Chapter 29 — Sugriva and Vali

Sugriva sat beside Rama on a flat stone above Pampa. The fire of their pact had burned low. Below them the lake received the late light; above them Rishyamukha rose in ridges and caves. Sugriva looked toward Kishkindha, though the city itself lay beyond the forest and could not be seen.

“Vali is my elder brother,” he began. “Once there was no enemy between us.”

He told them that an asura named Mayavi had come by night to Kishkindha's gates and called Vali out to combat. Vali answered the challenge. Sugriva followed, not as a rival but as a brother unwilling to leave him alone. Mayavi fled into a deep cave. Vali told Sugriva to wait at its mouth and went in after him.

Sugriva waited for a year.

The forest changed around the cave. Rain came and went. No voice emerged. Then blood flowed out over the stone. Sugriva called for Vali and heard nothing. He believed Mayavi had killed him. In fear and grief, he rolled a great boulder across the entrance, sealing the passage against the victor he thought might come out, and returned to Kishkindha.

The city made him king. He said he had not sought it. Whether he expected a brother's return no one could now prove; the act at the cave had left too much room for suspicion.

Vali had not died. He had killed Mayavi in the depths, found the cave sealed, and forced his way free by another route. When he returned to Kishkindha and found Sugriva installed, he read the whole sequence as treachery: the waiting, the stone, the throne.

“He would not hear me,” Sugriva said. “He drove me out. He took Ruma, my wife, into his own household. He sent men after me. I have lived here because this mountain protects me from him.”

Rama looked up toward the high ridge. Sugriva explained the refuge at last. Vali had once killed Dundubhi, an asura in the form of a monstrous buffalo, and hurled the body so violently that its blood fell near the hermitage of the sage Matanga. The sage forbade Vali ever to enter Rishyamukha; if he did, the curse would kill him. Sugriva's safety rested on that boundary, not on Vali's mercy.

Rama heard the story without pretending its first wound had a clean shape. But Vali's seizure of Ruma was no ambiguous remnant of the cave. It was the injury Sugriva named most plainly, and the humiliation under which he had been made to live.

“You will not remain here,” Rama said. “I gave you my word.”

Sugriva looked at him, then at Rama's bow. Fear had taught him that promises were light until they met force. He began to speak of Vali's strength: his speed before sunrise, his power in battle, the trees he had broken, the enemies he had thrown down. He told of Dundubhi, a buffalo-like asura whose massive remains still lay in the forest, and of the seven sal trees that stood in a row nearby.

“If you can move those bones,” he said, “if your arrow can pass through those trees, I will know you can meet him.”

Rama rose without anger. He set the toe of his foot beneath one of Dundubhi's long-dried bones and sent it flying across the ground. Sugriva's companions cried out. Still Sugriva watched, not yet certain.

Rama fitted an arrow to his bow. The bowstring gave a low, hard sound. The shaft went through the first sal tree, then the next, and the next, until all seven stood pierced. It entered the earth beyond them and returned to Rama's hand.

Sugriva's doubt gave way. He clasped Rama's hands.

“Then come,” he said. “Let him hear me.”

At Kishkindha's outer ground, Sugriva called Vali by name. The cry travelled through the city and out into the woods. Vali came, bright with anger and confidence, and the two brothers closed at once. They struck, grappled, tore branches from the ground, and drove each other across the earth. From the trees Rama watched for a clean shot.

But they were alike in build, face, and movement. The fight twisted them together until he could not tell who was Sugriva and who Vali. He did not release the arrow.

Vali's strength prevailed. Sugriva broke away battered and fled back toward Rishyamukha. Rama and Lakshmana found him there, bleeding and furious.

“You brought me to be beaten,” Sugriva said. “If you would not strike, why make me call him out?”

Rama did not defend the failure with a false reason. “I could not distinguish you,” he said. “Your faces and bodies were the same in the fight. I would not risk killing the man I promised to protect.”

He picked a flowering forest creeper and placed its garland around Sugriva's neck.

“Wear this. Challenge him again. This time I will know you.”

The second cry reached Kishkindha. Vali heard it within his palace. Tara, his queen, had already heard reports that Sugriva had returned not as a fugitive but with armed strangers. She came to Vali before he could go out.

“Something has changed,” she said. “He was defeated and returns at once. That is not the conduct of a man who thinks himself alone. Learn who stands with him. Send someone to speak. Make terms if terms can be made.”

Her counsel was neither timidity nor an attempt to preserve comfort. She named the altered facts. She thought of Vali, of their son Angada, and of a kingdom that could not afford a war it did not understand.

Vali listened, but pride and old injury spoke more loudly. He said that no alliance could make Sugriva formidable enough to frighten him. He spoke affectionately to Tara and praised her concern, yet treated it as fear to be soothed rather than judgment to be followed.

“Do not be troubled,” he told her. “I will return after I have humbled him.”

Tara held him once before he left. Then Vali stepped into the open, where Sugriva waited with Rama concealed beyond the line of sight.