A Second Father Dies

Rāma came to the dying bird, and at first, in his grief and his wariness, he did not know him, and seeing an enormous bloodied creature amid the signs of struggle, he half-took it for the demon that had done the deed. But Jaṭāyu spoke, and with his failing breath he told them who he was, and what had happened, and the truth turned Rāma’s wariness to grief and gratitude at once.

I am Jaṭāyu, the old bird said, or such were the words his ebbing strength could shape. I was the friend of your father Dasharatha; I knew him long ago; I loved your house. And I saw the demon carry off your Sītā through the sky, and I fought him, old as I am, to save her. I fought him and I could not prevail, for he was too mighty, and he cut off my wings and cast me down, and I am dying.

But I lived long enough to tell you this: it was Rāvaṇa, the lord of the rākshasas, the king of Lankā, who took her; and he carried her southward, toward his island kingdom across the sea. Go south, Rāma. Seek her in Lankā. That is where she is, and that is who has her, and now that I have told you, my work is done, and I can die.

And Rāma, hearing this, understanding that this broken and dying creature had given its life in the attempt to save his wife, that this old bird had thrown itself against the lord of all the demons for love of Rāma’s house and for the honour of a helpless woman, was overcome. The bird that lay dying before him had done what Rāma himself had not been there to do; had fought for Sītā when Rāma was away; had spent its last strength and its very life in her defence.

And Rāma knelt down beside the dying Jaṭāyu and gathered the great broken bird into his arms, and tended him, and wept over him, and honoured him with a tenderness that is among the most moving things in the whole epic.

For consider what Jaṭāyu was to Rāma in that moment. He was his father’s friend, a link to the dead Dasharatha, almost a father himself in his age and his love. And he was dying, as Dasharatha had died, in a kind of service to Rāma, giving his life in Rāma’s cause. And so Rāma, cradling the old bird, treated him not as a beast, not even merely as a helper, but as a second father, as one worthy of a son’s deepest love and a son’s last offices.

He held him as he might have held Dasharatha, had he been there to hold his father in his dying; he gave to Jaṭāyu the grief and the reverence he had not been able to give to his own father, whose death had come while Rāma was far away in the forest. In tending the dying bird, Rāma was, in a way, tending the father he had lost, performing at last the last loving service he had been robbed of the chance to perform.

And when Jaṭāyu died, his message delivered, his duty done, released at last from the agony he had held onto life through, Rāma performed for him the full funeral rites, the rites due to a father, the rites of the highest honour. He built the pyre with his own hands. He spoke the sacred words. He gave the noble bird the cremation of a king, of a kinsman, of a beloved father, and he grieved for him as a son grieves.

This was no small thing, and the story means us to feel its greatness: that Rāma, a prince of the highest line, gave the full and loving funeral honours of a father to a bird, to a creature that the proud of the world would have thought beneath their notice, because that bird had shown a love and a courage and a sacrifice that made it worthy of every honour a son could give.

Here again we see the thing that runs all through Rāma’s story, the thing that made the common people love him and the forest hunters love him and the sages love him: that Rāma saw the soul and not the station, that greatness of heart was to him the only greatness that counted, and that he gave his deepest reverence not according to birth or rank or form but according to love and virtue and sacrifice.

A hunter-chief, a fallen demon freed from a curse, an old vulture dying for a stranger’s wife, these were to Rāma more truly noble than many a proud king, and he honoured them accordingly, without a trace of the condescension that lesser great men show to those beneath them. Jaṭāyu was a bird, and Rāma gave him a father’s funeral, and in doing so Rāma showed once more the boundless and level compassion that was the deepest mark of his divinity, the love that knew nothing of the barriers of form and rank that divide the world.

And the death of Jaṭāyu marks something in the shape of the story, a turning, a threshold. For with the old bird’s dying words, Rāma now knew the truth: he knew who had taken Sītā, and he knew where she had been carried. The blind grief of the empty cottage, the helpless not-knowing, was over; now there was a name, Rāvaṇa, and a direction, south, and a purpose that could be pursued.

The abduction had plunged Rāma into a darkness of not-knowing; Jaṭāyu’s sacrifice lifted that darkness, gave the grief an object and the search a direction, and turned Rāma from a man wandering distraught in an empty forest into a man with an enemy to find and a captive to rescue and a road, however long and terrible, to walk. The old bird’s last gift was not only the naming of the enemy but the giving of a purpose, and it was purpose, more than anything, that Rāma needed to climb up out of his grief.

There is a further grief folded into this chapter, quiet beneath the loud one, and it is worth naming. In losing his father and now, in a sense, this second father, Rāma was being stripped, one by one, of the older generation, of the fathers and protectors who had stood between him and the full weight of the world. Dasharatha was gone. Now Jaṭāyu, his father’s friend, was gone.

The elders who had loved and guarded him were falling away, and Rāma was being left more and more alone to bear his burdens, to be himself the protector rather than the protected, the one who must act rather than the one who is shielded.

It is a passage every life comes to, this falling-away of the older generation, this finding of oneself suddenly in the front rank with no one ahead, and Rāma came to it here, in the forest, beside the pyre of an old bird who had loved his father, and he took up, with the death of this second father, the full and lonely weight of the task that now lay before him.

Then, the rites completed, the old bird honoured and burned and mourned, Rāma and Lakshmaṇa turned their faces south, in the direction Jaṭāyu had named, toward Lankā, toward Rāvaṇa, toward the recovery of Sītā, and they went on into the deeper forest, seeking the road and the allies that would carry them toward the war that now, at last, had a direction and a name.