Byangoma

The minister’s son was meant to be keeping watch. The prince and the princess had gone to sleep on the ground beneath a tree, there being no houses anywhere, and he sat up against the trunk with the cold coming into his back. Above him, in a nest that swung with the branch, two birds started talking. They were discussing how his friend was going to die.

The elephant would throw him. That was the first death. When the minister’s son heard the female bird ask whether a man on horseback might be saved instead, and heard her mate say yes, and then say that the lion-gate of the palace would fall and crush him, he understood what kind of night this was going to be. There were four deaths in total, each one dissolved by the same patient question and replaced by a worse one: the gate, then a fish head lodged in the prince’s throat, then a cobra coming through the water-passage of the bedroom at midnight. And at the end of the list, the sting in it. The man who killed that snake would be turned to marble if he ever repeated a word of this conversation.

He did all of it. He kept the prince off the elephant and was thought vain for it, had the decorated gate pulled down and was thought insolent, snatched the rohita head off the prince’s own plate at the welcome feast and was thought a glutton, then hid under the bed with a sword and cut the serpent to pieces. Accused at last of something worse than all of these, he told the truth to clear himself, and went to stone from the feet upward as he spoke, pausing twice to ask whether the prince really wanted him to continue. The prince did.

That tale is Phakir Chand, printed by Lal Behari Day in 1883, and it introduces the birds in one flat line: on that tree swung the nest of the two immortal birds, Bihangama and Bihangami, who had human speech and could see into the future. Day gives them no body at all. No feathers, no faces, no size. In the oldest of these tales the birds never once address the man beneath the tree. They talk to each other, and he listens.

The Bengali storytellers call them Byangoma and Byangomi, and in Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar’s Thakurmar Jhuli of 1907 they get something better than a description. Two brothers, Nilkamal and Lalkamal, walking to the country of the rakshasas with a newly sharpened sword, sit down under an enormous ashwattha tree. The Byangomi is complaining to her mate. Where are the merciful people, she says, who would give two drops of blood and open my children’s eyes. The brothers call up into the leaves asking who is speaking, because blood they can manage. The bird comes down. They bite their own fingers for it.

That is the whole of the exchange, and it is the clearest thing anyone ever wrote about these birds. Their nestlings hatch blind. A stranger’s blood, freely offered, opens the eyes. Shortly afterwards two young Byangomas come down out of the tree with a rush of air and ask the princes what work they can do in return, and when the brothers say nothing, live long, the chicks decide anyway. Climb on. Then dry land and embankment, rivers, hills, cloud, the sky, the moon and the sun all go past underneath.

They are punctual about debts. In the tale of Prince Sobur, a merchant’s daughter dressed as a wandering ascetic cuts down a serpent climbing towards their nest, and the birds arrive home expecting as usual to find their young eaten. Finding them alive, the male works out at once who she really is, what has happened to her husband, and how to undo it: their own dung, hardened on the ground below, powdered and brushed into his skin after he has been washed with seven jars of water and seven jars of milk. Then he carries her the whole way there on his back, on the single condition that she accept no presents at the other end. She takes a ring and calls it a memorial, which is the sort of loophole these tales enjoy.

The droppings work on eyes as well. In another of Day’s stories a parrot flies beyond seven oceans and thirteen rivers, waits under the nest at dawn with a leaf held in his beak, catches what falls from the chicks and carries it back still hot to a blinded king, who opens his eyes and sees.

So the powers are narrow and consistent. Speech, prophecy that never fails, medicine in the body, and a back strong enough for passengers. The limits are just as consistent. They do not act unless something is owed. They cannot keep snakes out of their own tree, and their children are born helpless and sightless and dependent on the kindness of whoever happens to be passing. Above all, their knowledge does not transfer cleanly. Overhearing it saves a life; saying it aloud costs the speaker his.

The Bangiya Sahitya Parishat’s journal lists Byangoma and Byangami in the standard furniture of the Bengali folktale, in among the king, the minister’s son, the kotal and the sword made of palm-leaf, which is roughly the position they have held ever since. Rabindranath Tagore, writing children’s verse in Shishu Bholanath, has a boy imagine riding out along the riverbank and stopping under the tree to ask Byangoma and Byangomi the way, and elsewhere in the same book crowds them into a room along with the barber and the jackal. Rajshekhar Basu got a good joke out of two Calcutta gentlemen overhearing a Byangoma conversation, which only works because every reader already knew the rule about eavesdropping. And a writer in Prabasi in the 1930s complained that the boys of Calcutta no longer wanted to sit still for fairy tales or Byangoma stories. The birds outlasted him. The human face everyone now pictures on them arrived with the pictures, not with the tellings, and it has stuck harder than anything the old books actually say.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a Byangoma?

A Byangoma is a bird of Bengali folklore that speaks human language and knows the future, always appearing with its mate, the female Byangomi. They nest in a tall tree beside the road, and heroes learn their fate by overhearing the pair talk to each other rather than by being told directly.

What do Byangoma and Byangomi do for people?

They repay favours. In Thakurmar Jhuli two princes give drops of their own blood to open the eyes of the birds’ blind nestlings, and the young birds carry them across rivers, mountains and clouds in return. In Lal Behari Day’s Folk-Tales of Bengal the birds cure a poisoned prince and restore a blinded king with medicine made from their own droppings.

Are Byangoma prophecies dangerous?

They are dangerous to repeat. In the tale of Phakir Chand the birds foretell four deaths waiting for a prince and add that anyone who kills the final serpent and then repeats their conversation will turn to marble. The minister’s son saves his friend four times over, is accused of treachery, tells the truth to clear his name, and petrifies from the feet upward as he speaks.

Why are Byangoma shown with human faces?

The human face belongs to the way the birds are pictured rather than to the tales themselves. Neither Lal Behari Day nor the story of Lalkamal and Nilkamal describes a Byangoma’s body or face at all, giving only the swinging nest, the blind chicks and a back wide enough to carry a grown passenger.

Where do Byangoma come from?

They belong to Bengal, and appear across the region’s folktale collections rather than in any single origin story. Day printed them in English in 1883 as Bihangama and Bihangami, which is simply the Sanskrit word vihangama, meaning a bird, and Dakshinaranjan Mitra Majumdar published them in Bengali as Bengoma and Bengomi in Thakurmar Jhuli in 1907.

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