Chapter 52 — Ravana's Birth and Boon

After many years in Rasatala, Sumali rose again to the world above. He traveled with his daughter Kaikasi and saw Vaishravana moving through the sky in Pushpaka, radiant with wealth and office.

Sumali turned to Kaikasi. Her youth was passing, he said, and no suitor had been chosen. “Go to Vishrava,” he instructed her. “He is Pulastya's son. From such a union you may bear sons with a splendor like this lord of wealth.”

Kaikasi obeyed her father. She came to Vishrava as he stood at the evening fire, head bowed and hands folded. The hour was harsh, and she stood before him with her face lowered.

Vishrava asked her name and purpose. Kaikasi answered with restraint: he knew by his own power what she wished, but she had come at her father's command.

The sage understood. “Because you have come at a fierce hour,” he told her, “you will bear fierce sons: rakshasas terrible in form and cruel in action.”

Kaikasi fell before him. “Such sons should not come from you,” she said. She did not deny the hour or plead ignorance of her errand. She asked him to look again at the consequence.

Vishrava answered that her last son would follow his own lineage in another way: he would be steadfast in dharma, the order of duty and right conduct by which power is used and judged.

In time Kaikasi bore Dashagriva, the ten-necked one, whose later name would be Ravana. He had ten heads, twenty arms, great teeth, dark brightness, and hair that blazed. Portents attended the birth: creatures cried out, the sky darkened, and violent signs moved through the world. The signs marked what had been born. They did not settle what he would do with it.

After him came Kumbhakarna, vast beyond ordinary measure; then Shurpanakha; and last Vibhishana, who was devoted to dharma. The siblings grew in the forest. Dashagriva became a cause of alarm in the worlds; the enormous Kumbhakarna ranged violently among sages and beings under their protection; Vibhishana held himself to study, restraint, and right conduct.

When Vaishravana again visited Vishrava in Pushpaka, Kaikasi showed him to Dashagriva. “See your brother,” she said. “You share a father, yet look at yourself beside him. Make the effort, my son, to become his equal—or greater.”

Dashagriva received the words with fierce resentment and made a promise to his mother that he would not remain beneath Vaishravana. With Kumbhakarna and Vibhishana, he went to the hermitage at Gokarna to undertake tapas.

The brothers' disciplines were not alike. Kumbhakarna stood amid five fires in summer, sat exposed to the monsoon rains, and remained in water during the cold. Vibhishana stood on one foot for thousands of years, then kept his arms raised, face turned upward, his mind held to sacred study. Dashagriva went without food for ten thousand years. At the end of each thousand, he cut off one of his own heads and offered it into the fire.

When he prepared to offer the tenth, Brahma came with the gods.

“Choose,” Brahma said. “Your labor has not been fruitless.”

Dashagriva asked first for deathlessness. That was not granted. He turned instead to a narrower request, asking that gods, celestial birds, serpents, yakshas, daityas, danavas, and rakshasas should not be able to kill him. The daityas were an elder race of beings, born of the same fathers as the gods and set against them from the beginning; the danavas were their kin. Human beings he judged too slight to name. Brahma granted the protection as he had requested, and restored the heads Dashagriva had given to the fire.

That omission was not an accident imposed upon him. It was the measure of his contempt. The boon was an exceptional granted condition, not a moral endorsement, and it did not make every creature powerless against him.

Then Brahma turned to Vibhishana. Asked what he desired, Vibhishana requested that, in every trial, his understanding should remain fixed on dharma and that he should keep to it. Brahma praised the request, granted it, and gave him immortality.

The gods feared what Kumbhakarna might ask. They asked Brahma to prevent a boon that would bring further terror to the worlds. At Brahma's direction, Sarasvati, the goddess associated with speech and sacred learning, entered Kumbhakarna's speech. When Brahma invited him to choose, Kumbhakarna asked instead for sleep through many years. Brahma granted it. Only after the goddess had gone did Kumbhakarna hear what his own mouth had said and grieve over it. He had asked to sleep for many years, and many years were granted him.

Thus the brothers received their divergent gifts. Ravana had strength and a protection bounded by his own dismissal of human life. Vibhishana had a mind turned toward dharma. Kumbhakarna had sleep. The history Agastya told at Rama's court had not yet reached Lanka's seizure, Sita's captivity, or the war—but its pressures had already gathered.