Itihāsa / Rāmāyaṇa chronicle / Araṇya · 25 of 50
25. Jaṭāyu
Araṇya (अरण्य)
Jaṭāyu is old, a friend of Daśaratha from a younger world, and he fights Rāvaṇa in the air anyway. He tears at the chariot. He is cut down. The page says that he falls. It does not describe the blows. Rāvaṇa goes south with Sītā, and her ornaments fall, a trail the poem is leaving for monkeys who have not yet entered.
Rāma and Lakṣmaṇa find the vulture still alive. He tells them the name. Rāvaṇa has taken her, south. Then he dies. Rāma cremates him as a father, which is the rite he could not perform for Daśaratha. The poem is deliberate. The man who kept a father's word and missed a father's funeral is given an old bird to be filial toward. The grief of the son and the grief of the husband are the same fire.
They go south without a plan that deserves the name. The forest closes the Araṇya-kāṇḍa's plot and opens a search. Sītā is no longer a person in a hut. She is a direction.
नेपालीमा
जटायु बूढा थिए, दशरथका साथी। आकाशमा रावणसँग लडे। ढले। यो पृष्ठले ढले भन्छ। प्रहार लेख्दैन। गहना झरे। रामले अझै जीवित गिद्ध भेट्नुभयो। उनले रावणको नाम र दक्षिण दिशा भने, अनि मरे। रामले बाबुजस्तै अन्त्येष्टि गर्नुभयो, जुन उहाँले दशरथको गर्न पाउनुभएको थिएन। सीता अब कुटीकी मान्छे होइनन्। दिशा हुन्।