Virādha’s End

With Bharata gone home and the affairs of Ayodhyā settled as far as they could be settled, the three exiles left Chitrakūṭa. They had loved the green hill, but its peace had been broken by the coming and going of the great host, and more than that, Rāma felt that they should go deeper into the wild, away from the northern country and its constant reminders of all they had lost, into the true forest where the fourteen years could be lived as the fourteen years were meant to be lived.

So they turned south, toward the vast Daṇḍaka forest, the deep and dangerous wilderness where the sages kept their scattered hermitages and the demons hunted them, and where the real trials of the exile awaited.

And almost at the threshold of that deeper forest, they met the first of its horrors.

His name was Virādha, and he was a demon of terrible size and strength, a monstrous shape that came crashing out of the trees upon them, huge, hideous, roaring, a giant of the wild places who fed on flesh and terrorized all who entered his domain. He fell upon the three of them without warning, and before they could well grasp what was happening, he had seized Sītā, snatched her up in his monstrous arms, and stood bellowing his defiance at the two brothers, threatening to devour them all.

For a moment even Rāma and Lakshmaṇa were at a loss, for the creature had Sītā, and any attack upon him risked her, and his size and fury were beyond anything they had yet faced. But the brothers were not the sort to be paralyzed for long, and they set upon the demon with their weapons, loosing arrow after arrow into his vast body, striking him with everything they had.

And here they met a horror worse than his size: he could not be killed. The arrows struck him and wounded him and did not slay him, for Virādha bore a boon that made him proof against death by weapons; no blade, no shaft, no missile could end his life.

The brothers poured their whole strength into the assault, and the demon bled and roared and did not die, and for a terrible while it seemed that they had met an enemy that could not be overcome, one who would wear them down and devour them however hard they fought, because the ordinary means of his defeat were closed to them.

But Rāma and Lakshmaṇa were not only strong; they were resourceful, and where force alone would not serve, they found another way. If the demon could not be killed by weapons, then they would not try to kill him by weapons. They fell upon him instead with their bare hands and their whole bodies, and they overpowered him by main strength, and they cast him down, and finding that they could not slay him, they resolved to bury him, for a boon against weapons is no boon against the weight of the earth.

They dug a great pit, and into it they cast the raging demon, and they buried him alive, heaping the earth upon him, so that the creature who could not be killed by any blade was ended after all, smothered in the ground, defeated by the one means his boon had not foreseen.

And then a wonder happened, for as the demon died beneath the earth, his monstrous form fell away, and out of it rose a being of light, a Gandharva, a celestial spirit, freed at last from a horrible shape. For Virādha had not always been a demon. He had once been a Gandharva of the heavens, and had been cursed, for some old offence, to wander the earth in that hideous monstrous form until Rāma should release him from it by death.

His whole terrible existence as the demon Virādha had been a curse and a waiting, and the moment of his death at Rāma’s hands was the moment of his liberation, the breaking of the curse, the restoration of his true and radiant nature. He rose up freed and grateful, blessed the prince who had released him, and ascended to the celestial regions from which he had so long been exiled.

Let us pause on the pattern here, for it is one that runs all through this forest portion of the story, and it is worth understanding. Again and again, in the Daṇḍaka and beyond, Rāma will encounter a monster, and the monster will prove to be a cursed being in disguise, and Rāma’s slaying of it will turn out to be not a destruction but a redemption, the freeing of a trapped soul from a shape it was condemned to wear. Virādha is the first of these, and Kabandha will be another, and there are more. And the pattern carries a deep meaning.

It tells us that what looks like Rāma’s violence is really Rāma’s grace; that the demons he destroys are, many of them, souls in torment waiting to be released; that the divine, even when it comes wielding weapons and dealing death, comes fundamentally to liberate, to free the bound, to restore the fallen to their true nature. Virādha the monster was Rāma’s enemy for an hour; Virādha the Gandharva was Rāma’s beneficiary forever; and the arrow, or in this case the burial, that ended the one was the very thing that freed the other.

The forest is full of such transformations, and they teach us to look past the monstrous surface of things to the trapped soul that may lie beneath, and to understand that even the hardest and most violent-seeming acts of the divine are, at their root, acts of deliverance.

Now this whole episode, the tellers note, was one that Vishṇu Sreenivas had passed over in the condensed telling, moving the exiles from Chitrakūṭa toward Panchavaṭī without the encounter that in the fuller tradition marks their entry into the deep forest.

But it belongs, and it is restored here, for it sets the note that the whole Araṇya Kāṇḍa will sound: that the peace of Chitrakūṭa is behind them now, that the forest ahead is a place of monsters and of magic, of terrible dangers and hidden redemptions, and that Rāma’s passage through it will be a long campaign against the powers of darkness that have made the wild a place of terror for the holy and the innocent.

Virādha is the gate through which they pass out of the gentler exile and into the true wilderness, and his death and liberation are the first sounding of the theme that will build, chapter by chapter, toward the great confrontation with the lord of all the demons that waits at the far end of the forest road.

The three went on, then, past the buried demon and the freed spirit, deeper into the Daṇḍaka, toward the scattered hermitages of the sages who dwelt in that dangerous country, and toward the long quiet years, and the fateful meeting, that still lay ahead of them in the green and perilous heart of the wild.