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By Mukul Ronak Das

Tomorrow, across India, Ravan will burn.

Effigies packed with fireworks will rise over maidans from Delhi to Kullu to Mysuru. Crowds will gather at dusk. An arrow will fly. And in a burst of light and noise, the ten-headed king will fall again, as he has every Dussehra for centuries.

It is the most famous ending in Indian storytelling.

But it is not where the story ends.

The battle tells us how RAM won. What happens after tells us what winning was for.

The day after the victory

Ravan is dead. Lanka, the golden city, lies open. Its treasuries, its palaces, and the most remarkable flying machine in the world are, by every rule of war in that age, RAM’s to keep.

He keeps none of it.

He crowns Vibhishana king of Lanka. He leaves its gold where it is. A verse often attributed to the Ramayan captures the spirit of that moment. Even a Lanka made of gold does not tempt me. Mother and motherland are greater than heaven.

What he does accept is a ride home.

Vibhishana offers him the Pushpaka Vimana, the flying chariot built by Vishwakarma for Kuber, the god of wealth, and seized years earlier by Ravan. RAM accepts it for one reason. Time.

Fourteen years of exile are about to end. Bharat has vowed that if RAM does not return the moment those years are complete, he will give up his life. Walking back from Lanka would take months.

So RAM flies.

The most famous flight in Indian history was not a luxury. It was a promise with a deadline.

Who flew in the Ramayan

It is easy to forget how crowded the skies of the Ramayan are. Read it again with flight in mind, and it starts to look like an aviation epic.

Hanuman, of course. He did not only leap to Lanka. When Lakshman lay dying on the battlefield, Hanuman flew to the Himalayas overnight to bring back the Sanjeevani herb. Unable to identify the right plant, he lifted the entire mountain and flew it back to Lanka.

Jatayu fought Ravan in mid-air and shattered his flying chariot before he fell. His elder brother Sampati, wingless for years, spotted Sita across a hundred yojanas of ocean and grew his wings back.

Ravan’s son Meghanad, named for the thunder-like cry he gave at birth, fought from inside the clouds, invisible to his enemies. He once defeated Indra himself, which is why he is better known as Indrajit.

When Indrajit’s serpent arrows bound RAM and Lakshman on the battlefield, it was Garud who swooped down from the sky, and the serpents fled at the sight of him.

And in the final battle against Ravan, RAM did not fight on foot. Indra sent his own celestial chariot, driven by his charioteer Matali, down from the heavens. The war that Dussehra celebrates was won from a flying chariot.

Our oldest epic is, among many other things, a story about who controls the sky.

The stops along the way

The flight home is not direct, and the stops are worth noticing.

At Sita’s request, the Pushpaka lands at Kishkindha so that Tara, Ruma and the other women of the vanara kingdom can join the journey to Ayodhya. A victory, in her view, was something to be shared with those who had stood beside them.

It lands again near Prayag, at the ashram of the sage Bharadwaja.

From there, RAM sends Hanuman flying ahead to Nandigram, where Bharat has lived for fourteen years. RAM asks Hanuman to watch Bharat’s face carefully when he hears the news. If there is any sign that Bharat now wishes to keep the throne, RAM is prepared to let him have it.

There is no such sign. Bharat weeps with joy.

The man who kept the kingdom in trust

What happens next is a detail almost nobody remembers, and it is my favourite moment in the entire epic.

For fourteen years, Bharat had refused to sit on RAM’s throne. He placed RAM’s sandals on it instead and ruled Ayodhya from a village outside the city, as a caretaker.

When RAM finally lands, Bharat returns the sandals to his feet. And then, Valmiki tells us, he says something remarkable.

He asks RAM to inspect the treasury, the granaries, the city and the army. Through your strength, he tells him, I have increased all of it tenfold.

Fourteen years. A kingdom held in trust. Returned ten times larger.

There may be no better description, in any ancient text, of what responsible stewardship looks like. Bharat did not merely protect what he was given. He grew it. Patiently, without credit, for a person who was not there to see it, over a horizon most people would find unbearably long.

RAM, for his part, completes the cycle. Once he is home, he sends the Pushpaka back to Kubera, its rightful owner.

Lanka is returned to its people. The vehicle is returned to its owner. The kingdom is returned to its king, ten times stronger.

What Dussehra is really about

We usually tell Dussehra as a story about defeating something. That is true.

But the Ramayan spends just as much care on what comes after. On the patience it took to wait fourteen years. On the trust that held a kingdom together in someone’s absence. On the quiet, compounding work of a caretaker who knew the real owner would one day come home.

Some returns take longer than others. In our own small way, we know something about that. The skydiving camps we ran across India between 2010 and 2014 were full every time. They stopped because India did not yet have the infrastructure that human flight needs. The journey back to the sky has been a long one.

It is nearly complete.

Tomorrow, when Ravan burns and the sky lights up, it is worth remembering what came next.

A flying chariot. A promise kept on time. And a kingdom returned, ten times larger than it was left.

That, too, is victory.

Curious about indoor skydiving?

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