Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Yuddha · 43 of 50
43. Kumbhakarṇa and Indrajit
Yuddha (युद्ध)
Kumbhakarṇa is waked, because the city is losing and the sleeper is a weapon the king has been saving by leaving him asleep. He wakes hungry, and he speaks, before he fights, a version of Vibhīṣaṇa's warning. This war was a mistake. He then fights it anyway, out of a brother's loyalty that the poem respects and does not endorse. He falls. The page says he falls. It does not describe the fight. Rāvaṇa feels this death as the war entering his house in a way the ministers' deaths did not.
Indrajit is the other son, and the more dangerous, because he does not require size. He fights unseen, and he performs a rite that renews the unseen. Lakṣmaṇa breaks the condition of the rite by reaching him, and kills him. The page says Indrajit falls to Lakṣmaṇa when the concealment and the rite no longer cover him. It does not describe the killing. Rāvaṇa's grief for this son is the grief that finally takes the glamour off the palace. A scholar-king who stole a wife has spent his children on the theft.
The city still has a king. The poem is not interested in a war that ends by committee. It has cleared the brothers and the sons so that the last day can be the two husbands, one by marriage and one by theft, in the same field.
नेपालीमा
कुम्भकर्णलाई जगाइयो। लड्नुअघि उसले पनि विभीषणको चेतावनी दोहोर्यायो। अनि भाइप्रतिको निष्ठाले लड्यो। ढल्यो। यो पृष्ठले ढल्यो भन्छ। लडाइँ लेख्दैन। इन्द्रजित् नदेखिई लड्थ्यो। लक्ष्मणले उसलाई पुगेर विधि भङ्ग गरे, र मारे। यो पृष्ठले लुकाइ र विधिले ढाक्न नसकेपछि ऊ ढल्यो भन्छ। मारिने तरिका लेख्दैन। रावणले छोराहरू चोरीमा खर्च गर्यो। अन्तिम दिन दुई पतिको हो।