When Ravana talks about Rama to Maricha, he shudders in fright. He starts explaining to Ravana about what happened in Dandaka forest. He starts off by retelling about Rama’s appearance as a 12-year-old boy. He shares with his king on how Rama as a boy of fewer than twelve years of age had demolished him. Unborn are 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 he was irradiating the Dandaka forest with a radiating radiance of his own, and then he appeared like the just risen baby-moon.
Since Maricha knows that he cannot directly praise Rama’s qualities to his king, he infers a couple of things indirectly through this retelling. By alluding to his moustache and his boyish looks which are natural to humans, Maricha infers to Rama as a human being. By inferring that Rama was wearing a single cloth, he clearly conveys that Vishwamitra was treating the brothers just like he would treat any other young scholar. Also, the single cloth clearly means that Rama was not wearing any armor or shield even when he knew that he would be meeting demons like Tadaka, Subahu, and Maricha.
Rama does not sport princely jewelry, but only a single pendant. His cleanly arranged locks of hair show how his mother Kausalya still treats him as a small boy and arranges his hair in neat locks. By comparing him to a baby moon, Maricha seems to emphasize Rama’s age during the encounter. For Maricha, everything about Rama cries “boyish” during that frightful meeting, except the bows and the arrows that he unleashed on the demon. The hits that he got from Rama still brings him the jitters so much that he tells Ravana that after that day, he has shuddered every time he even heard someone utter the word RA!
With a parched throat, Maricha goes on to say that Ravana is trying to bring ruin to his race and to his country by planning to abduct Seetha and thus earning Rama’s wrath. He pleads to Ravana not to listen to his informers who have misled him so far. He explains that Rama is neither a renegade nor a criminal and that he is in the forest to honor his father’s words. He begs Ravana not to make Rama his implacable enemy and bring total destruction to his kingdom and people!
mythological squirrel 