Free The Ramayana by Ramesh Menon

and his wives returned to their kingdom. In those days, when the world was young, heaven and earth were hardly apart from each other as they are now. The earth was peopled, equally, with the children of the Gods and men. Sumati bore her husband Sagara sixty thousand sons. She did not bear them as children are born today, but by the miraculous motherhood of light and by the grace of the Devas, most of all, the grace of Brahma. Sumati’s boys were handsome and brave, virile and arrogant.
    â€œIn time, Kesini also bore Sagara a son, the one who would become his heir. But to Sagara’s despair, this boy, Asamanja, was an evil prince. In his childhood he would dismember insects, tearing off their delicate arms and legs when he found the little creatures wandering on the palace floor. Sagara thought it was just an infantile affliction and had elaborate pujas performed for the boy. But some years later, as he grew, Asamanja entertained himself by secretly slaughtering calves and ponies in the royal dairies and stables.
    â€œStill, the king hoped his prince would mend. But when he reached his youth, Asamanja was caught drowning small children of the city in the Sarayu. He stood fondling himself as he watched their desperate struggles. Sagara saw his son was evil. Yet he waited, hoping against hope the boy would mend. Finally, his people came to petition Sagara against the prince. The king banished Asamanja from the kingdom, though it broke his heart.
    â€œBut there was some consolation for Sagara. Asamanja’s son Anshuman was a noble, gentle child, and devoted to his grandfather. When Anshuman was a young man, Sagara undertook an aswamedha yagna. For his yagnashala, he chose the plains between the Himalaya and the Vindhya mountains, which glower at each other across the sacred land like mortal enemies. He sent a white horse across the country, with his grandson Anshuman riding with it: daring any king to arrest its careen, and claiming fealty from those whose kingdoms the horse crossed unchallenged.
    â€œBut there is always one king who obstructs the aswamedha yagnas of the rulers of the earth. Indra spirited away that horse. The brahmanas who had charge of the yagna said to Sagara, ‘If the horse is not found and the yagna not completed, calamity will visit the House of Ikshvaku.’
    â€œSagara called his sixty thousand sons by Sumati, of whom their mother was so proud, and said to them, ‘Go and find the horse, wherever it may be.’
    â€œLike the wind, like fire, air, and tameless water, they swept away in quest of the horse, those ferocious, elemental Sagaraputras. They excavated the earth, they razed whole forests, to discover where the animal was hidden. They brought terror wherever they went, among men and beasts, great old plants, and even the rakshasas of the jungles. They came with such violence.
    â€œThey could not find the horse by land or by sea, though they searched for it with the powers of sorcery they inherited from their celestial ancestors. They burrowed into the nether worlds, the deep Patalas, where pale and grave Asuras and emerald nagas with resplendent jewels in their heads dwell in darkness and peace. They saw the elephants of legend, the Diggajas that bear the earth upon their heads. But they saw no horse of their father’s aswamedha.
    â€œThey went deeper, down the spiraling paths of the twilight realms. They came to a dark cavern and, from within it, heard the whinny of a horse in tether. In they plunged and saw, seated in padmasana, the posture of the lotus, the Maharishi Kapila Vasudeva, his eyes shut, absorbed in the Brahman. Beyond the rishi in dhyana was their father’s white horse, tied to a tree.
    â€œâ€˜Thief!’ they roared, and rushed at Kapila with their weapons raised. The muni’s eyes flew open to see who dared disturb his samadhi, and instantly those sixty thousand sons of Sagara were made ashes; for they all plunged into that