The Departure

After Sita the Ramayana does not linger long, and the brevity is the same restraint the Mahabharata uses for its own ending: a life’s whole weight set down in a few quiet pages, because everything that needed to be felt has been felt.

Rama reigned on — the epic keeps the long just years, Rama-rajya at its fullest, the kingdom held in an order the culture would never stop measuring itself against. He divided the realm in time among his sons and his brothers’ sons, Lava and Kusha given kingdoms, the line secured. One by one the figures of the poem went before him in the way of their kinds: the brothers, the friends, the generation that had carried the story. The Ramayana lets the world it built thin out gently, the way the Mahabharata empties before its Pandavas climb the mountain.

The end, when it came for Rama, came as a calling-home. The epic frames his departure not as a death but as a return: the avatar’s term, the reason the gods had asked Vishnu to consent to be a man — Ravana’s loophole, the limited thing that could reach what the unlimited could not — was complete. The work the Bala Kanda set in motion in the gods’ council was done. Rama walked into the Sarayu, the river of Ayodhya, and out of the human form he had accepted, and was received back into what he had always been beneath it. The Ramayana lets the man and the god be one thing again, the limitation laid down, the story’s deepest engine, hidden under six and a half books, surfacing only at the very last to close.

And then the frame shuts completely, which is the chapter’s true subject. This whole poem — the war, the bridge, the fire, the banishment, the earth opening — has been the thing Valmiki was commissioned to compose when grief fell into metre by the Tamasa; it was learned by Lava and Kusha and sung back to the king; and it survives him. The Ramayana ends by telling you what the poem itself is for: that it is to be heard, and that whoever hears it — the epic says this plainly, the phalashruti, the fruit of the listening — is blessed by it, cleansed, carried. The story outlasts every person in it, including Rama, including Sita, and that survival is the consolation the poem offers in place of the reunion it refused: not that the good were spared their cost, but that the truth of what they were was made into something that does not die.

This is the Ramayana’s final claim, and it rhymes exactly with the Mahabharata’s. Both epics end by folding into the scene of their own telling and insisting that the poem is the justice the world withheld — the Mahabharata recited at a fire that was to burn the serpents, the Ramayana sung by a banished queen’s sons to the king who wronged her. The poem born because a man could not bear an innocent creature’s pain ends by becoming the permanent memory of an innocent woman’s, kept true, kept beautiful, handed to everyone who comes after.

Here the Ramayana ends — Rama returned to the river and to what he was, the song outliving the singer, and the blessing it was built to leave resting now with whoever has read to the end of it.