The Story of Rama and the Squirrel

At a Glance

• Central figures: Rama, the prince of Ayodhya and avatar of Vishnu; Hanuman and the Vanara army; a small squirrel who wishes to serve Rama.
• Setting: The shore of the ocean separating the Indian mainland from Lanka, during the construction of the Rama Setu; from the Ramayana.
• The turn: A squirrel too small to carry stones begins rolling in sand and shaking the grains onto the bridge, and is mocked by the Vanaras for being in their way.
• The outcome: Rama intervenes, lifts the squirrel in his hands, and strokes its back - blessing it and rebuking the Vanaras for dismissing the creature’s effort.
• The legacy: The three pale stripes on the back of the Indian palm squirrel, said to be the marks left by Rama’s fingers.

Sita was gone - taken across the ocean to Lanka by the rakshasa king Ravana - and Rama stood on the southern shore of the subcontinent with an army of Vanaras at his back and water in every direction. The ocean was not something he could simply wade or swim. It had to be crossed properly, with all his forces, with enough speed and strength to wage a war at the other end. And so the work began.

The Building of the Rama Setu

Nala, one of the Vanaras and a builder by gift and training, laid out the plans. Sugriva commanded the armies. Hanuman, already legendary for having leapt the ocean once alone, now organized teams to carry boulders down from the inland mountains. The sea god Varuna granted his blessing, and the stones - massive slabs of rock that no ordinary engineering could have floated - were set into the water. They held. They stayed. They became the first courses of a bridge that stretched, stone by stone, toward the horizon and the island of Lanka beyond it.

The Vanaras threw themselves into the labor. They were enormous, some of them, strong enough to uproot trees and hurl hilltops. They worked in lines, passing stones hand to hand, wading into the shallows to press rocks into place, calling back and forth to one another across the noise of surf and construction. It was the kind of work that fills a shoreline with sound and motion, with dust rising and water spraying, with no still corner anywhere along the length of it.

The Squirrel at the Shore

There was a squirrel on that shore, small and brown, with a pale belly and the nimble fretful energy of its kind. It watched the Vanaras working and felt something - not the ability to carry stones, which it plainly lacked, but the desire to be useful to Rama. The want was real, whatever the creature could or could not do.

So the squirrel found its method. It ran to the wet sand near the water’s edge, rolled in it until the grains clung to its fur, then ran back up the bridge and shook itself out over the stones. Fine sand fell into the cracks between rocks, into the gaps the great boulders could not fill. The squirrel ran back to the shore. It rolled again. It ran back. Over and over, through the heat of the day, back and forth across the same short stretch of ground while Vanaras thundered past it carrying loads a hundred times its size.

The Vanaras’ Scorn

For a while no one paid the squirrel much attention. There was too much else to watch. But the squirrel was small and quick and kept crossing in and out of the work lanes, darting under arms and around feet, and eventually the disruption registered. A Vanara looked down and saw what was happening. He stopped. Others stopped with him.

“What do you think you are doing?” one of them demanded.

The squirrel kept working.

“Your grains of sand,” another Vanara said, with the full contempt of someone who had spent the morning moving boulders, “what good are they? You are too small. You are in the way. You are not helping.”

The squirrel did not stop. It rolled, it ran, it shook its fur over the stones.

Rama’s Hands

Rama heard the exchange. He walked over, and with one hand he gently lifted the squirrel from the ground, cradling the creature in his palm, bringing it close. He looked at the Vanaras.

“Do not mock it,” he said. “This squirrel is doing everything it is capable of doing, and it is doing that thing with its whole heart. How is that worth less than what you are doing?”

He did not ask the Vanaras to measure the sand against the boulders. He asked them to look at the act itself - the animal returning again and again to the water’s edge, the grains of sand falling into places no stone could reach, the uncalculating expenditure of effort in a cause the squirrel had no stake in beyond its own devotion. Rama turned the creature in his hands and drew his fingers slowly along its back, three fingers, three stripes of touch pressed gently into the fur.

The squirrel was set down and went back to work.

The Marks on Its Back

Those three lines remain. Anyone who looks at the Indian palm squirrel today can see them - three pale stripes running from the animal’s neck to its tail, evenly spaced, exactly the width of a man’s fingers pressed together. The stripes are said to be what Rama’s blessing left behind, the trace of his hand on an animal that came to a colossal undertaking with nothing but sand and the willingness to carry it.

The bridge was finished. The army crossed. The war was fought, and Sita was brought home. But the shore still holds its small witnesses, striped and quick, carrying their grains from one place to another.