What is Anjaneri?

The monkeys had come to the edge of the sea. They had been sent south to look for Sita, and they had found the place where the land ran out, and the ocean was in front of them with nothing on the other side that they could see, and every one of them knew that Sita was across it. One after another they said how far they could jump. One could jump so far, another a little further, none of them all the way. And the whole army of them lost heart.

Jambavan was the old bear among them, and he had been watching Hanuman, who was sitting a little apart from the rest and had not said a word. Jambavan sent for him. Why are you sitting by yourself, he said, saying nothing? You are as strong as Ram and Lakshman and the monkey king himself. Listen. I am going to tell you who you are.

Your mother, he said, was an apsara. An अप्सरा apsara is one of the beautiful women of heaven. Her name was Punjikasthala, and there was no one in the three worlds as beautiful as she was. She was cursed, and the curse turned her into a monkey, and as a monkey her name was Anjana. She could take any shape she liked. She married a monkey called Kesari.

One day she took the shape of a young woman, dressed in silk and hung with garlands, and went walking on the top of a mountain. The mountain was dark with cloud, the way the hills are in the rains. And the Wind came past and took her clothes. He pulled the yellow cloth with the red border right off her, and he saw her, and he wanted her, and he took her in his arms.

She cried out. Who is this, she said, who wants to break the vow of a woman who has a husband?

I am doing you no wrong, the Wind said. Do not be afraid. Because I have held you, you will have a son. He will be as strong as I am and as clever, and as fast as I am, and nothing will tire him.

That made her glad. And she gave birth to him in a cave.

He was a baby, and one morning his mother went off into the trees to find fruit and left him. He got hungry. He cried, the way a hungry baby cries, and nobody came. And then the sun came up over the edge of the forest, big and round and red like a bunch of flowers, and the baby looked at it and thought: fruit. He got up and jumped for it.

He went straight up. Not a little way — up, and up, mile after mile into the sky, and the gods and the demons and everyone in the sky stopped and stared, because nothing had ever moved like that, not the Wind, not Garuda, not thought itself. And if he could do this as a baby, they said to each other, what will he do when he is grown?

His father followed him. The Wind went up behind him and blew cool on him so that the sun would not burn him, and the baby went on climbing, mile after mile, until he was close. And the Sun looked at what was coming at him and thought: he is only a child, he does not know what he is doing. And the Sun held back his heat and let him come.

Now that same morning was the morning of an eclipse, and Rahu had come to swallow the sun. Rahu is the demon who eats the sun and the moon and lets them go again. He arrived at the sun’s chariot and found a monkey baby already there with his hands on it, and he was so frightened that he ran, all the way to Indra. You gave the sun and the moon to me, he shouted at him. Today was my day, and I went to take the sun and there was another Rahu on it already.

Indra got up from his throne, put on his golden crown, and climbed onto his elephant Airavata, who is as big as a hill and has four tusks, and told Rahu to lead the way. Rahu went on ahead. And the baby saw him coming, let go of the sun, and thought: another fruit. And he jumped at Rahu. Rahu is only a head, and the head screamed Indra, Indra, Indra, and went and hid behind him. Then the baby saw Airavata. A great elephant, as big as a hill, coming through the sky. Oh, he thought. What a lovely fruit. And he went for the elephant.

Indra was not even very angry. He let the thunderbolt go from his finger, almost lazily, and it hit the child, and the child fell out of the sky onto a mountain, and where he landed he broke his left jaw on the rock.

The Wind saw his son lying on the rock, not moving, and he picked him up and carried him into a cave. And there he stopped.

The Wind stopped. Everywhere, in every body, in every creature, the wind that goes in and out of you stopped. People stiffened like blocks of wood. Nothing could breathe, nothing could go on, and the three worlds became a hell. The gods went to Brahma with their bellies swollen up and their hands joined, and said: you gave us the Wind to keep us alive, and now he is killing us. Brahma told them why. Indra has knocked his child out of the sky, he said, and the Wind has gone into a cave with him, and without the Wind a body is a piece of wood. We have to go to him.

So they all went, Brahma and the gods and the serpents, everyone, to the cave where the Wind was sitting with his son in his arms. It was dark in there. And the child was lying on his father’s lap shining, the way the sun shines, or fire, or gold, and Brahma looked at him and was sorry for him, and so was everyone who had come.

The Wind got up with the boy he had been crying over as if he were dead, and bowed to Brahma three times and fell at his feet. And Brahma reached out and touched the child, almost playing, and the child woke up, the way a seed comes up when it is watered. And the Wind began to blow again. Everything that had been stiff went soft, everything breathed, and it was like a lake full of lotuses when a cold wind has finally stopped blowing across it.

Then Brahma turned to the gods. Every one of you, he said, is going to give this child something.

Indra went first. He took the lotus garland off his own neck and said: since my thunderbolt broke his jaw, this child will be called Hanuman. हनु hanu is the jaw. And no thunderbolt will ever hurt him again. The Sun gave him a hundredth part of his own light, and said that when he was old enough to learn, he would give him the gift of speech. Varuna said his noose and his waters would never be used against him. Yama said he would never die in battle and never fall sick. Kubera said his own mace would guard him in a fight. Shiva said his arrows would never wound him. Vishwakarma said no weapon he had ever made would touch him. And Brahma said: none of my weapons either. He will be able to take any shape he wants. He will go wherever he likes, as fast as he likes, and nothing will stop him.

And the Wind took his son home and told Anjana everything that had happened, and went back to his work.

With all of that inside him, the boy could not sit still. He went through the ashrams of the rishis like a storm. He knocked over their ladles and their water jars, he scattered their fires, he threw their piles of bark about, and there was nothing they could do about it, because Shiva had said no weapon would touch him. They put up with it for a long time. His father Kesari told him to stop, and he did not stop.

In the end the rishis cursed him. Gently, for rishis, but they cursed him. Since you know how strong you are and you use it on us, they said, you will forget. You will forget for a long time. And when somebody reminds you, you will have it back.

And he forgot. From that day he wandered the forests as quiet as anyone, and when Sugriva his friend was in trouble with his brother Bali, Hanuman stood by him and did no more than that, because he did not know he could.

Jambavan looked at him. You crossed the sky as a baby, he said. You took the thunderbolt and lived, and the gods gave you what they had to give. I am old now, and my strength has gone, but you are here, and you are a second monkey king among us. Stand up. The sea is wide, and you are the one who can cross it.

And Hanuman stood up, and began to grow.

The hill is on the road from Nashik towards Trimbakeshwar, and the way up it is on foot.

The way up passes caves and small temples, waterfalls and pools of water, and open green meadows with wildflowers in them. Among the caves is the one where Hanuman was looked after when he was a baby, with old writing cut into it. Anjana’s temple is on the hill. Higher up there is a pond, and if you look at it from above you can see that it is shaped like a foot. It is Hanuman’s left foot, people say.

On the very top is the temple of Hanuman. Go in. In the temples you have been in, Hanuman is a grown man — tall, red, the mountain on his hand, or kneeling with his hands joined in front of Ram. Here he is a child.

In the town, the Kalaram temple has the other Hanuman, grown and standing in the hall with his eyes on Ram’s feet. The other hill outside the town is Saptashrungi, where the goddess with eighteen arms is.