Three stories are told on this day, and each has its own book. Shri Ram's comes first, and even it is told differently in different books. In the Valmiki Ramayana, Ravana sat in tapas for ten thousand years and offered one of his heads into the fire at the end of each thousand. When Brahma ji appeared, Ravana asked to live for ever and was refused. So he asked that no Suparna, Naga, Yaksha, Daitya, Danava or Rakshasa, and no god, should be able to kill him. Men and the other creatures he did not name: to him they were straws.
Years later Ravana carried Sita Maa away to Lanka, and Shri Ram and Lakshman set out to bring her back, with Hanuman ji and Sugriva’s army of vanaras.
The Devi Bhagavata Purana tells that before they crossed the sea, Narada told Shri Ram to keep the Navaratra vrat for the Devi. In the month of Ashvin Shri Ram made her altar on a hilltop and kept the vrat for nine days, with puja and homa. On the night of the Ashtami she appeared to him on her lion and promised him victory. On the tenth day he did the Vijaya puja, and then he went down to the sea, built the bridge and killed Ravana. The north’s Dussehra telling, nine days of puja to Durga Maa and then the march, is this one; neither Valmiki nor Tulsidas tells it.
Bengal tells it through the Krittivasi Ramayana. There Ravana was under the Devi’s protection and could not be killed without her boon. On Brahma ji’s counsel Shri Ram woke her out of season, in autumn, though spring is her time: the akal bodhan. He gave her puja on the Saptami and the Ashtami and the sandhi puja at night, and on the Navami he resolved to offer her a hundred and eight blue lotuses. Hanuman ji brought them from Devidaha, but at the puja one was missing: the Devi herself had hidden it. Shri Ram, whose eyes were like blue lotuses, made ready to offer one of his own eyes. The Devi, pleased, gave him the boon of Ravana’s death.
The Ramcharitmanas, read in many north Indian homes, has no puja to Durga Maa. There, as the bridge was being built, Shri Ram said he would establish Shiv ji at that place. Sugriva sent for the munis, and Shri Ram installed the Shivling at Rameshwaram and gave it puja as the rites require.
The books end the war differently too. In Valmiki’s, each time Shri Ram cut off one of Ravana’s heads another grew in its place, a hundred and more, until Matali, Indra’s charioteer, reminded him of the weapon Brahma ji had made, which the sage Agastya had given him. Shri Ram loosed it, and it pierced Ravana’s breast.
In Tulsidas’s Manas the heads and arms kept growing back, and Shri Ram looked to Vibhishan, who told him that nectar lived in a pool in Ravana’s navel and that Ravana lived by its strength. Shri Ram loosed thirty-one arrows. One dried up the nectar in the navel; thirty took the heads and the arms. The body still ran at him, and with one more arrow he cut it in two.
Neither book names the day. The Bengali and Telugu tellings keep Ravana’s death on the Dashami of the bright fortnight, and the Hindi vrat katha of this day says that Shri Ram overcame him in the Vijaya time of Dashami evening, when the stars come out.
The second story is the Mahabharata’s. The five Pandava brothers lost at dice and had to live twelve years in the forest and a thirteenth in hiding; if they were found in that year, they would go back to the forest for another twelve. They hid in King Virata’s city: Yudhishthira as a courtier, Bhima as a cook, Arjuna as a dance teacher, Nakula with the horses, Sahadeva with the cows, and Draupadi as a maid.
Near a burning ground outside the city stood a Shami tree. Nakula climbed it and tied their bows, swords, quivers and arrows firmly where no rain would reach them. Then they hung a dead body in the tree, so that the smell would keep people away, and told the herdsmen it was their mother, a hundred and eighty years old, hung there by the custom of their forefathers. The epic has no prayer to the tree; in Telugu homes they tell that the brothers gave it puja and asked it for victory.
As the year ran out, the Kauravas came to seize King Virata’s cattle while the king was away fighting the Trigartas. Prince Uttara rode out with Arjuna, as Brihannala, driving his chariot. At the sight of the army the prince jumped down and ran; Arjuna caught him and drove to the Shami, and told him to climb it and bring down the bows. Uttara said a corpse was tied there. ‘There are only bows in this tree, not corpses,’ said Arjuna, and the prince climbed up and brought down the Gandiva and the other bows. Arjuna told him who he was, fought the army alone and brought the cattle home.
The third story is Kalidasa’s, in the Raghuvamsha. Kautsa, a pupil of the sage Varatantu, kept pressing his teacher to name a fee, until the teacher, annoyed, asked for fourteen crores, one for each of the fourteen lores he had learned. Kautsa went to King Raghu, Shri Ram’s great-grandfather, who had just given away everything at the Vishvajit yagna and received him with an earthen pot.
Raghu asked him to wait two or three days, and meant to take the gold from Kubera himself: he slept that night in his chariot, its weapons ready. At dawn the treasury officers came to him in wonder: gold had rained from the sky into the treasury. Raghu gave it all to Kautsa. Kautsa would take no more than his teacher’s fee, Raghu would take back nothing he had given, and the people of Ayodhya praised them both. In the end the whole heap went with Kautsa, on hundreds of camels and mares.
Maharashtra tells it its own way on Dasara: the gold fell on the Apta and Shami trees outside Ayodhya, Kautsa took what his teacher was owed and left the rest for the people, and they took it home that Dashami. That is why the Apta leaves are given as sona, gold, on this day.
The Hindi vrat katha of this day ends at the Shami. It held Arjuna’s bow, and it proclaimed Shri Ram’s victory as he set out for Lanka, so it is given puja in the Vijaya time of the evening. Its prayer calls it the tree that takes away wrongs, red-thorned, the keeper of Arjuna’s arrows, the one that spoke kindly to Shri Ram. As Shri Ram won and Arjuna took back his bow, may whoever hears this katha win in what they begin.
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