Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Sundara · 34 of 50
34. The city at night
Sundara (सुन्दर)
He walks the palaces. The poem gives Laṅkā its splendor on purpose. Rāvaṇa is not a king of a hovel. The rooms are magnificent, the court is a court, the women of the inner apartments are beautiful, and Hanumān, searching among sleeping women, is careful in a way the poem pauses to praise. He does not look at them as a thief of anything but a face. He is looking for one face. He does not find it. The absence is worse than a danger, because it raises the possibility that she is dead, or that she has consented, or that the vulture was wrong.
He searches until searching becomes despair, and the despair is part of his loyalty. A servant who cannot imagine failure is useless at the hour of failure. He considers, and then he sees the grove. The aśoka trees. A garden inside the city, which is the one place a prisoner might be kept who is neither killed nor crowned.
The night walk is the poem's answer to a cartoon of the enemy. The man who stole her lives inside beauty, scholarship, and power. The theft is not explained by poverty or by a monster's simple hunger. It is a great king's crime. Hanumān sees the greatness before he sees the captive. The order is the moral.
नेपालीमा
उनी महलहरू हिँडे। रावण झुपडीको राजा होइन। सुतेका स्त्रीहरूको बीचमा हनुमानले एउटै अनुहार खोजे। कविताले उनको सावधानीको प्रशंसा गर्छ। अनुहार भेटिएन। निराशा निष्ठाको भाग हो। अनि उनले अशोकको उपवन देखे, जहाँ नमारिएकी र नअभिषिक्त भएकी कैदी राख्न सकिन्छ। हनुमानले कैदी देख्नुअघि शत्रुको महानता देखे। त्यही क्रममा नैतिक पाठ छ।