Anjana was an apsara who had been born as a monkey — a forest dwelling, tree-scaling, thoroughly agile monkey — through a curse that could only be lifted through a specific circumstance. She had married Kesari, a great and powerful monkey chief, and they lived on the mountain slopes with the ease and the joy of beings who have found each other in an unexpected place.
She prayed for a son. Specifically, she prayed with the intensity that in the divine mathematics produces results: she prayed to the Wind God, Vayu, asking for a son who would inherit something of the wind’s nature — its freedom, its speed, its ability to go anywhere and be stopped by nothing.
Vayu obliged. The son born from this divine arrangement — Anjana’s son, Kesari’s son, Vayu’s son — was Hanuman.
The child arrived into the world with the energy of wind, which is to say: he arrived. He was present from his first breath in the way that wind is present — filling whatever space is available, moving without self-consciousness, bringing the temperature and the smell of wherever he had been.
He was, even as an infant, an extraordinary creature. His face glowed red-gold — later traditions say his complexion was the colour of the early morning sun, bright and warmth-giving, slightly startling. His body was compact and powerful. His tail — the monkey’s long, prehensile tail that would become one of his most famous features — was already remarkable in the cradle.
He was also hungry.
One morning, as an infant not yet trained in the ways of the world, Hanuman saw the rising sun and mistook it for a ripe mango. The sun was round, it was orange, it was at a distance that suggested accessibility, and he was hungry. He leaped.
The leap that took an infant monkey from the earth to the sun was the first demonstration of a capacity that would define his story: the capacity to go anywhere that needed going, to cross any distance that needed crossing, in service of something. In this case the service was purely appetite, but the mechanism was the same.
Indra, watching the infant hurtling toward the sun — watching what would happen if a child, however divine, reached the sun — threw his thunderbolt. It struck Hanuman and he fell, and his jaw was injured in the fall, and that injury is why his jaw is set at the slight angle that gives him the name Hanuman: curved chin.
Vayu was furious. His son had been struck down. He withdrew from the world — stopped blowing — and within moments the consequences were apparent to every living thing. Without wind there is no breath. Without breath there is no life. The universe was in immediate crisis.
The gods came to Vayu and made amends and gave Hanuman boons. Brahma gave him the boon of remaining alive even when struck by deadly weapons. Indra gave him the same imperviousness to his own thunderbolt. Vishnu gave him the swiftness that had already been evident in the sun-leap. Shiva gave him the boon of long life. Surya, the sun, gave him wisdom.
So Hanuman, who had been struck down for his first innocent mistake, rose from the ground more powerful than he had been in the cradle and surrounded by the blessing of every significant deity in the cosmos.
His childhood was the childhood of every being of extraordinary power who has not yet learned the appropriate use of it. He was clever and fast and strong and he used these gifts with the uncalibrated enthusiasm of youth — pulling the beards of sages in meditation, disrupting ashrams, generally making the forest world around him an exciting and somewhat exhausting place.
Eventually, a sage named Matanga placed a gentle curse on him: he would forget, for a while, the full extent of his powers. This sounds like punishment, but the tradition interprets it as education. How does an entity of boundless power learn patience, learn service, learn the appropriate moment for strength? By living for a time without full access to it. By having to work at things. By meeting, eventually, the purpose for which all the power was given.
That purpose had a name. It had not yet been born when Hanuman was growing up on his mountain. But it was coming. In Ayodhya, in a palace, in a royal lineage that carried the shape of something the universe had been preparing for, it was coming. And when Hanuman met it, he would remember everything he had forgotten.