Week 3 Reading Diary: Narayan's Ramayana

Reading:
The Ramayana: A Shortened Modern Prose Version of the Indian Epic by R. K. Narayan

The curse laid on Ravana could make for an interesting flashback story of sorts. I also feel like that's some form of foreshadowing, but we'll see. Also, the picture of Ravana in my mind keeps changing, originally I just picture him with a normal body with ten heads. But, it was specifically stated that he has twenty shoulders, so does he also have twenty arms? Here's a picture that's like that:

Ravana
Courtesy of Harekrsna

Narayan's description of Ravana killing Jatayu was the most violent and specific so far. Compared to a lot of other stories it's still not very bad, but it's more than Narayan usually says. Also, apparently Ravana tried to show a little mercy at the beginning, which was unexpected.

The whole story of Ravana killing Vali is very strange, the conversations become very unreal as Vali is dying, and things don't seem to line up right. When Rama met Sugreeva, something felt off about his story, but as soon as the story got to Vali, I was sure that Sugreeva was tricking Rama for his own gain, and I haven't seen any evidence otherwise. Vali seemed like a just ruler who was tricked by his brother, Sugreeva didn't go running to his wife after Rama defeated Vali, of course that could be a cultural thing, but he just starts drinking and celebrated and doesn't seem to focus on war prep at all. Maybe it was intentionally vague though.

Hanuman seems to be much more powerful than I expected. He broke out of a deep underground cavern somehow, which could make for a really good story, and was able to grow larger than Vishnu had before, 3 times to be precise. I also find the curse laid on him by his father to be very interesting. He reminded me so much of Son Wukong from Journey to the West that I did a quick google search, and apparently Wukong is based on Hanuman. That's something to remember.