Chapter 47 — The Road Home

The dead had been restored, the gods had withdrawn, and the field outside Lanka lay quiet at last.

Indra told Rama that the time had come to return to Ayodhya. Bharata, he said, had kept his brother's grief and the discipline of the fourteen-year promise. Rama did not treat the instruction as a release from responsibility. The exile had reached its appointed end; Bharata must be seen, and the kingdom entrusted to his care must be received back.

Vibhishana offered baths, clothing, ornaments, and the full hospitality of Lanka. Rama answered that Bharata had waited too long for him to remain. Vibhishana then brought Pushpaka, the celestial vehicle that Ravana had taken from his half-brother Kubera and that had become part of Lanka's royal splendor. It was no ordinary chariot. Crafted by Vishvakarma, the divine maker, it was a vast aerial palace: terraces and chambers rose within it; crystal, gold, and precious stones caught the morning light; white banners and small bells moved in the wind. It could carry a company without crowding them and travel as swiftly as thought.

The vehicle's magnificence did not make its history innocent. Ravana had possessed it, and the people boarding it had just brought down his city. Now it would bear the survivors away from the place of captivity and war.

Before entering it, Rama honored the vanaras. They had left their own kingdom, crossed the sea, endured grief and battle, and made his cause their own. He asked them to return to Kishkindha. They answered that they wished to see Ayodhya, Kausalya, and the installation that would bring Rama home. Sugriva spoke for them; Vibhishana joined their request. Rama welcomed them aboard.

Sita traveled beside Rama, with Lakshmana near them. Sugriva, Hanuman, Jambavan, Angada, Vibhishana, and the other allies found places throughout the great vehicle. As Pushpaka rose, Lanka's towers fell away beneath them. The guarded ashoka grove, the palace courts, and the battlefield became smaller, but they did not become less real.

The journey did not turn the war into something distant merely because the earth fell away below. Rama showed Sita the ground where Ravana had fallen and where Mandodari had mourned. He showed her the ocean, its surface broken by the long bridge raised through the labor of the vanaras, and the island city shrinking behind them.

Then the vehicle passed over the long road of the search. There was Kishkindha, the wooded vanara kingdom where Rama had first met Sugriva and Hanuman. There was Pampa, whose waters and flowering banks still shone below. There was Panchavati, where their leaf dwelling had stood beside the Godavari. Rama pointed out the forest clearing where Jatayu had given his life resisting Ravana; the hermitages that had sheltered them; Chitrakuta, where Bharata had come to plead for Rama's return; then the Yamuna and the Ganga, the rivers crossed at the beginning of exile.

For Sita these were not sights on a journey. They were places where a shared life had been broken, endured, and sought again. Rama did not ask the landscape to absolve anything. He pointed; she looked. The air around Pushpaka was full of the allies' voices, the bells of the vehicle, and the great silence between memories.

At last Ayodhya came into view: pale palace roofs, broad courtyards, the Sarayu's course, and the city where Rama had left as an exile in bark cloth. Pushpaka did not descend there at once. Rama first brought the company to Bharadvaja's ashram, the hermitage of the sage who had received the exiles at the beginning of their journey and directed them toward Chitrakuta. There, before entering the city, he would learn how Bharata had kept the years.