Indra

Gautama's austerities were so complete that Brahma made him a wife without equal, Ahalya, and they lived together at his hermitage. Indra saw her and wanted her. One morning, while Gautama went down to the river for his bath, Indra took on the sage's shape and came to Ahalya's door. In Ramesh Menon's telling, she knew at once who stood before her despite the disguise, the thousand eyed god underneath, but she stayed anyway, flattered that a god desired her, and let him lie with her on the very floor where she slept beside her husband. In Ami Ganatra's Ramayana Unravelled, she went further, telling him afterwards that she was glad to have consented, and wanted only him gone before Gautama returned.

Gautama came back before Indra could get away, in Ganatra's telling needing only a look to understand it. What followed was the same shock in most versions. In the translation credited to Valmiki and rendered by Arshia Sattar, present twice in this pack under two titles, Gautama cried that Indra had taken his form to do a wicked thing, and at that moment the thousand eyed god's testicles fell to the ground. Egenes's translation instead had Gautama curse him only never to father a child, with no mention of the testicles. Gautama then turned on his own wife, cursing her to live on air, sleep on ashes, and stay invisible to every creature until Rama, son of Dasaratha, came to the hermitage and freed her by his presence alone.

Indra went to the gods, crying that he had ruined a good man's penance. The gods and ancestors tore the testicles from a ram and grafted them onto him, which is why, in the Many Ramayanas anthology edited by Paula Richman, the Ancestors have eaten castrated rams ever since. In Menon's fuller telling, Indra sat in penance a thousand divine years before Brahma relented and changed his thousand marks of shame into a thousand eyes, though half the guilt of every adultery in the world was left on him as the first to commit it. Ahalya waited out her curse as dust on the ground in Menon's telling, or as a black stone in the Richman anthology's account, until Rama walked through on his way to Mithila. The dust of his footsteps was enough: she rose again in her own form, restored exactly as Gautama had sworn.

Travelling south to Videha with the princes of Ayodhya and the princesses of Mithila, Vishwamitra told the story of the Ganga as they went, and in Devdutt Pattanaik's Sita it begins with King Sagara's horse. Sagara had loosed the horse for his Ashwamedha, the sacrifice that let a king claim whatever land the animal crossed unchallenged as his own. Indra watched it wander and grew afraid that if it reached his own city of Amravati unopposed, Sagara would end up ruling over him instead. So Indra stole the horse himself and hid it far off, in the hermitage of a sage named Kapila, lost at the time in his own meditation.

Sagara's sons went out to find the missing horse, and when they finally traced it to Kapila's hermitage, they found only the animal and a silent sage beside it, and accused him outright of the theft. Kapila had done nothing wrong. He was lost in his tapasya until that moment, and it was their accusation that broke his stillness and brought his eyes open. When they did open, flame poured out of them, all the tapa he had built through his meditation, and it caught every one of Sagara's sons where they stood, burning them down to a single heap of ash. Sagara asked whether his sons could ever live again. They could, Kapila told him, on one condition: that Sagara carry their ashes to the Ganga and let the river take them.

Ravana himself rode into the battle against the Devas, and for the first time ever he was driven back, matched and beaten by the Adityas and Vasus without much effort on their part. Indra, on the other side of the field, drove into the rakshasa army until the two sides met after a hundred bloody yojanas, and Indra fought with such ferocity that Ravana himself was forced to retreat. The rakshasas cried out that they were undone.

Indrajit, Ravana's son, watched his proud father shamed and could not bear it. He flew into the battle invisible, cloaked in a power Shiva had granted him, and Indra could see nothing of his attacker but a storm of arrows. They smashed his chariot to pieces and wounded his charioteer Matali. Indra fled the field, remounted his white elephant Airavata, and returned to the fight, but Indrajit's coiling weapon caught him and held him fast. Indrajit called across the field to his father: the war was won, Indra was his captive, and the three worlds were theirs to rule. Ravana rode to his son and embraced him as the saviour of their race, and Indrajit carried his captive home to Lanka to a hero's welcome.

Brahma came to broker Indra's freedom, telling Indrajit he must not carry the sin of holding heaven's king prisoner, and offering whatever price he named. Indrajit asked first for immortality. Brahma refused him that, since even he himself would die one day, but granted a second wish instead: that whenever Indrajit worshipped Agni before going into battle, a chariot of fire would answer, and while he sat in it no one could kill him, though skipping the rite would leave him open to any warrior able to do it. Indrajit spoke the mantra that had bound Indra, the coils fell away, and the king of the Devas went free, humiliated by a capture he never lived down. Later in the same war, when Indrajit rode out against Rama behind that same cloak of invisibility, he taunted the monkeys defending Rama with exactly that memory, in Ramesh Menon's telling of the battle and in Linda Egenes's translation alike: he had beaten Indra himself once, so what hope did they have?