Tales from the Ramayana

By Diana Hunter

King Janaka has a problem. The time has come to marry off his eldest daughter, Sita, but it’s his opinion that no man exists who is worthy of his little girl. Seeing a way to keep her by his side, he proposes an impossible-to-win contest, confident no man will ever accomplish the deed he sets forth.

What Janaka never expects, however, is for his daughter to fall in love, or for the boy she falls in love with – to be a god incarnate!

The Ramayana, an ancient epic from India, is a wonderful story of battles and bravery, of courage and spiritual fulfillment. But at its heart, the Ramayana is a love story. The four short stories in this collection reveal the beginnings of that love.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Diana Hunter
• Release date: Apr 9, 2011
• ISBN: 9781452437330

Diana Hunter

Diana Hunter became interested in writing stories with bondage and D/s themes when she found a dearth of them on the web. Nothing she read seemed to have the romantic element she knew was possible in such relationships. Challenged by a friend to write a better one, she wrote her first full-length novel, Secret Submission. Each book Diana writes contains a kernel of truth or deeply held conviction from her own life, but don’t ask her where truth ends and fantasy begins...she’ll never tell! When not writing, Diana is usually at her loom, weaving thread lines of a different sort. Married for over thirty years to the same man, she is grateful for all the wonderful encouragement he gives her.

Book preview

Tales from the Ramayana

Retold by Diana Hunter

cover by Katherine Duprey

copyright April 2010 by Diana Hunter

Published by Diana Hunter on Smashwords

All Rights Reserved

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Introduction

The Ramayana is an ancient epic from India and, like all epics, contains great deeds done by magnificent warriors, a truly evil villain, and of course, some magnificent battle scenes. It is an epic told and retold over and over again. In fact, if you ask anyone in India how many stories of the Ramayana there are, you will always get the same reply: There are as many Ramayanas as there are grains of sand on the seashore. Tradition holds that you do not truly come to understand the epic, until you have told it yourself, until you have delved into the story to find your own insights about these people and the deeds they accomplished.

But I will tell you, in spite of all the heroics, in spite of all the sword-play and archery, at its heart, the Ramayana is a love story. Not one, but two couples must first meet and fall in love before the epic battles begin. The four stories that follow tell only this small portion of the larger epic.

~ Diana Hunter

www.dianahunter.net

Ram and Sita Meet

But, Father! I don’t want to marry some old man. I want to marry for love.

You speak like a commoner’s child, Sita. You are my daughter, the daughter of the King of Mithila…you will marry where I tell you to marry! King Janaka, ruler of entire armies, governor of thousands of lives, ran his fingers through his hair in frustration at the stubbornness of his eldest daughter. He shook his head. Somewhere in a past life he must have done something wrong for the gods to punish him with not one, but two beautiful daughters.

So beautiful, he’d always left the disciplining to their mothers. Too often he would start out correcting them…and end up having tea with their dolls or listening to the two of them sing a new song they’d learned.

But not today. Today he needed to be firm. Sita stood before him, her dark eyes flashing with temper and hurt. The temper he could manage…the hurt pained his heart. If it were up to him, he would never marry her off. Never force her to take on the terrible responsibilities for which she’d been trained. But he was king and, as his daughter, Sita was