Chapter 57 — The Taking of Pushpaka

Ravana did not go to Kailasa alone. Six ministers went with him: Prahasta and Mahodara, Maricha, Shuka, Sarana, and Dhumraksha. Their company crossed cities, rivers, forests, and mountain ranges in the swift movement of Agastya's tale, until the white heights of Kailasa stood before them, bright above the darker slopes and ravines below.

Vaishravana's guards saw the rakshasa force arrive. They carried the news to their lord: Ravana had come to the mountain with his ministers and an army. Vaishravana gave permission for his yakshas to meet the attack. He had sent a warning and seen its messenger murdered. There was no longer room for counsel to do the work of defense.

The battle began beneath Kailasa between yakshas and rakshasas. The yakshas, powerful nonhuman beings in Vaishravana's service, came out with maces, clubs, spears, swords, and heavier weapons. Ravana's followers met them with their own. The old account gives the weapons in a dense procession of names; beneath them was the same hard fact: a mountain road filled with dust, metal striking metal, men and nonhuman fighters calling to one another through the uproar.

At first the rakshasa ministers carried the fight. Then the yakshas drove into them with a force that shook their line. Maricha was struck and fell stunned to the ground before he could recover. Dhumraksha went down beneath the blow of a yaksha champion. Prahasta and Mahodara kept fighting, but the pressure of the defense began to turn Ravana's advance back upon itself.

Ravana saw it. He did not call his men away.

With a great cry he entered the fighting, his mace raised. He went through the yakshas as fire moves into dry wood. The image does not make the violence clean. Fighters fell back among broken stone; others ran toward the caves and the narrow tracks above the field. A guard named Suryabhanu stood at an ornamented gateway and tried to bar Ravana's passage. Ravana wrenched the gateway free and struck him with it. When Suryabhanu fell, the remaining guards broke away in fear.

Then Vaishravana came out himself.

He carried a mace and approached through the ruined defenses with the bearing of one who still held authority over the place being attacked. Lanka had been taken from him by Ravana's demand. Now Ravana had carried the same force to the mountain where his father had told him to live. Vaishravana did not yield the mountain merely because he had lost a city.

“I tried to turn you from this course,” he said. “You did not understand. When you meet its fruit, you will understand too late.”

He spoke as an elder brother and as a ruler. Ravana had despised parents, teachers, and kin; he had mistaken the strength he possessed for freedom from consequence. A person who drinks poison in delusion, Vaishravana said, may not know what he has done at once, but learns it in the end. Each act made its own result. Power, wealth, children, reputation—all such things arrived by the course a person had made, not by an exemption from judgment.

“I will not speak further with one who has chosen such conduct,” he said.

Ravana answered with combat. His ministers rushed toward Vaishravana, but Vaishravana drove them back. Then the two brothers faced each other. Neither gave way at first. Vaishravana sent a fire weapon against Ravana; Ravana met it with a water weapon. Fire struck water. Steam rose in a hot veil over the scarred ground, and the forces around them could no longer see the brothers clearly.

Ravana took advantage of that confusion. He entered a rakshasa illusion; when he emerged, he swung his mace against Vaishravana's head. The blow shook the lord of wealth. Blood marked him, and he fell like an ashoka tree cut at the root.

His attendants did not abandon him. They carried him from the battlefield to the Nandana grove and tended him there. Agastya's account does not give a reconciliation, a yielding word from Vaishravana, or a death. It leaves an injured ruler borne away from a defense that has failed.

Ravana stood where Vaishravana had stood and took Pushpaka. Brahma had granted the celestial vehicle to Vaishravana in the earlier history Agastya had told; it was not an heirloom waiting for Ravana to claim. Its theft was therefore another act of dispossession, as visible as the seizure of Lanka and more mobile in its consequence.

Pushpaka rose at Ravana's command. Gold-colored pillars caught the mountain light; jewel-work marked its gateways; pearl netting trembled in the air. Yet nothing in its splendor changed what Ravana had done to possess it. He mounted the vehicle taken by force and descended from Kailasa, carrying his victory into the sky.