The Friend of Dasaratha

Markandeya had been sitting at the Pandavas' fire in the Kamyaka woods for some days by then, telling Yudhishthira the story of a prince who had lost more than he had and had borne it better. He had brought it now to the worst hour of that story.

Rama had gone off after a deer with golden horns and a golden skin, which was not a deer at all but the Rakshasa Maricha, and had killed it, and the dying thing had cried out in Rama's own voice. Lakshmana, kept back to guard the hermitage, had been driven out of it by the reproaches of a frightened woman, and had shut his ears with his hands and gone. And Ravana, king of the Rakshasas, wicked at heart though genteel in guise, like fire covered over with a heap of ashes, had come to the empty asylum in the dress of a hermit, thrown the dress off, and been refused. She had told him that the vault of heaven might fall with all its stars, and the earth break into fragments, and fire itself turn cool, before she forsook the descendant of Raghu. Then he had seized her by the hair of her head and risen into the air with her.

"On a mountain peak in that forest," said Markandeya, "there lived a vulture."

He was huge as a mountain-peak shooting up above the clouds. He was a king among his own kind, and his brother was Sampati, and his name was Jatayu, and the thing that mattered most about him in that hour was none of these. He had been a friend of Dasaratha.

Dasaratha was dead by then, dead of grief in Ayodhya for a son he had banished, so that the friendship was a debt that could no longer be paid to the man who was owed it. Only to his children.

And the old bird, looking up from his peak, saw a woman he called his daughter-in-law weeping in a Rakshasa's lap, and calling on Rama, and being carried across his sky.

He went up in wrath, a ranger of the skies rushing at the king of the Rakshasas, and he did not go quietly.

"Leave the princess of Mithila," the vulture said. "Leave her, I say. How canst thou ravish her, Rakshasa, while I am alive? If thou dost not release my daughter-in-law, thou shalt not escape from me with life."

It was a demand made by an old bird to the lord of Lanka, who had armies and brothers and a city built by the architect of the gods, and who was holding a woman in one arm at the time. Jatayu did not wait to see whether it would be answered. He went in with his talons.

He tore the Rakshasa. He struck him with his wings and with his beak, and he mangled him in a hundred different parts of his body, and the blood began to come out of Ravana as copiously as water out of a mountain spring. That is Markandeya's image for it, and it is worth holding: not a wound, a source. The king of the Rakshasas was running like a hillside after rain, in the air, with nothing under him, fighting off a bird for possession of a woman who was calling for her husband.

And there was nothing in it for Jatayu. He was not rescuing his own. He had no stake in Kosala and no quarrel with Lanka. He fought, says the story exactly, desirous of Rama's good.

Ravana could not shake him off with his hands. So he took up a sword.

He cut off the two wings of that bird, both of them, in the sky.

And Jatayu, king of the vultures, huge as a mountain-peak shooting forth above the clouds, went down out of the air he had ruled all his life and struck the forest floor, and Ravana rose higher with Sita on his lap and went on south.

She could not fight and she could not escape, so she did the only thing left to a woman being carried through the sky, which was to leave a trail.

Wherever she saw anything below her that men would come back to, she dropped something of hers into it. An asylum of ascetics. A lake. A river. A tank. An ornament went down into each of them, so that whoever came searching along that line, if anyone ever came searching, would find gold lying in places where gold does not lie.

Then, on the top of a mountain, she saw five monkeys sitting together, foremost of their kind, watching the sky.

She was intelligent, says Markandeya, and she understood at once what five pairs of eyes were worth. She took a broad piece of her costly attire and threw it down among them, and that beautiful yellow cloth went fluttering down through the air and fell in the middle of the five like lightning coming out of a cloud.

Neither she nor they knew what it was for. She was a captive throwing cloth at strangers. They were monkeys on a hilltop who had been given a piece of silk out of the sky by a screaming woman. Months later, in a place called Kishkindhya, that scrap of yellow would be laid in front of Rama by the monkey Sugriva as the one piece of evidence that his wife was alive and had passed that way, and the whole alliance that broke Lanka would be founded on it.

Ravana saw none of it. He passed a great way through the firmament, the way a bird passes through air, and then his city came up beneath him: Lanka of the many gates, ringed about on every side with high walls, built by Viswakrit himself.

And the king of the Rakshasas entered his own city, accompanied by Sita.

While this was going on, Rama was walking back through the woods with the deer dead behind him, and the first thing he saw on the path was his brother coming the other way.

He knew what it meant before Lakshmana opened his mouth.

"How couldst thou come hither," Rama said, "leaving the princess of Videha in a forest that is haunted by the Rakshasa?"

He went on reproving him while he walked, and while he reproved him he was working it out: the deer that had drawn him away by appearing and vanishing and appearing again, mile after mile, the voice that had called for Sita and Lakshmana in his own tones as it died, his brother arriving here on this path at this hour, which could only mean the hermitage was standing empty and had been standing empty for some time. The whole shape of the thing came together in him, and he was filled with agony.

He quickened his pace, still reproving, and asked the question that was underneath the reproof.

"O Lakshmana, is the princess of Videha still alive? I fear she is no more."

Then Lakshmana told him everything. He told him what Sita had said, all of it, including the part he might have kept back and did not: that she had accused him of wanting his brother dead, that she had said she would sooner kill herself with a weapon, or throw herself off a hill, or walk into fire, than live with a wretch like him, forsaking Rama the way a tigress might forsake her mate to be sheltered by a jackal. He had shut his ears with his hands when she said it. He repeated it now to the one man in the world he would least have wished to say it to, because his brother had asked him what had happened, and that was what had happened.

Rama listened, and then he ran for the asylum with his heart burning.

On the way he came upon something lying in the path: a vulture huge as a mountain, in the agonies of death.

Rama had just learned that the forest was full of Rakshasas wearing shapes that were not their own. He drew his bow to a circle with great force, and Lakshmana drew beside him, and the two of them came at the dying thing to finish it.

The bird spoke first.

"Blessed be ye. I am the king of the vultures, and friend of Dasaratha."

They stopped where they stood and put their excellent bows aside, and looked at each other, and said, "Who is this one that speaketh the name of our father in these woods?"

Then they came close enough to see him properly, and saw that the creature in front of them was a bird destitute of two wings.

He told them, in whatever time he had left, of his own overthrow at the hands of Ravana for the sake of Sita: that he had challenged him in the air, and torn him, and been cut down by a sword for it. He was not asking for anything. He had come down here to die and had held on to his life on the chance that these two would pass this way, and now they had.

Rama asked him the one question that mattered. Which way had Ravana gone?

The vulture had no breath left for it. He answered with a movement of his head, a nod toward the quarter he meant, and with that he breathed his last.

Rama read the sign. South.

And before he went south, that descendant of Kakutstha's race, whose wife had been carried off that morning and whose every hour was now worth a life, stopped and reverenced his father's friend and had his funeral obsequies duly performed, in full, in the forest, for a bird.

Then those chastisers of foes took the southern path through the Dandaka woods, and the road told them what had been happening in that country long before Ravana came for Sita.

They passed asylum after asylum of ascetics, and every one of them was empty. Seats of kusa grass scattered about. Umbrellas of leaves lying where they had fallen. Water-pots broken. Nobody dead and nobody there, and hundreds of jackals in the clearings where men had been keeping fires. Whoever had lived in those hermitages had either been eaten or had run, and nothing had been rebuilt after.

Deeper in, the deer began to go past them in herds, running in every direction at once, and a great uproar came up out of the forest from creatures of all kinds, the sort of noise that is heard when a fire is spreading fast through dry woods. There was no fire.

What they came to was a Rakshasa with no head.

He was dark as a rain-cloud and huge as a mountain, with shoulders as broad as a Sala tree and arms in proportion to them. He had a pair of large eyes set in his breast. The opening of his mouth was placed on his capacious belly.

He took Lakshmana by the hand without any difficulty at all. Sumitra's son, who had held off armies, was seized and held like a child, and became utterly confounded and helpless, and the monster began to draw him in toward that belly where the mouth was.

Lakshmana looked across at his brother and gave up.

"Behold my plight," he said. "The loss of thy kingdom, and then the death of our father, and then the abduction of Sita, and finally this disaster that hath overwhelmed me. Alas, I shall not behold thee return with the princess of Videha to Kosala and seated on thy ancestral throne as the ruler of the entire earth. They only that are fortunate will behold thy face, like unto the moon emerged from the clouds, after thy coronation bath in water sanctified with kusa grass and fried paddy and black peas."

He was being pulled toward a mouth, and what he was grieving over was a coronation he would not live to watch.

Rama, undaunted amid danger, answered him in two sentences and wasted neither on comfort.

"Do not, O tiger among men, give way to grief. What is this thing when I am here? Cut thou off his right arm and I shall cut off his left."

He was still speaking when he did it. The left arm of the monster came away under his scimitar as easily as a stalk of tila corn is cut. Lakshmana, seeing his brother standing in front of him, remembered that he had a sword of his own and struck off the right arm, and then went on striking in under the ribs until the huge headless thing came down on the ground and died.

And out of the body there came a person of celestial make.

He stayed a moment in the sky above them, effulgent as the sun in the firmament, and Rama, who was skilled in speech, put the question plainly. "Who art thou? Whence could such a thing happen? All this seems to me exceedingly wonderful."

"I am, O prince, a Gandharva of the name of Viswavasu. It was through the curse of a Brahmana that I had to assume the form and nature of a Rakshasa."

Then, without being asked, he gave them the thing they had been walking south to find.

"As to thyself, O Rama, Sita hath been carried away with violence by king Ravana who dwelleth in Lanka. Repair thou unto Sugriva, who will give thee his friendship. There, near enough to the peak of Rishyamuka, is the lake known by the name of Pampa, of sacred water and cranes. There dwelleth, with four of his counsellors, Sugriva, the brother of the monkey-king Vali, decked with a garland of gold. Repairing unto him, inform him of thy cause of sorrow. In plight very much like thy own, he will render thee assistance. Thou wilt, without doubt, see the daughter of Janaka. Ravana and others are known to the king of the monkeys."

In plight very much like thy own. A brother had taken that monkey's wife and his kingdom and driven him up a hill to live on it with four companions, and the Gandharva knew that a man who has lost a wife gets better help from another such man than from any army.

Having said it, he made himself invisible.

And the two heroes stood beside a dead giant with its arms off, wondering much: at a bird that had died naming their father, at a curse that had worn a monster's shape for years and had been waiting for someone to kill it, and at the fact that they now knew where they were going.