Hanuman

Left alone as a hungry infant, Hanuman woke, saw the sun rise red over the forest and took it for a piece of fruit. He sprang after it and covered three hundred yojanas without flinching from the heat. Valmiki's Ramayana has the wind god Vayu tell this same story to Sita years later: that the child leapt for the sun, that Indra's thunderbolt caught him in the air and broke his jaw, and that from that broken jaw, hanu, he was given the name Hanuman, though this telling never says whose voice actually gave it. A fuller account names the namer: Indra himself, hanging his own lotus garland on the child and declaring that since his own vajra had broken this jaw, the boy would be called Hanuman from that day. The two versions differ again on what he was chasing when the bolt struck. In the fuller version the eclipse demon Rahu had come that same morning to swallow the sun, and Hanuman, still hunting fruit, flew at Rahu instead, so it was in defending his catch that he drew Indra's thunderbolt. An introduction to the Uttarakanda gives a third shape again, with the infant charging Indra's own white elephant, mistaking it for fruit, so that Indra struck him down in his own defence.

His father Vayu found him lifeless on the mountainside and would not be comforted. He shut himself in a cave and stopped breathing through the three worlds, and every creature everywhere began to choke and stiffen for want of air. The gods went as one to Brahma, who led them to Vayu's cave, laid the dead child in his own lap and revived him at a touch. Grateful, the gods loaded him with gifts: Brahma granted invulnerability; Indra, awed that his own bolt had done so little harm, granted him the choice of his own death; Surya promised him a portion of his own light and, in time, his teaching; Varuna swore he would never drown, and Yama spared him both his staff and disease. Telling Sita her own life story years afterwards, Hanuman adds that the same bargain also left him a second name, Vajranga, or Bajrang, and a body as swift as lightning and as strong as thunder.

Hanuman planted himself on the summit of Mount Mahendra and gathered his strength to leap the ocean to Lanka, the one vanara in the whole host who could clear it. He roared until the sky itself seemed to recoil, and drove himself upward with such force that the mountain groaned and animals for miles fled to their caves. Once airborne, arms outstretched, tail curled above his head, he flew higher than the clouds, past the moon, steady on Lanka and nothing else. Partway across, a golden mountain rose from the sea to meet him: Mainaka, raised up by the ocean itself to offer him a place to rest. Mainaka's own reason, when he gives it, is older and more personal: Hanuman's father, the wind, once blew him to safety when Indra was clipping every mountain's wings, and he owes the family a debt. One telling has Hanuman recognise the courtesy at once and decline it gently, touching the peak with a finger rather than refuse it outright; another has him mistake the rising mountain for a demon's trick and shove it aside with his chest, understanding only afterwards, from Mainaka's own mouth, that the offer had been meant kindly.

The gods, having seen his strength, sent Surasa, mother of serpents, to test him: grown to the size of a mountain, jaws stretched wide, she told him he was fated to feed her and would not let him pass otherwise. Hanuman agreed to be swallowed, then shrank himself smaller than a fly, darted in through her teeth and out again before she could close her mouth, and went on with her blessing. A third obstacle waited nearer the coast: Simhika, a sea demon who hunted by seizing a flier's shadow on the water and hauling him down. She caught Hanuman this way and opened her mouth to swallow him whole; he let himself be swallowed, then swelled inside her until he tore his way back out through her body, killing her outright. Streaked with her blood and his own sweat, he flew on and finally saw Lanka's coastline, palm-lined and gleaming, ahead of him.

Having torn apart Ravana's pleasure garden and cut down the guards sent against him, Hanuman let Indrajit close in when the prince came for him alone. The two fought hard and even, Indrajit's arrows against Hanuman's stones and uprooted trees, until Indrajit saw he could not land a killing blow and turned to a weapon of Brahma's instead. Hanuman let its invisible bonds close over him without a struggle: he felt no pain and no fear of it, only a strange respect for Brahma himself, and let the rakshasas drag him bound into Ravana's own court. Vibhishana, Ravana's brother, stopped his kinsmen killing a messenger outright, so Ravana chose a crueller answer: nothing mattered more to a monkey than his tail, he said, so let this one's tail be set alight and let him be marched burning through the streets. In one telling Ravana first orders Sita's own garment brought to use as the burning rag, until Hanuman shrinks his tail rather than let her be dragged into it himself.

The rakshasas wound cloth soaked in oil around his tail and set it burning, and Hanuman felt no heat at all, only a strange coolness, as if winter itself had settled on him. He guessed at the reason as he flew: his father the wind's old friendship with fire, Rama's own power, and, some tellings say plainly, Sita's chastity, which the fire would not defy even to punish her husband's messenger. Free of both the fire's threat and Indrajit's bonds, which he simply grew too large and then too small to hold, Hanuman turned his tail on the city itself. He sprang from roof to roof, touching each alight, until every mansion the rakshasas had built stood burning and their gold ran molten through the streets. He crossed the palace moat and set Ravana's own roofs ablaze, growing to the height of the towers he burned and shrinking back to a cat-sized monkey once the work was done. Only Sita's own garden, where she sat untouched among the women and children she had been teaching to sing, went unburned. With a hundred rakshasas felled and the city smouldering behind him, Hanuman was left, by his own account afterwards, wondering what to do next.

With the war behind them, rakshasa and vanara standing together in tears at the friendships it had cost and made, Hanuman knelt before Rama and asked for one thing: that his devotion never turn to anyone else, and that his own body go on living for as long as Rama's story was told among men. Rama embraced him and granted it outright: his fame, and life in his body, would last exactly as long as the tale of Rama itself lasted in the world, and since that tale, Rama said, would be told for as long as the world stood, so would Hanuman live in it.

Right at the end, as Rama himself prepares to leave the earth, both tellings return to the same promise. One has Rama turn to Hanuman directly and ask whether he still means to remain in the world a long time yet, and Hanuman answers that he will live in it for as long as the Ramayana is told. The Uttarakanda gives Rama's own words in full: as long as this tale of mine shall circulate through the worlds, he says, so long will life remain in your body. He then takes his own pearl necklace, its centre stone lapis lazuli, from around his neck and fastens it on Hanuman with his own hands. Later tradition counts Hanuman among the seven undying beings of the epic for this reason, and calls him Rama's foremost devotee: a single boon that turned a battlefield ally into someone who could not, in the end, be separated from the story he had helped to make.

Mahiravana tried again and again to slip past the fortress Hanuman had built by ringing Rama and Lakshmana with his own coiled tail, coming disguised first as Jambavan, then as Kaushalya, then as Janaka, and each time Vibhishana saw through the trick. Only when Mahiravana finally took Vibhishana's own shape did Hanuman let him pass, and the sorcerer cast his spell on the two brothers and carried them off through a tunnel he had bored into the ground, down to Patala to be sacrificed to the goddess there. Hanuman followed the moment he understood what had happened. At the entrance to Patala a warrior as strong as himself blocked his way, and the two fought until neither could win. Asked who he was, the stranger answered that he was Makaradhwaja, son of Hanuman, which Hanuman could not credit: he had no wife, and had kept himself celibate all his life.

However he came to have a son he had never known of, Makaradhwaja let his father pass once the truth was out, and no one else in Patala tried to stop him. He found Rama and Lakshmana already chained and anointed for their own sacrifice, garlanded with hibiscus and fed well beforehand, and took the form of a bee to reach Rama unseen and tell him a way out. When Rama was brought to the altar and told to bend his head for the killing blow, he answered as Hanuman had coached him: that as the eldest son of the Raghu line he had never once bowed to anyone, and would need the sorcerer himself to show him how it was done. Since a sacrifice's wishes must be granted, Mahiravana knelt to demonstrate, and Hanuman trampled him underfoot on the spot. This story comes from the Sanskrit Adbhuta Ramayana, a later text with more fantasy in it than a sacred story usually allows itself. Free of Patala, Hanuman leapt back to the surface with both princes and returned them safely home.