Ahiravana

Ahiravana — called Mahiravana in some places — is not found in the Valmiki Ramayana.

The story is found in the fifteenth-century Bengali Krittivasa Ramayana, and is also told in later texts such as the Ananda Ramayana, the Bhavartha Ramayana and the Parashara Samhita.

Which is why this chapter has a different colour — it has maya, an underworld, a life kept elsewhere, five faces, none of which sits easily with Valmiki's plain manner of telling. This gatha keeps it, but with the label on.

The whole vanara army was on watch, and Ahiravana still got right inside — not because the watch was weak, but because he chose the one face nobody questions.

That is the most frightening part of the story: the security was not broken, it was used.

Which is why the first thing the real Vibhishana had to say in the morning was that it had not been him.

By the story, after burning Lanka Hanuman was cooling the fire of his tail in the sea, and a drop of his sweat was swallowed by a fish — Makardhwaja came from that.

This episode is not in Valmiki either; it comes from the same later texts the Ahiravana story comes from.

It is the one place in this whole gatha where anything of Hanuman's own family appears — and it is a son whose first meeting with him is a fight.

This is a familiar shape in the storytelling tradition: a demon's life is not in his body but hidden elsewhere, and until that place is found he does not die.

Here the condition is harder still — five lamps, five directions, and all of them must go out together. If one is left, all of it is wasted.

That condition determines the whole build of this chapter, and out of it comes the form this story is best known for.

This form did not come as decoration — it was the direct solution to the problem of how one body reaches five directions at once.

Statues and images of the five-faced Hanuman are very common today, and their root is this story.

Which is to say the most extraordinary-looking form of Hanuman does not come from Valmiki but from this later tradition.

The cleanest thing about this story is that the form does not come first, the problem does.

The condition was five lamps, one instant. The solution was five faces, each towards its own direction.

This keeps returning in the gatha: every great power of Hanuman's comes out in answer to some difficulty, not for display. At sea he got smaller; here he became five.

The key to the riddle is in "putting me out alone was useless" — that was the real difficulty of this story.

If they had been put out one at a time, the lamps still burning would have set Ahiravana on his feet again.

Which is why this fight was not one of strength but of coordination — and that need is what produced the five-faced form.

Makardhwaja appears only in this chapter of the whole gatha — first as a guard, then as a son, and then as a king.

There is no emotional scene between Hanuman and him. There was a fight, there was a recognition, and then the work moved on.

A large truth of this gatha hides in that silence: there is very little in Hanuman's life that is his own. Even his son is met on the road, and left on the road.

All the events of this chapter happen in one night and the morning after it.

Worth noticing: nowhere in this whole episode does Hanuman win by strength alone — first he has to ask the way, then fight his own son, and at the end find the real lock.

The five-faced form is not the end of the story but its solution — and the solution only comes once the problem is fully understood.

This is among those small disagreements that show these stories were not written in one place at one time.

Ahiravana in some places, Mahiravana in others — and in a few, the two are even said to be different characters.

Both names are recorded in this gatha and neither is settled as "the real one" — the same method used for the disagreements over counting in the Krishna-Leela.