शूर्पणखायाः विरूपकरणम्

Then Rāma, smiling, spoke to Śūrpaṇakhā, bound as she was in the noose of desire, in gentle words of his own choosing. His answer was not harsh but soft and full of jest: ‘I am already married, good lady, and this is my beloved wife. For women like you, living with a rival wife would be bitter grief.’ So he refused her as if thinking only of her own good. Then he pointed to Lakṣmaṇa: ‘But here is my younger brother, the glorious and valiant Lakṣmaṇa, virtuous and handsome, who has no wife. He has never had a wife and is in want of one; he is young and good-looking, and will make a husband worthy of your beauty. Take my brother for your husband, wide-eyed one; with him, fair lady, you will have no rival, and you will attend him as the sun's radiance attends Mount Meru.’ The image of Meru and the sunlight is a sweet one, suggesting both that she would adorn him as the sun's rays adorn the mountain, and that she would be free of a rival, as she wished. In truth Rāma was mocking her in sending her to Lakṣmaṇa, but blinded by desire she did not see the jest, and that was the root of her ruin. Thus addressed, the rākṣasī, deluded by desire, at once let Rāma be and turned to Lakṣmaṇa — the fickleness of desire is plain, for in a moment she moved on to another, and her letting Rāma go shows that her passion was fixed not on a person but only on a handsome form. It should be noted that Rāma's words were not false: Lakṣmaṇa was in fact living in the forest without a wife. But what the words meant was one thing and what they said another — that is the pretence of a jest.

She said to Lakṣmaṇa: ‘I am the wife worthy of your beauty, a woman of lovely colour; with me you will roam happily through all the Daṇḍaka forest.’ Thus addressed, Saumitri, skilled in speech, smiled at the rākṣasī with nails like winnowing fans and gave a fitting reply, full of humility and mock praise: ‘How can you want to be the wife of a slave, lotus-coloured lady, and so become a slave-woman yourself? I belong wholly to my noble brother; I am not my own master. Become instead the younger wife of that noble and prosperous lord; then you will have your wish, and be happy and of spotless beauty. He will surely leave this ugly, unchaste, hideous, shrunken-bellied old wife of his and take you, wide-eyed one. For what man of discernment, fair-complexioned and fair-hipped lady, would give up so excellent a beauty and set his heart on mortal women?’ Here Lakṣmaṇa uses the very words that she had flung at Sītā in the previous sarga — ugly, unchaste, hideous, shrunken-bellied — and this turning of her own words back on her shows the poet's wit. But Śūrpaṇakhā did not catch the irony. Lakṣmaṇa's speech has three layers: outward humility, praise in the middle, and at its core sharp mockery. By calling himself a slave whose wife would be a slave, he belittled himself only to refuse her; and words of praise like ‘of spotless beauty’ and ‘fair-complexioned’, spoken to a misshapen rākṣasī, turn into mockery of themselves. The poet also shows the brothers' different styles here: Rāma's jest is quiet and brief, Lakṣmaṇa's long and cutting.

Addressed in this way by Lakṣmaṇa, the hideous, shrunken-bellied creature, who had no sense of a joke, took his words for the truth. With that one phrase — no sense of a joke — the poet names the cause of all the trouble to come: missing the irony, she took his words as encouragement. Overcome by desire, she went back to Rāma, the unassailable scorcher of foes, who sat in the leaf hut with Sītā, and said: ‘Clinging to this ugly, unchaste, hideous, shrunken-bellied old wife, you think little of me. Today, before your very eyes, I will devour this human woman, and then, with no rival left, I will roam with you as I please.’ The repetition of the same abusive words she used in the previous sarga is no fault in the poet; it shows the single-minded hatred of the rākṣasī. So saying, with eyes like firebrands, she rushed in a fury at fawn-eyed Sītā, as a great meteor falls upon the star Rohiṇī — a most fitting comparison, for Rohiṇī is gentle and auspicious and the meteor ill-omened and destructive. Seeing her rushing on like the noose of death, the mighty Rāma held her back and said angrily to Lakṣmaṇa: ‘Never jest in any way with cruel and ignoble creatures, Saumitri. Look, gentle one — Vaidehī has barely escaped with her life.’ There is self-reproach hidden in his words: he admits that this was the fruit of the jest. ‘Barely escaped with her life’ shows how grave Sītā's danger was; in a single moment a great disaster could have happened. In this verse the poet sums up the lesson of the whole episode: do not make jests with the cruel, for they do not understand a jest and grasp only its result.

Rāma commanded: ‘Tiger among men, you should disfigure this ugly, unchaste, wildly insolent, huge-bellied rākṣasī.’ He ordered not death but disfigurement: killing a woman is forbidden by a warrior's dharma, yet punishment was necessary, and so the proper limit was kept. At these words the mighty Lakṣmaṇa, enraged, drew his sword before Rāma's eyes and cut off her ears and nose. With her ears and nose cut away, the fearsome Śūrpaṇakhā let out a hideous shriek and fled back into the forest the way she had come. Disfigured, dreadful and drenched in blood, the rākṣasī roared in many voices like a thundercloud in the rains. Streaming blood on every side and terrible to see, she flung up her arms and plunged, still roaring, into the great forest. Then the disfigured creature came to her brother Khara, of fierce splendour, who sat among throngs of rākṣasas in Janasthāna, and fell to the ground before him like a thunderbolt from the sky. Stunned with fear and confusion and covered in blood, Khara's sister told him everything — how Rāghava had come to the forest with his wife and Lakṣmaṇa, and how she had been disfigured. Here the poet heightens the description with images: her roaring like a thundercloud in the rains, her fall like a thunderbolt out of the sky. Both images come from the sky and both are terrifying, so a single feeling mounts step by step, and the closing verses quicken the pace of the story towards the battle that follows. The importance of this sarga is that here the story of the Rāmāyaṇa takes a new road: from the disfigurement of one rākṣasī follow, one after another, the slaying of Khara and Dūṣaṇa, Rāvaṇa's enmity, and the abduction of Sītā. An episode that seems small is in truth the root of the whole great story.