Being Ravana’s wife does not stop Mandodari from talking the truth about Rama. In the same vein, there is another person from the same camp talking about Rama, but this time to Ravana himself.
Shurpanakha comes back to Ravana after all her brothers are killed by Rama. Ravana inquires about Rama’s valour and weaponry for which Shuurpanakha narrates about Rama, Seetha, and Lakshmana and what has happened in Janasthaana. Thus, she prompts Ravana to achieve Seetha as his wife, for none surpasses Seetha in her beauty. Ravana is now brainwashed into submission by his sister. So he proceeds to meet Maareecha to seek his help in the abduction of Seetha. In his search for Mareecha, he arrives at a pleasing hermitage in the sacred and scenic interior of the forest.
In this hermitage he sees Maareecha, wearing jute-clothes and black deerskin and tufts of hairs. Maareecha welcomes the king Ravana, offers him meals and drinking water, and venerates him properly before enquiring about the purpose of his visit. Ravana explains his intent of abducting Seetha and asks for Mareecha’s help. He wants Maareecha to assume the shape of a golden-deer and lure Seetha. He is sure that Seetha will ask Rama and Lakshmana to fetch that golden-deer. If Rama and Lakshmana are distracted from the hermitage, Ravana can safely abduct Seetha. On hearing this, Mareecha is dumb-struck.
He explains to Ravana how he was on the rove around this earth, taking pride in his valor, bearing the strength of a thousand elephants, mountainous in his size and black-cloudlike in his sheen, wearing ear-knobs and a crown made out of refined gold, with a bludgeon as his weapon, and how he rambled Dandaka forest causing terror to the world, and eating the fleshes of sages. He shares with his king on how Rama as a boy of less-than-twelve years of age had demolished him. Mareecha continues to exclaim how unborn were the identities of adulthood like moustache on Rama’s face, and that providential one was magnificent in looks with a peacock-blue complexion, wearing a single cloth, locks of hair, and golden locket, and wielding a bow, and how he was irradiating the Dandaka forest with a radiating radiance of his own, and appeared like the just risen baby-moon.
Although to the un-initiated, these may sound like normal extrapolations of a boy entering his boy-hood, there are a couple of hidden meanings that Mareecha is implying when he speaks thus to Ravana. He also speaks more about Rama and how Rama has affected him and his life.
mythological squirrel 