Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Yuddha · 41 of 50
41. The siege begins
Yuddha (युद्ध)
Rāvaṇa sees the army and does not return the woman. Aṅgada goes as a last messenger and is insulted, and the insult is a throwing of a person from a height, and he returns. The war begins. The poem's battle books are long, and this chronicle will not rehearse them as a sequence of duels. Allies fall on both sides. Sons fall. A wall is defended and approached and defended. The page says the siege was fought. It does not describe the killing.
What it will keep are the falls a reader of the whole poem has to know, because the grief and the politics attach to them. Those come in the next sittings. Here the fact is the scale. A search by one minister has become a war of peoples, monkeys and bears and a rākṣasa house, over a refusal to undo a theft.
Inside the city Sītā hears the noise and is told lies about Rāma's death, and refuses the lies, and is not rescued by the noise. A siege is a hope heard through a wall. The poem leaves her inside it for a long time. The reader is meant to feel the length.
नेपालीमा
रावणले सेना देखे पनि सीता फर्काएन। अङ्गद अन्तिम दूत भएर गए, अपमानित भए। युद्ध सुरु भयो। यो वृत्तान्तले द्वन्द्वको शृङ्खला दोहोर्याउँदैन। यो पृष्ठले घेराबन्दी लडियो भन्छ। मारिने तरिका लेख्दैन। एक मन्त्रीको खोज बानर, भालु र राक्षस वंशको युद्ध भयो, एउटा चोरी नफर्काइएकाले। भित्र सीतालाई राम मरेको झूट सुनाइयो। उनले पत्याइनन्। घेरा पर्खालबाट सुनिने आशा हो।