Anxiety in Lankā

Across the sea, in Lankā, the mood had changed, and this chapter belongs to that change, to the slow seeping of dread into a city that had never known it.

For Lankā had been, until now, a city wholly without fear. It was the seat of the mightiest power of the age; its king had conquered gods; its warriors were terrible; its walls had never been breached; and its people had lived in the settled arrogance of those who believe themselves untouchable, secure in the shadow of Rāvaṇa’s might, contemptuous of all the worlds they had subdued. Fear was a thing that happened to others, to the conquered, to the weak; it had no place in golden Lankā, the invincible fortress of the invincible king.

And then a single vānara had come, and the settled arrogance had cracked. Hanumān’s visitation had done more than wreck a garden and slay a prince and burn some streets; it had struck the first blow at the city’s deepest possession, its confidence, its sense of its own invulnerability.

For if a single servant of the enemy could enter the impregnable city, wreck the royal pleasure-garden, slay a prince of the blood, defy the king in his own court, and burn the golden capital from end to end, and then leap away unharmed, then Lankā was not invulnerable after all; the walls could be passed; the fortress could be entered; the impossible could happen. The burning had left more than ashes; it had left doubt, the first doubt the proud city had ever known, and doubt, once admitted, spreads.

And now, on top of the doubt, came the news: that Rāma, the master of that single terrible servant, was marching to the sea with an army beyond counting, coming to make war on Lankā, coming for Sītā and for vengeance. And the doubt that Hanumān had planted began to grow, in the light of this news, into something closer to dread. For the reasoning was plain and cold, and it spread through the city in whispers: if one servant could do so much, what would the master do, and his whole host?

The burning of Lankā by a single vānara had been a demonstration; the coming of Rāma’s army was the thing demonstrated; and the people of Lankā, looking at their fire-scarred city and hearing of the approaching host, began to feel, for the first time in their lives, the cold touch of fear.

And the tellers give us the omens, too, the physical signs of coming doom that began to trouble the city, for in the old understanding such great events cast their shadows before them, and the very elements gave warning of the ruin that approached.

There were portents, dark and troubling: vultures and birds of ill omen gathering and circling over the city; strange tremors in the earth; unnatural changes in the light and the air; the sacred fires behaving ill; evil dreams troubling the sleep of the demons; all the signs by which, in the old belief, the cosmos itself announces an approaching catastrophe.

These omens spread through Lankā, and deepened the dread, for they seemed to confirm what the news of Rāma’s army suggested, that the doom of the city was truly at hand, that the invincible fortress was facing, at last, its destruction.

And there were voices, too, the voices of the elder and wiser among the demons, the counsellors and ministers who had always known, or had come to see, that Rāvaṇa’s crime would bring ruin, and who now raised their warnings as the danger approached.

For not all in Lankā were fools or fanatics; there were among the demons those with wisdom and foresight, who understood that the abduction of Sītā had been a catastrophic error, that it had brought upon the city an enemy it could not hope to defeat, that the whole disaster flowed from Rāvaṇa’s ungoverned lust and pride, and who now, in the growing dread, found the courage to say so, to warn the king, to counsel him even at this late hour to return Sītā and seek peace before the storm broke.

Their warnings mostly went unheeded, for Rāvaṇa’s pride was not to be moved; but they were raised, and they added to the atmosphere of foreboding, the sense of a city divided between a proud king rushing toward ruin and the wiser souls who saw the ruin coming and could not turn him from it.

Let us mark the deep justice in this change of mood, for the tellers mean us to feel it. Lankā had made a whole world afraid; its king had terrorized the gods; its power had rested on the fear it inspired in others; and now, at last, fear had come home to Lankā itself. The city that had never feared was learning to fear; the fortress that had made others tremble was beginning to tremble; and the arrogance that had scorned all the worlds was cracking under the approach of a justice it could not escape.

There is a rightness in it, a turning of the wheel, the terror-maker learning terror, the invincible learning its own vulnerability, the proud city beginning to pay, in dread, for all the dread it had inflicted. And the dread was just, for the doom was real; the omens did not lie; the wise counsellors were right; Rāma was coming, and Lankā would fall, and some in the city already knew it, and feared, and the fear was the first installment of the ruin.

So the mood in Lankā darkened toward dread, and the omens multiplied, and the wise warned and the proud refused to hear, and over the whole golden city there settled the heavy foreboding of a doom approaching across the sea.

And in the midst of this gathering anxiety, Rāvaṇa, refusing still to feel the fear that had touched his people, refusing still to heed the omens or the warnings, called his council together, to plan not for peace but for war, to array the strength of Lankā against the coming enemy, and to hear from his commanders and his brothers the counsel that would either save the city or seal its doom.