Chapter 61 — Anaranya and Yama

Ravana went from Marutta's sacrifice to the cities of kings. He demanded a battle or an admission of defeat. Many rulers, knowing the force of his boon, said that they had been overcome. Agastya named them: Dushyanta, Suratha, Gadhi, Gaya, and Pururavas. The list was not a celebration of conquest. It marked the reach of fear.

At last Ravana came to Ayodhya, guarded by the aged King Anaranya of the Ikshvaku line—the royal line from which Rama would later come. Ravana gave him the same demand.

Anaranya chose battle.

His army came out with elephants, horses, chariots, and foot soldiers, but Ravana's force broke it. The king watched his defense disappear and then took up his own bow. He advanced on Ravana and sent eight hundred arrows against him. The arrows fell without making a wound, like rain falling upon a mountain.

Ravana struck Anaranya on the head with his open hand. The king fell from his chariot, shaking upon the ground.

Ravana laughed. “What have you gained by fighting me? There is no king in the three worlds who can give me a duel.”

Anaranya answered from the edge of death. “What can be done when Time cannot be crossed? I have not been defeated by your boasting. Time has overcome me, and you have become its instrument.”

He spoke then with the authority of his own life: if he had given gifts, offered sacrifice, practiced tapas, and guarded his people rightly, let his words prove true. From the great Ikshvaku line, he said, a king of exceptional power would arise and take Ravana's life.

Agastya's account lets Rama hear the declaration after its fulfillment. When Anaranya had spoken, signs answered from the sky, and the king died and went to the world of the blessed.

Ravana turned away from Ayodhya. On the road he met Narada, a rishi whose freedom of movement carried him among royal courts, forests, and the realms of gods. He was not a warrior in Ravana's campaign, nor a court flatterer who needed the rakshasa king's favor. He came as one accustomed to speaking where power gathered and to carrying news between worlds. His question did not praise the suffering Ravana had caused.

“Why do you still torment mortals?” Narada asked. “Every mortal is already held within death.”

Ravana laughed and said that he was bound for the southern region, to Yama. Yama is the ruler of the dead: the one before whom beings come when their lives are over, and whose realm gives consequence to the good and harmful actions they have done. He is not merely another king with a territory to seize. For Ravana to threaten him was to challenge the order that outlasted a person's strength, rank, and pleasures.

Ravana had vowed to defeat the four guardians of the world, he said, and would make Yama, whom he called a bringer of suffering to living beings, meet death himself.

Narada watched Ravana leave with his ministers. Then, curious to see what would follow, he went swiftly ahead to Yama's realm.

There Yama sat with Agni before him, ordering the destinies of beings according to what they had done. The court Narada entered was not a place of arbitrary torment. It was where the results of conduct were assigned: some beings received the fruit of generous or disciplined lives, while others met the suffering shaped by their own harmful acts. Ravana had already seen such beings as Pushpaka approached; he had not understood what he was looking at.

Yama received Narada with the formal offering due a visiting rishi and asked whether all was well and why he had come.

Narada told him. “Dashagriva is coming to bring you under his power.”

Far away, Pushpaka's light was already approaching. The warning made clear what would come next: Ravana was not riding toward another frightened earthly king, but toward the keeper of the boundary every mortal must cross. Agastya ended this part of the account before Ravana reached the court of the dead.