Jarita and her sons debate how to escape a forest fire
A forest fire races toward Jarita and her four flightless sons, trapping them. Jarita proposes sacrificing herself to shield them, but her sons argue she must survive for their lineage. When she suggests hiding in a rat hole, they face a new terror: a sanctioned death by fire, or a miserable death in the dark.
The fire came for them all at once.
It blazed up in the heart of the forest, licking the tall trees with its tongue, advancing toward the place where Jarita huddled with her four young sons. They were Sharngakas — a kind of bird — and her sons were still flightless, without feathers or strong feet, masses of flesh unable to escape. Jarita, their ascetic mother, was stricken with grief, listening to their distress.
She began to lament aloud, her thoughts spinning. “My children still have imperfect understanding. They are the ultimate refuge of our ancestors, and they are tugging at me. I cannot escape somewhere else, taking my sons with me. Nor can I abandon them. Which one will I leave? Which will I take? What should I do?”
She thought of their father, who had long ago abandoned them with a prophecy for each son: Jaritari, the eldest, would establish the lineage; Sarisrikva would have offspring to extend it; Stambamitra would practise austerities; Drona would be supreme in knowledge of the brahman (the ultimate reality). That future now faced annihilation.
“I will cover you with my body and die with you,” she declared, bereft of judgement, seeing no other way.
Her sons spoke back. Their voices were not those of panicked children, but of beings weighing cosmic outcomes. “O mother! Give up your love for us and go to a place where there is no fire. If we are destroyed, you will have other sons. But if you are destroyed, there will be no progeny in our lineage. Consider these two outcomes. The time has come for you to do that which is best for our lineage. Out of love, do not do anything that will destroy it. The act of our father, who wishes to attain the worlds, must not amount to nothing.”
It was a cold, clear argument: the mother was the vessel of the future. The sons were expendable if the vessel survived.
Jarita heard them and offered a third path. “Near this tree, there is a rat hole in the ground. Swiftly enter the hole and you will suffer no fear from the fire there. When you have entered, I will cover the hole with dirt. When the fire has died out, I will return and remove it. That is the only means I can think of.”
The Sharngakas considered the hole. “We are only masses of flesh, without feathers, and the carnivorous rat will destroy us. On beholding this fear, we cannot enter. We do not know how we can escape being burnt by the fire or being eaten by the rat. How can our father attain fulfilment and how can our mother survive?”
They laid out the dilemma with stark logic. “The dwellers of the sky will either be destroyed in the hole by the rat or by the fire. Considering both possibilities, it is better to be burnt than to be eaten. To die from being eaten by a rat in a hole is a most miserable death. But destruction of the body by fire has been sanctioned by the learned.”
The fire advanced. The hole waited. The family remained, trapped between two terrible ends, debating not how to live, but how their death would be counted.