Chapter 33 — Lanka

Night came over Lanka with the sea wind.

From the height beyond its walls, Hanuman saw an island capital built for power. Lamps shone along terraces and gateways. Bells moved in the wind. At the great entrances armed rakshasas—the powerful nonhuman beings of Ravana's realm—kept watch beside elephants and standards. The city was rich with stone, metal, gardens, and water; it was also guarded as though every beauty inside it belonged to a ruler who expected enemies.

Hanuman made himself small enough to pass unnoticed. At the gate, however, the city itself met him. A female rakshasa stood before the entrance, immense against the white gateway. She was Lankini: not a resident guard but the embodied guardian of Lanka, charged to challenge any intruder at its threshold. She blocked his way and demanded to know how a stranger had come so far.

“I have come to see this city,” Hanuman said, giving no more than the moment allowed.

She struck him. He answered with one measured blow, enough to throw her down but not to kill her. Rising, she looked at him differently. An old warning, she said, had foretold that Lanka's ruin would begin when a vanara overcame its guardian. Her defeat did not make Hanuman master of the city; it told him that the mission had crossed its first boundary. She stepped aside.

Hanuman crossed the wall and entered a city that seemed almost to float above the dark sea.

He moved through streets where night traffic still passed: armed patrols, chariots, courtyards bright with lamps, houses whose windows carried music and voices. Towers caught the moonlight. The sea wind carried salt through the city and set its banners moving above the roofs. He saw wealth on a scale that made Ravana's rule visible before he saw Ravana himself. But the search did not let him admire the city for long. Somewhere within it, Sita was being held against her will.

He went from compound to compound, keeping to roofs, eaves, and shadows. At last he came to Ravana's inner residence. Its courts held guards, weapons, and carved halls; within stood Pushpaka, the celestial vehicle Ravana had taken as part of his power. Hanuman searched the chambers beyond it.

There he saw Ravana asleep among members of his household. The rakshasa king was unmistakably a man accustomed to command: powerful in body, surrounded by luxury, his weapons near at hand. Hanuman saw neither a creature to be made grotesque nor a greatness that excused the abduction. Yet Sita was not there.

The search forced Hanuman through places where women slept after music and drinking. He looked only as a messenger who had to identify the person he sought. Then he recoiled from the thought of confusing Sita with any of them. Rama's wife had been taken by force. She would not be lying at ease in Ravana's palace, adorned as one who had chosen her place.

The failure shook him. He had crossed the sea, entered the guarded city, searched the ruler's house—and still had no certainty. For a moment he imagined returning with nothing. Then he stopped himself. His task was not finished merely because the first places had failed him.

He left the palace and searched again: ponds, groves, shrines, terraces, and the farther enclosures of the city. At the edge of those enclosures he saw trees gathered thickly behind another line of watchfulness. The air there carried the scent of flowers, but guards stood among the paths. No one had told him Sita would be in a grove. It was the watchfulness that made him attend.

This was Ashoka Vatika, the ashoka grove.

Hanuman slipped into its branches. In the pale night beneath them, surrounded by harsh-faced guards, he saw a woman seated apart beneath a simsapa tree. Her clothes were worn; grief had thinned her; yet her bearing resisted the place made to hold her.

He did not speak. He did not yet know enough.

But he stayed in the tree and watched, with his breath held against hope.