The whole epic narrows at last to a single combat: Rama against Ravana, the rakshasa emperor who had humbled gods and shaken the worlds. By the time they met, Ravana had already lost his mightiest: his brother Kumbhakarna, the colossal sleeper, and his sorcerer-son Indrajit, conqueror of Indra himself, both fallen to Rama's side. Yet Ravana remained the most formidable foe of all.

The duel is described as a thing of cosmic scale. Ravana fought from his chariot with the strength of his ten heads and twenty arms; Rama, the gods watching, was at length given the chariot of Indra and the charioteer Matali so that the contest might be equal. Whenever Rama severed one of Ravana's heads, another rose in its place — an image, the tradition suggests, of how the ego regenerates itself, how pride cannot be ended by cutting at its surface.

The turning came through knowledge. Vibhishana, Ravana's righteous brother now in Rama's camp, revealed the secret his brother had concealed: a vessel of amrita, the nectar of immortality, lay hidden within Ravana — in many tellings, in the hollow of his navel — and while it remained, he could not be slain. Rama took up the Brahmastra, the supreme weapon, charged with sacred mantra and, in the devotional accounts, with the very breath of prayer. He drew the bow to its full and loosed it; the arrow found the hidden nectar, and Ravana, lord of Lanka, fell.

What is striking is the epic's refusal of triumphalism. Ravana is not a cartoon villain but a tragic king — a supreme devotee of Shiva, a master of the Vedas and the arts, a ruler under whom Lanka had flourished — undone not by weakness but by a single ungoverned desire. As he lay dying, the tradition tells that Rama sent Lakshmana to him to learn statecraft and wisdom from the dying king's own lips, honouring the greatness even in the enemy. Rama ordered full and respectful funeral rites, reminding all that with death enmity ends. The shadow had fallen; but the cost of victory, and the dignity owed even to the vanquished, are never far from the poet's mind.