the whole rest of the epic will turn on. They set out for Mithila, and on the way the road has one more thing to show them: a shape on the ground that used to be a woman.