The morning was perfect — one of those early monsoon mornings when the air has been washed clean and the mountains gleam and the rising sun catches the water on every leaf and turns it to gold. It was the kind of morning that makes beings in every category feel the world is benevolent.
For young Hanuman, the morning held something specific: hunger, and a large orange object on the horizon.
He had been awake since before dawn, full of the restless energy that characterized every waking hour of his childhood, moving through the forest with the ease of someone who has never had reason to slow down. He was perhaps a few months old in the telling — old enough to leap, young enough to think the sun was a mango. Those two facts, combined, produced the story.
He leaped. The leap was not an ordinary leap. It was not even an extraordinary monkey leap, the kind that covers the length of several trees in a single bound. It was a leap that took him from the ground to the sky in a single trajectory, straight toward the rising sun, his small powerful body arrowing through the morning air.
Surya, the sun god, saw him coming. He also saw who this was — divine perception is precise about the nature of what approaches — and his response was the response of the genuinely surprised: he began to move away. The sun retreating from an approaching child is one of the more unusual reversals of the natural order, but the sun’s reasoning was sound. This was the son of Vayu. What this child might do upon arrival was unpredictable.
Rahu was also present that morning. Rahu — the severed head of the demon who had drunk the amrita, now a celestial body whose resentments manifest as eclipses — had come to swallow the sun. This was his due, his periodic right, the act his immortal existence was organized around. He arrived to find the sun retreating and a child pursuing it.
Hanuman looked at Rahu, considered him briefly, and apparently concluded that Rahu was another mango of sorts. He lunged.
Rahu fled to Indra. ‘There is something up here,’ he reported, ‘that tried to eat me. I came for the sun and there is something already here that tried to eat me. Something small. Something that appears to be a monkey.’
Indra arrived on his elephant Airavata. Hanuman looked at Airavata — the great white elephant, magnificent, the vehicle of the king of gods — and decided that this too was interesting. He moved toward the elephant.
Indra threw his thunderbolt. This was the same thunderbolt that had in previous stories split mountains and subdued demons; it was not a weapon that was thrown carelessly. It struck Hanuman in the chin.
He fell.
Vayu caught his son before he hit the ground, which is the kind of thing the wind can do. And then Vayu, the wind, stopped blowing.
The consequences were immediate and non-negotiable. Every living thing breathes. Every fire needs wind. Every cloud needs wind to move. Without wind the world suffocates and the fires go out and the rains stop and everything that depends on circulation — which is everything — begins to fail.
The gods had made a mistake. They came to Vayu with the child in his arms and they begged, and they gave gifts. Brahma gave Hanuman the boon of protection against the brahmastra. Indra gave him the boon of immunity to his own thunderbolt — the weapon that had struck the child would never harm him again. Vishnu gave him divine speed. Shiva gave him long life. Varuna made him immune to water. Agni to fire.
Vayu, receiving these assurances and seeing his son held by the collected boons of the entire divine assembly, returned to his work. The wind blew again. The fires caught. The clouds moved.
Hanuman woke up with a sore jaw and an immunity to almost everything worth being immune to, surrounded by gods who had all, in the last hour, given him something of their own essence.
He was also probably still hungry. But the mango would have to wait. He had just received, in the manner of a child who doesn’t quite know what’s happening, every gift he would need for the work that was coming.
The sun continued to rise. Rahu continued to cause eclipses periodically. And Hanuman bounded back to the forest, his jaw at its new angle, his powers more complete than they had been before anyone tried to hurt him.
This is the story of how the most powerful devotee in the world received his powers before he even knew he needed them. Before he had met the one he would devote them to. Before the name Rama meant anything to him. All the boons, gathered in advance, waiting for the moment when they would be needed.