The headless monster in the forest who pointed Rama to Sugriva

What stood in the clearing

It stood eight cubits tall, taller than any man, and where the head should have been, there was nothing.

The neck simply ended at the shoulders. The face was set in the chest, between the nipples, with one enormous yellow eye in the middle of the forehead, a single Cyclops eye, and a mouth as wide as a doorway lined with teeth the size of plowshares. The arms were the strangest part. Each arm was a yojana long, eight Vedic miles, coiling on the forest floor like enormous snakes, ending in palms the size of ox-carts.

It was sleeping when Rama and Lakshmana entered the clearing. Or rather, the eye was closed.

The brothers had been wandering the Dandaka forest for three days after Sita's abduction, following broken branches and an abandoned ornament southward with no plan, no direction, no real knowledge of where she had been carried. Now they had walked into the clearing of a creature called Kabandha, the headless one.

Rama raised his hand to halt Lakshmana. Both brothers stopped on the threshold and looked at the thing.

"Brother," Lakshmana said quietly, "we should go around. We do not need this fight."

Rama nodded. They began to back away.

But Kabandha was awake. The eye opened. The arms moved. With one impossible reach of the right arm, then the left, both brothers were caught, Rama in one fist, Lakshmana in the other, and lifted into the air, dangling, eight miles away from the body.

The arms began to draw them in. Toward the mouth. To eat them.

The two brothers in the fist

Lakshmana, dangling in the right hand, shouted: "Brother, my arm is pinned. I cannot reach my sword."

Rama, dangling in the left, said with a strange calm: "Then let me cut my arm free first. When I cut his right arm, you fall. When you fall, draw your sword. We cut the left arm together."

Kabandha was laughing. The laugh came from the chest-mouth, deep and rumbling, the laugh of a being who had eaten travelers in this clearing for what he himself could not remember was how many centuries.

Rama drew a small dagger and slashed across the wrist of the right arm. The skin was leathery, thick. He cut deeper. The arm twitched. The flesh was so old it bled black, not red. He cut through the tendon. The arm fell.

Lakshmana dropped to the ground. He drew his sword. He slashed at the left arm and the second arm fell.

Both brothers stood now at the feet of the headless monster. Kabandha looked down at them, though looked is the wrong word, the eye was in his chest, and the eye was filled with something the brothers had not expected.

It was filled with gratitude.

What Kabandha asked

The monster sank to his knees. The eye was weeping. The mouth, which had been laughing, was now speaking, and the voice had changed.

"Princes. Burn me."

Rama lowered his sword. "What did you say?"

"Burn me. I have been waiting for you. Build a fire. Place my body on it. Burn me until nothing is left. Then I will tell you where Sita is."

Lakshmana was suspicious. "It is a trick. He wants us to release him from this body so he can pursue us in another form."

"No," Kabandha said. "Listen. I will tell you what I am, and you will understand."

The gandharva who became this

He had once been Vishvavasu, a celestial gandharva of remarkable beauty. The gandharvas were the singers of the heavens, the musicians who played the celestial vina at Indra's court, beautiful beyond mortal women and arrogant in the way that beautiful things often are. Vishvavasu had been the most beautiful, and the most arrogant.

One day he had seen the sage Sthulashiras, the great-headed one, sitting in meditation. Sthulashiras was unusually ugly. His head was disproportionate to his body. His face was scarred from austerities. His skin was burned dark by the sun.

Vishvavasu had laughed at the sage's appearance. He had pranced around him. He had imitated the great-headed shape with his hands. He had said: "Sage, you should hide that face in the forest. The world is more beautiful without it."

Sthulashiras had opened his eyes. He had looked at the gandharva. And he had pronounced the curse:

"You who mock the form of others, lose your own form. Become a body without a head. Be the ugliness you laugh at, multiplied a thousand times. Live in this body until two princes find you and you ask them to burn you. Only then will you be released."

Vishvavasu had laughed at first. Then his head had begun to sink into his shoulders. His face had migrated downward, into his chest. His arms had begun to elongate. By the time the transformation was complete, he was Kabandha.

There had been a second insult, layered on top. Kabandha, already transformed, had attacked Indra himself in a desperate rage. Indra had struck him with the Vajra, the thunderbolt. The blow had driven Kabandha's already-sunken head deeper, into his stomach itself, and had stretched his arms to the eight-mile length they were now.

Kabandha had been waiting for centuries. He did not know how long. He had eaten thousands of travelers. The arms were the only way he could feed, and feeding was the only thing that kept the body alive, and the body's continued life was the curse he could not escape.

Until today.

"Princes. I have been waiting for you for what feels like all of time. Burn me. Release me from this body. And I will tell you where to find your wife."

The fire

Rama and Lakshmana exchanged one long look. Then they went silently into the forest. They cut wood. They piled it in the clearing. They set the great headless body onto the wood. They lit the pyre.

Kabandha did not scream. The flames climbed his hairy iron-colored body. The chest-eye slowly closed. The plowshare-teeth slowly blackened.

Then, from the smoke of the burning body, rose a celestial form. A young man. Beautiful beyond mortal description. White silk, golden ornaments, a vina in his hand. Vishvavasu the gandharva, restored.

He hovered above the pyre. He bowed to the brothers.

"Princes. Thank you. The curse is undone. Now listen carefully. Go south to Lake Pampa. There, on the shore, lives an old ascetic woman named Shabari. She is waiting for Rama. After her, go to the western mountain Rishyamuka. There lives Sugriva, the exiled monkey-king. Befriend him. He has lost his kingdom and you have lost your wife. The two of you, together, will recover both."

He paused. He looked at Rama.

"Prince. The curse that held me was given for laughing at another being's form. Do not laugh at any form, ever, no matter how strange. Every monster you meet on this journey was once something else. Be careful what you take into your eye when you look at a stranger."

He bowed again. He rose into the sky. He was gone.

Rama and Lakshmana followed his directions exactly. They went south to Lake Pampa. They met Shabari. Shabari pointed them further south, to Rishyamuka. There they met Hanuman, and through Hanuman, Sugriva. The alliance between Rama and the monkey-army began.

None of this would have happened without Kabandha. The brothers had been wandering with no plan. The headless monster was the navigator who set them on the southern road. Without his death, there is no Sundara Kanda. Without his death, there is no Lanka war. Without his death, there is no recovered Sita.

He was the door the story had to walk through, and he had been waiting at the threshold for a thousand years to ask the only two people who could open it for a fire he could not light himself.