The Parrot and the Poisoned Tree

On the bed of arrows, Bhishma turned to Yudhishthira and said that dharma did not confine itself to the councils of kings; sometimes it showed its truest face in a creature too small for anyone to notice. He told the king of a great tree that had once stood at the edge of the Kamyaka wood, and of a poisoned arrow that was never meant for it at all.

A hunter had gone into that forest after a running deer, patient and silent, and loosed a shaft tipped in venom prepared to bring down even the swiftest game. The deer swerved at the last breath and the arrow flew wide, burying itself instead in the trunk of an old tree standing where the wood thinned toward open country - a tree tall enough to be a landmark for travelers, whose branches for generations had cradled more nests than any man could count. The hunter cursed his aim, went on after other quarry, and never looked back to see what he had done.

But the poison did not forget the tree. Within days its topmost leaves curled and yellowed. Within a season the bark had cracked and grayed, and roots that once drew up sweet water now carried venom to every branch. Fruit that should have hung heavy through autumn shriveled before it ripened and dropped unwanted to the ground. The sap that had drawn bees from three villages away thickened in the wood and, at last, stopped moving altogether.

The birds who had nested there for generations watched the canopy above their young grow thin and gray, and one by one they began to speak among themselves of finding another home before the season of scarcity closed in around them.

The departure began slowly and then all at once. The cuckoos went first, since they had never needed much reason to move on. Then the mynahs left in loud, quarrelsome flocks, and after them the peacocks, trailing their tails through the undergrowth toward the greener stands of Dvaitavana, where fruit still hung ripe and water still ran clean. Even the woodpeckers, who might have been expected to stay and work the dying wood for grubs, found richer trunks elsewhere and did not return.

Within a month the great tree stood alone in a forest that had once been unable to contain all its life, bare-branched, gray-barked, visited by no one.

No one, except a single parrot.

It was not a remarkable bird to look at - green-feathered, red-beaked, no different from a thousand others that filled the Kamyaka canopy in better seasons. But where every other creature had weighed the tree's worth against its own hunger and found the answer easy, this one parrot stayed. It perched on the barest, most exposed branch, day after day, through sun that no leaf now broke and rain that no canopy now caught. There was no fruit left to eat, and what little the bird could find nearby it ate sparingly and always returned to the same branch afterward, as though the tree needed watching over even in its ruin.

Its feathers dulled. Its body, once plump enough to draw a hunter's eye of its own, grew thin and its flight, when it flew at all, grew slow and labored. Other birds passing overhead on their way to Dvaitavana's plenty called down to it, asking why it lingered on a corpse of a tree that could give it nothing. The parrot never answered them. It only watched the road below, and waited, though for what, even it might not have said.

It was Indra, lord of the heavens, who at last came down to see what kept a creature with wings sitting on a dead thing when the whole sky lay open to it. He took the form of a brahmana, thin and travel-worn, and walked into the ruined grove until he stood beneath the parrot's branch.

'Bird,' he said, 'you are not chained here. Your wings are whole. A day's flight in any direction would bring you to trees heavy with fruit and thick with shade, where a hundred of your kind already live well. Why do you starve yourself keeping company with a trunk that cannot even shelter you from the rain anymore?'

The parrot looked down at him with eyes that had grown too large for its wasted face. 'Brahmana,' it said, 'I was hatched in this tree, in a nest built in the crook of that highest branch. When I could not yet fly, its leaves kept the sun from killing me and its trunk kept the wind from tearing my nest away. When I was grown, its fruit fed me every season without asking anything in return. I owe this tree my whole life, twice over - once for shelter, once for food.

'Now it has nothing left to give me, and every creature that once depended on it has judged, correctly, that there is no more profit here. I do not fault them for their cleverness. But it is a cleverness I find I cannot learn. A debt does not become smaller because the one who is owed it has grown too poor to collect. If I left now, in its ruin, whatever I called myself afterward, I would not call myself grateful. So I stay, brahmana, for as long as there is a branch to stay on.'

Indra was silent for a long moment, and then the borrowed form of the brahmana fell away like a shed skin, and the parrot found itself looking upon the king of the gods himself, crowned and radiant, standing where the poor traveler had stood a moment before.

'Little bird,' Indra said, 'I have tested the gratitude of kings and sages and found most of it convenient rather than true. Yours is neither. Ask of me whatever you wish, and it will be granted, for you have earned more than most who come before my throne with folded hands.'

Any other creature might have asked for a body restored to its old plumpness, for a home among the fruit trees of Dvaitavana, for wings swift enough to outrun any hunter's arrow for the rest of its life. The parrot did not hesitate before answering, and it did not ask anything for itself at all.

'Lord of the thunderbolt, if you would grant me a boon, then let it fall on the tree and not on me. Let the venom that killed it be drawn out. Let sap move in its trunk again, and leaves cover its branches, and fruit ripen where fruit has not ripened in a year. That is the only gift I know how to want.'

Indra, who had expected many answers but not that one, smiled and touched the trunk with his hand. Where his palm rested, the gray bark darkened and softened, and a visible shiver of green moved upward through the wood like water finding its old channel again. Within days the tree stood in full leaf, and its fruit, when it came, was said to be sweeter than any that grew nearby. The birds who had judged it worthless returned in their multitudes, chattering as though they had never left, and among them, thinner still but no longer starving, sat the one who had stayed the whole time.

Bhishma let the story settle before he spoke again to Yudhishthira. 'That is the whole of it,' he said. 'A parrot with nothing to gain kept its seat on a worthless branch, and in the end its worthlessness was the very thing that proved what the bird was made of. Gratitude that only holds while the giver can still give is merely good arithmetic. It is when the seat itself is ruined, when nothing further can be extracted from it, that a creature's true accounting is shown.'

He reminded the king, in a single breath, that the story of the crane and its rescuer runs the opposite way - there the debt was owed by the one with power to a lesser creature who had first shown it kindness, and the reckoning came only when that debt was called due. Between the two tales, Bhishma said, a king could learn both directions gratitude is owed: upward, to those who raised and sheltered him when he had nothing, and downward, to those low and small who once helped him when he was the one in need.

'You will sit on a throne someday soon, Yudhishthira, built from a kingdom that gave you everything before you had done anything to deserve it - milk in infancy, shelter in exile, a name before you had earned one. Remember the parrot when that kingdom, too, is thin and gray and asks nothing of you but your presence. Do not be among those who flew off toward Dvaitavana the moment the fruit stopped falling. Sit on the bare branch if it comes to that, and let the sitting itself be the answer to anyone who asks why you stayed.'

Yudhishthira bowed his head and said nothing for a long while, turning the small bird's fidelity over in his mind like a coin whose weight he had not expected.