Rāma Slays the Monsters

The dead land had a name and a mistress. It was the forest of Tāṭakā, and once, Vishvāmitra told them, it had been as green and living as any country in the world. Now nothing grew there. The trees stood black and leafless, the ground was cracked and grey, and a silence lay over it that was worse than any noise, the silence of a place where living things have learned not to be. The boys felt the wrongness of it in their skin.

"A demoness holds this land," the sage said. "Tāṭakā. She was not always a monster; she was born beautiful, and had the strength of a thousand elephants given to her as a gift. But strength without goodness is a curse to its owner and everyone near it, and hers turned to cruelty. She and her son have made this whole region a wasteland. They kill travellers, they wreck the hermitages of the sages, they have driven out or devoured every peaceful creature for miles. Rāma, this is your first task. You must kill her."

Rāma had listened readily to everything the sage had asked of him until now. But at this he hesitated, and the hesitation did him honour. "Kill her, Gurudeva?" he said. "She is a woman. I was taught that a warrior does not raise his hand against a woman, that to do so is among the lowest things a man can do. My whole training rebels against it. How can I do this and remain the man my teachers made me?"

It was not cowardice; nothing in Rāma was ever cowardice. It was the opposite: a young man’s clean instinct for the rule he had been given, a reluctance to become, even for a moment, the kind of man who strikes the weaker. And Vishvāmitra did not scold him for it. A lesser teacher would have snapped at the delay. Vishvāmitra saw that the boy’s hesitation came from the right place, and that the right answer was not to override his conscience but to educate it.

"I honour the instinct that makes you pause," the sage said. "Never lose it. A man who strikes women easily is a beast. But listen closely, for here is a distinction you must carry all your life. The rule you were taught protects the innocent and the helpless. It exists to shield those who cannot shield themselves. Tāṭakā is neither innocent nor helpless. She has the strength of a thousand elephants and the malice of the pit. She has murdered more travellers than you have years.

To stand aside from her because she wears a woman’s shape is not mercy; it is a betrayal of everyone she will kill tomorrow if you spare her today. The question is not whether the creature before you is a man or a woman. The question is whether it is a protector or a predator. A being who has thrown away all righteousness, who lives by preying on the innocent, has stepped outside the protection that righteousness gives, and must be met as what it has made itself. Your duty is not to a rule of combat. Your duty is to the helpless.

Do not let a shallow reading of one law make you break the deeper law beneath it."

Rāma heard this, and understood it, and the understanding settled the matter in him. This is worth marking, because it is the pattern of his whole life. Rāma was never a man who acted without thought and reasoned afterward. When he was troubled by a thing, he needed to see clearly why it was right before he could do it wholly; and once he saw, he acted without a backward glance. His strength was never separate from his understanding. That is what made him more than a warrior.

Tāṭakā came. She had felt the intrusion into her land, and she came roaring out of the dead trees in a fury, a monstrous shape, huge and hideous, hurling boulders and raising storms of dust, her voice alone enough to freeze the blood. She was terrible to behold, and the boys, for all their new mantras and their royal training, were looking at the first real monster of their lives.

But Rāma did not falter now. The time for hesitation was past; he had reasoned his way through it and left it behind. He raised his bow, and where a moment before there had been a troubled boy there was now something else, something that would make demons across the whole southern world learn to fear a single name. He met her charge. The battle was short and furious.

She was strong, immensely strong, but strength was not enough against a clear eye and a righteous arm, and Rāma’s arrow found her, and the demoness who had made a wasteland of a living country fell, and was still.

And the moment she died, the land felt it. The wrongness that had hung over the place lifted like a weight taken off the chest. The killing of Tāṭakā was not a cruelty; it was a healing. In time, the tellers say, the blasted forest would grow green again, the birds would come back, travellers would walk the road unafraid. One life, rightly ended, gave life back to a whole country. This is the hard arithmetic of the protector, and Rāma had learned to do the sum.

Vishvāmitra was pleased, and he showed his pleasure in the way a great teacher does: by giving the pupil more. He bestowed on Rāma a whole armoury of celestial weapons, the divine astras, missiles of fire and wind and light that answered to sacred words, weapons the gods themselves had wielded. Rāma received them gravely, and Vishvāmitra watched him receive them and was satisfied that they had come into safe hands, for the boy showed no greed for them, no eagerness to use them, only a sober sense of what such power meant.

Then they went on, to the true purpose of the journey: the sacrifice. They came to Vishvāmitra’s hermitage, the Siddhāshrama, and the sage made his preparations, and told the boys their task. "For six days and nights I will be bound by the rite, unable to lift a hand. On the last day the demons will come, Mārīcha and Subāhu, to defile the fire with blood and flesh at the very moment of its completion. That is when you must guard me. Watch the sky. Let nothing reach the altar."

They watched. For six days the sacrifice rose toward its completion, the chanting unbroken, the fire fed, the sage lost in his devotions. And on the last day, as Vishvāmitra had foretold, the sky darkened, and the demons came, screaming down out of the clouds with a rain of filth to ruin the holy work at its final hour.

But the boys were ready. Rāma loosed a weapon at Mārīcha, not the killing shaft, for something stayed his hand toward that one, but a weapon that struck the demon like a mountain and flung him far out across the miles, hurling him bodily into the distant sea, stunned but living. Mārīcha would remember that blow. It would matter later, in a way none of them could yet see. And upon Subāhu, Rāma loosed the weapon of fire, and Subāhu was consumed and fell to ash, and the lesser demons that came behind them were scattered like leaves before a gale.

The altar was untouched. The sacrifice reached its completion clean and whole, and the fire rose up pure at the end, and the sages of the hermitage lifted their voices in a joy they had not felt in years, for their fire was safe at last and the long torment of their rite was ended.

Vishvāmitra came out of his devotions to find his sacrifice complete and his young guardians standing watch over an unspoiled altar, and he blessed them both. The first labour was done, and done well, and the boy who had hesitated to raise his hand against a woman had learned the hardest lesson a protector learns: that mercy misplaced is only cruelty postponed, and that the truest kindness is sometimes the firm and terrible hand that ends an evil before it can feed again.