The Sandals

Since Rama would not return and Bharata would not reign, Bharata asked for the one thing that could hold both their dharmas at once: Rama’s sandals. He would set them on the throne, rule only as their servant and regent in their name, live himself as an ascetic outside the city, and on the exact day the fourteen years ended he would either greet Rama returning or, if Rama did not come, end his own life in fire. Rama gave him the sandals. Bharata carried them back to Ayodhya on his head, enthroned them, and ruled from beneath them, from a village called Nandigrama, in bark and matted hair, for fourteen years.

The image is the resolution the whole Ayodhya Kanda was built toward, and it is worth seeing exactly what it solves. It separates, cleanly, the two things the catastrophe had jammed together — the sign of kingship and its substance. The sandals are the sign; they sit on the throne so that the office is not vacant and the wrong of usurpation is not committed. The substance — the loyalty of the people, the authority of dharma — stays with the absent Rama, and Bharata governs only as its custodian, owning none of it. The epic has turned the most ordinary thing in a dynasty, a fight over a throne, completely inside out: the throne is occupied by footwear so that no living man has to commit the sin of sitting on it wrongly.

It is also the chapter where the Ramayana finishes drawing its central figures as mirror-images and lets the reader feel the symmetry. Rama in the southern forest, in bark, ruling nothing, keeping a dead father’s word. Bharata in the northern village, in bark, ruling everything, keeping a living brother’s place. Two men in identical austerity, a kingdom between them, each refusing for the other’s sake the thing both could have seized — the exact inverse of the cousins in the Mahabharata, who would not yield a needle’s width. The poems are arguing with each other across the tradition, and the Ramayana’s answer to the question “what does dharma look like in a succession?” is this picture: an empty throne wearing a brother’s shoes, and two ascetics counting the same fourteen years from opposite ends of a grief.

For the reader the chapter closes the Ayodhya Kanda on a strange, suspended note — not tragedy and not relief, but a held breath fourteen years long. Everything is, in a sense, arranged: the wrong is contained, the kingdom is safe, the brothers are at peace with each other if not with the world. And yet nothing is healed; it is only postponed, pending a date, on the condition that all of them survive to it. The Ramayana has spent two books showing that a lawful word can destroy a king and exile the best of men, and it has answered with the most generous arrangement its world can devise — and then it quietly reminds you that the arrangement only holds if nothing happens to Rama or Sita in the forest in the meantime.

Something is about to happen to them in the forest. The Book of Ayodhya ends with the sandals on the throne and the count begun; the Book of the Forest opens with the three of them going deeper into it, toward a leaf-hut by a river, a demoness who will fall in love, and the single small act of mutilation that turns a quiet exile into the war the whole rest of the epic is.