your bridge home
The Great Epics
It was written in a two-line metre so that ordinary people could hold it in memory, and it is where the squirrel on the bridge comes from.
It is where the squirrel comes from.
She is the small creature who carries grains of sand to the bridge, while the vanaras heave boulders.
Rama picks her up and strokes her, so that every squirrel afterwards carries three pale stripes.
And she is not in Valmiki. She is in the Telugu Ramayana, and in the northern devotional tradition, and from there she went everywhere.
The Ranganatha Ramayanam is the first Ramayana in the Telugu language.
It is attributed to Gona Budda Reddy, a chief of the Telugu country in the thirteenth century. A ruler, not a court poet.
He was writing somewhere between about 1220 and 1280. And it was completed after him by his sons, Kacha Reddy and Vitalanatha Reddy.
The rest of this story, read aloud, and a new one every day.