The first poem in that language happened by accident, to a man who was not trying to write one.
Vālmīki went down to the river one morning to bathe. On the bank stood two krauñca birds — big water birds, the kind that stand very still and then move all at once. A pair. They were paying attention to nothing except each other.
A hunter shot one of them.
One arrow, out of the trees. The male came down onto the sand, still moving, and then not.
The female stood over him and made a sound. That is the part the text stays with — not the arrow. Her going round and round the place where he was, calling, not stopping.
Something went through Vālmīki that he did not choose. He was not being wise. He turned to the trees and cursed the hunter: you will never rest, not through all the endless years, because you killed one of a pair while they were lost in each other.
Then he stopped, because of how it had come out.
It had come out in four parts, each the same length as the others, with a beat in it. You could sing it. He said it again to check, and it was still true.
He stood on the riverbank with a dead bird in front of him, saying his own sentence back to himself, completely bewildered, because he had not done any of it on purpose.
He named it that afternoon. The word for grief is śoka. He called the thing that came out of his grief a śloka.
Then Brahmā arrived and told him the verse had not been an accident — it had been put into his mouth — and that he was now to tell the whole life of Rāma in it.
And he did. Twenty-four thousand verses, almost all of them in the shape that arrived on the riverbank that morning.
He had gone down to the river to wash. He came back with a shape that everything written in that language for the next three thousand years would be poured into.