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ceased their emergence. The stench of death, blood and iron and the pungent reek of male seed rose like a miasma from the patch of earth beneath the hovering Pushpak. Vibhisena stared down, unable to believe his eyes. 
    ‘ Ra-va-na!’ 
    Jatayu’s plaintive cry filled the air for miles around, rising to the cloud-enshrouded sky like a lament to broken gods. The cry sent a chill through Vibhisena’s heart. He felt the bird-lord’s frustration and rage. Only moments ago, Jatayu had been dreaming of freedom; freedom from Ravana and his Prithviconquering ambitions, his sadistic and humiliating leadership, his brutal ways and indomitable will. Vibhisena himself had been dreaming similar dreams; not just for himself the way Jatayu had, but for all Lanka. He had had a dream, a dream of a Lanka that lived in harmony with the rest of Prithvi-lok, that some day, through the goodness of its actions and the sincerity of its reparations, rejoined the rest of the mortal plane and abjured its demonaic history for ever. 
    Now he feared that he might have dreamed too much too soon. 
    Vibhisena continued to gaze down from the Pushpak. The chariot hovered in mid-air, about five yards above the surface of the ground. The area below the vehicle was unlike the rest of the land around it. While the rest had been cleansed of its asura ash by the purifying waters of the Ganga rain, this patch remained ash-grey, scorched and charred. The patch was no more than six yards long by three yards wide, yet it was a blot on the entire gangetic plain. The wisps of fetor that rose like steam off its scarred and ruined surface withered the stalks of new shoots nearby, wilting newborn buds before they could bloom, rotting holes in newly grown leaves. There was no question at all that whatever lay here, it was neither purified nor cleansed. If anything, it still retained the potency to corrupt the land entire, like a seed of blackness waiting to sprout and darken the earth. 
    Even sacred ganga-jal and Brahman power could not cleanse this patch. Such is the power of Ravana, even in death. Deva save us all from his tyranny. 
    Vibhisena felt his voice tremble as he issued a command to the flying chariot in the secret code-tongue that Ravana had taught him. At once, the underside of the Pushpak began to glow with a fierce white light, the beam directed downwards at the patch of blighted earth. The beam shone as thickly as a shaft of solid whiteness, a perfect marblesque pillar with only a shimmering at its periphery to indicate its lack of substance. 
    The pillar of white light descended solidly to the ground, then made contact with the surface. 
    A deafening impact exploded into the morning sky. Suddenly, the world turned dark as twilight, the sun blotted out by a force as powerful as the Brahman mantra that had brought the gangajal rain only hours earlier. The sky rolled and seethed with ominous colours like a vast backlit cyclorama in a Sanskrit drama: some tragic epic of warring devas and asuras. Colours at the lower end of the spectrum–garish crimsons, purples, cerulean blues–flashed and rolled across the horizon. Explosions of blinding white light burst from the pores of the patch of blighted earth as the pillar of light bored its way relentlessly into the ground. As the pillar went down, penetrating the protesting earth, ash-grey dust billowed up, spattering Vibhisena and Jatayu, blinding their vision. The giant bird-beast screeled in terror and panic and flapped its mighty wings again, churning up even more dust and ash and earth. Still the pillar of light went down, down. Sods of blighted earth began to fly up, as if churned by an invisible plough, coating the burnished gold of the celestial chariot, besmirching Vibhisena’s face and person, drawing enraged cries from the bird-lord perched above. 
    With a final burst of effulgence, the drama of light and noise reached a climax, and as suddenly as it had begun, the spectacle ended. The world