Chapter 54 — The House of Ravana

Ravana had entered Lanka with his brothers, but Agastya did not let the city stand as a throne alone. He turned to the households forming around it.

Ravana first gave his sister Shurpanakha in marriage to Vidyujjihva, a leader among the Kalakeya danavas. Shurpanakha was given neither a speech nor a choice in it. Her place in this history is not erased by that silence: she is a sister whose life is placed within the political arrangements of Ravana's new rule.

Later Ravana was ranging through a forest on a hunt when he found Maya, a danava famed for wondrous making, with a young woman beside him. Ravana asked who he was and why he had come into the lonely wood.

Maya answered with his own history. His wife Hema, an apsara, had gone away on the work of the gods. He had made a shining city for her, bright with gold and jewels, but without her he could no longer bear it. He had taken their daughter into the forest to seek a husband for her.

“This is Mandodari,” Maya said. “Her mother is Hema. Receive her as your wife.”

Ravana named himself as the son of Vishrava and accepted. Before a kindled fire, he and Mandodari took hands in the marriage rite. The fire was the sacred witness of the union; there was no courtship and no promise beyond the marriage itself.

Maya also gave Ravana an unfailing spear, won through his own austerities. Its power was part of the gift, but Agastya did not carry the account forward to make it a prophecy of a later war.

Ravana returned to Lanka with Mandodari. For his brother Kumbhakarna he brought Vajrajwala, a granddaughter of Vairochana. Vibhishana, whose mind had asked to remain fixed on dharma, took Sarama, daughter of the gandharva king Shailusha, as his wife. Their marriages made a household, but not a single character or a single fate. Kumbhakarna, Vibhishana, Shurpanakha, and Mandodari would each stand differently within the calamities to come.

In time Mandodari bore Ravana a son. At the moment of his birth, the child's cry rolled out like thunder. Lanka seemed stunned by it. Ravana gave him the name Meghanada, “thunder-cry.”

Agastya looked toward Rama as he said it. “This is the child you know as Indrajit.”

The name did not yet tell the court how Meghanada had earned the later title. For the moment he was a newborn in Ravana's inner household, guarded among the women of the palace as fire may be kept hidden beneath fuel. Yet the sound of his first cry had already carried across the city, and the sages who had asked about his death had now heard the beginning of his life.