Closely Guarded

Sītā did not go silently into the sky, and her cries were heard, and one who heard them answered, and the answer is one of the noblest and most moving episodes in the whole epic.

For as Rāvaṇa flew southward with his struggling captive, his path carried him over the domain of an old and mighty bird, Jaṭāyu, the great vulture, a creature of enormous age and enormous nobility, who had been in his youth a friend of King Dasharatha himself, and who therefore held Rāma and all his house in love and loyalty. Jaṭāyu heard the cries.

He saw the ten-headed demon flying through the sky bearing away a weeping woman, and he saw that the woman was Sītā, the wife of Rāma, the daughter-in-law, as it were, of his own old friend the dead king, and though he was aged, though his strength was long past its prime, though he must have known that he was no match for the lord of all the demons, Jaṭāyu did not hesitate for an instant. He rose into the air to bar Rāvaṇa’s path, and he challenged him, and he gave battle.

Let us honour what the old bird did, for it is pure heroism, the heroism of the hopeless stand, the courage that fights not because it can win but because it must not stand aside. Jaṭāyu was old. Rāvaṇa was the mightiest being of the age, the conqueror of heaven, nearly invulnerable, in the full flush of his power. There was no chance, none, that the aged vulture could defeat him. Jaṭāyu knew it.

And he attacked anyway, because before him a helpless woman was being carried off to a terrible fate, because she was the wife of one he loved, because to see such a wrong and do nothing would have been a betrayal of everything he was, and because some wrongs must be resisted even when the resistance is certain to fail. That is the essence of his heroism: not the hope of victory, but the refusal, whatever the cost, to let the evil pass unopposed.

And he fought magnificently. Old as he was, he flung himself upon Rāvaṇa with a fury that for a while actually checked the demon, tearing at him with beak and talon, ripping at his flesh, savaging his chariot, breaking his bow, killing the demon steeds that drew the aerial car, casting Rāvaṇa down to the earth and forcing him to fight for his life.

For a time the aged vulture, fighting for the honour of his dead friend’s house, actually had the better of the lord of the demons, and it seemed almost that heroism and right might triumph against all odds.

But they did not, for Rāvaṇa’s power was too great, and the odds were, in the end, exactly as hopeless as they had appeared. Rāvaṇa recovered himself, and drew his sword, and in the fury of the battle he struck at the old bird and cut off his wings, and Jaṭāyu, maimed, his great pinions severed, fell at last out of the sky and crashed to the earth, mortally wounded, his heroic stand ended, his strength poured out, dying.

And Rāvaṇa, freed of his one opponent, gathered up the terrified Sītā again and flew on toward Lankā, leaving the old bird broken and bleeding on the forest floor.

But Jaṭāyu did not die at once. He clung to life, there on the ground where he had fallen, holding on by sheer will, because he had one thing left to do, one last service to render, and he would not let go of life until he had done it: he would live long enough to tell Rāma what had happened, to name the demon, to point the way, so that his death should not be in vain. And so he lay there, dying by inches, waiting, holding the knowledge that Rāma would need.

And Sītā, borne away helpless through the sky, did what little was in her power to do, and it was a small thing and a wise one, and it would matter greatly in time. As Rāvaṇa carried her over the forests and toward the sea, she saw below her, on the summit of a mountain, a group of monkeys, vānaras, watching, and in that instant she thought quickly.

She gathered together some of her ornaments, her jewels, and bundled them in a piece of her garment, in her silken upper cloth, and she let the bundle drop, casting it down toward the watching monkeys, so that it fell among them on the mountaintop. It was a message, a clue, a trail; she could not free herself, she could not send word, but she could leave a sign, a token that might one day tell searchers which way she had been taken.

It was the act of a clear mind even in the extremity of terror, and it was exactly the kind of quiet resourcefulness that Sītā had shown all along, and those dropped jewels would indeed, in time, become a thread that helped lead her rescuers to her.

So Rāvaṇa bore her at last across the sea to Lankā, to his golden city, and there he set her down, and there her long captivity began. But he could not make her his, and this is the thing to understand about that captivity: that even in his power, even carried off to his island fortress, even wholly in his physical grip, Sītā was not conquered, and Rāvaṇa could not touch her.

For Rāvaṇa, mighty as he was, was bound by an old curse that prevented him from forcing any woman against her will, and so he could not simply take Sītā; he could only try to win her consent, to persuade her, to break her spirit until she yielded of her own accord. And that consent he would never, never get.

He did not imprison her in a dungeon, but in a grove, the Ashokavana, a garden of ashoka trees within his palace grounds, a place of some beauty, and there he set her, surrounded and guarded, but guarded by a horror: a company of fierce and hideous rākshasīs, demon-women, ogresses, set to watch over her day and night, to threaten her, to torment her, to wear down her resistance with their menaces and their cruelty, to guard her closely so that she could not escape and could not be rescued, and to labour without cease at the breaking of her will.

Closely guarded she was, ringed by monstrous keepers, cut off from all the world, a prisoner in a garden, in the heart of the enemy’s golden city, across a sea from any hope of help.

And there we must leave her for now, in the Ashokavana, ringed by her monstrous guards, grieving for Rāma, holding fast to her love and her honour against all the menace of her captors, unshakable in the midst of her helplessness, the most closely guarded captive in all the three worlds. She did not yet know whether Rāma even lived, or whether he knew where she was, or whether any rescue could ever reach her across that terrible sea.

She knew only that she would not yield, that she would die before she would consent to Rāvaṇa, that her heart was Rāma’s and would remain his though the whole power of Lankā were arrayed to break her. And in that unbreakable fidelity, held fast in the very citadel of the enemy, lay the seed of Rāvaṇa’s doom, though the demon king, in his pride and his lust, could not yet see it.

Far to the north, in the forest, Rāma was even now returning to the empty cottage, all unknowing, to find his wife gone, and to begin the long descent into a grief that would nearly destroy him, before it forged him into the instrument of Lankā’s ruin.