Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  Also, I just want to say that I think some big changes are going to be happening soon. I’ve been having some really serious, heart-to-heart talks with my brother. I can’t talk about anything just yet but to all my fans, please stay tuned, you won’t regret it, I promise you. Some serious shit is about to go down, I can guarantee it. So don’t forget to keep watching, show my brother Raavana some love at the links below and big love to all of you guys, you mean so much to me and I value each and every one of you. Peace out, ya’ll.

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  Exile

  Neelanjana Banerjee

  I sneak through Exile’s side entrance, hoping I can make it into the costuming area through the Disfigurement Room, the DFR for short, without being seen. Val wants us here at eight pm on the dot, but it only takes me forty-five minutes before I hit the floor in full character.

  It’s dark so I feel my way past the VIP section, which will later be cordoned off by a stationary smokescreen. Under my fingers, the plants and vines that cover the living couches break off and turn to dust. Something must be wrong with the irrigation system again, another reminder that we’re barely second tier in the Ramayana cosplay club scene here in Outer Vegas.

  Sure, Val has ex-space station security and fast-running kiosks to make sure the clients spend up to twenty percent of their expense budgets, but we’re just not classy. Our authenticity rating is low because the club just looks like the warehouse it used to be and not like you are walking into the Dandaka Forest. The clients’ Sita and Ram costumes are made with fourteen-hour synthetics and they tend to unravel at the end of a long night. To be expected, since they’re mostly call center workers and web clerks, with a heavy smattering of border thugs and other analog criminals. We don’t see the hackers, enviro-moguls and blogcasters here—they stick to the top tier clubs like 800 BCE and Ayodhya on the Strip. Their gear is made from fiber-optic silks programmed to shapeshift you into your favorite character. Even us players are using second-hand equipment, skin lightening chambers and silicon suits from five years ago. Regardless, Val has an eye for raw talent in his players and it keeps Exile as busy as most clubs in the top tier.

  I’m almost safely concealed inside the DFR when the light goes on in Val’s office. I duck down, hiding behind one of the dance platforms, still un-retracted from last night. Val’s office looks over the whole club from the top floor of the building. It’s the only place in here that has any sense of authenticity design, with its ambient flame lanterns hanging from the ceiling and a desk that looks like it was cobbled together from axe-cut trees and sanded with monkey hair. But the big draw is the custom-built ant farm that runs through the far walls. He is Valmiki, the scribe, meditating until the ants build their giant mounds around him; or Val, the club owner, watching his world play out below him.

  It’s a great hustle, all of it. There’s something special about that office. People tend to buy Val’s whole “wise sage” con up there with his shaved head and ambiguous looks. I did, before I figured out who he really was. When you’re up there you forget about the rest of the club, with its watered-down elixirs and poorly done character summary videos that loop in the atrium to try to catch people up on who’s who of the Ramayana. In top tier clubs, if you don’t know Sumitra from Kausalaya—you can’t get in. But top tier clubs here don’t even com pare to what goes on in India. There, it’s all gone CGE, or computer generated environments. You just plug in and you’re deep in the forest, dancing with a ten foot tall Hanuman.

  I peek over the platform and see Val perched on the edge of his desk talking to someone. I don’t want to risk moving, even though they probably can’t see out onto the floor. I can tell by the way he nods his head, his hand thoughtfully cupping his chin, that it’s some girl. No doubt some new player that’s trying to bump her way up the ladder by sucking up to Val. He reaches out to touch her, maybe stroke her hair. She stands up and I see Anita, one of the floor players.

  Dammit

  Anita has had it out for me ever since I started. At first I thought she was just pissed that I started as a character player and didn’t work my way up from the floor. Then I realized she’s just a backlasher, that she hates anyone that ever had a possibility of reversing to India, especially Indians.

  Most of it all happened before Anita and I were even born. Even the history books aren’t quite up to date, so what I know I pieced together from my mother and news archives on the web. I guess The Reverse started at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a slow trickle of retirees and young tech workers. Then about forty years ago, India’s technology infrastructure began to hyperleap anything going on in the First World, especially in America. The massive “earthquakes” that destroyed the technology centers in California had a lot to do with it. Most people think that they were caused by some kind of underground nuclear attack from China, but there has never been solid proof. After that, Indians were the first to reverse, followed quickly by anyone in the upper tax brackets, and then everyone else. But the population of India was so large, that there was no need for any industrial or even menial labor. India’s slums became refugee camps for American and European immigrants looking for a piece of the high-tech Indian Dream. Around this time, India began to control all media production, with everything— cartoons, game shows, soap operas, huge action movies, interactive web series—coming out of the revamped Bollywood studios. The Indian epics became source material for all of it. The cosplay scene grew out of the super popular Ramayana web-comics and animated web series.

  Ma says that during the heyday of The Reverse, India’s system was fairly corrupt, which meant that a lot of Indians—especially rich ones—used family connections and bribery to push their immigration paper work to the front of the line. At the same time, as all manufacturing shifted to India, many remaining Indian Americans began to monopolize the lucrative import business. There were media exposes and protests against the corruption but it didn’t do much to stop the gradual transfer of wealth to this one community. Rich Indians began to segregate themselves in clusters of premium, gated high-rise apartment complexes that mirrored those in suburban Delhi and Mumbai. Ma remembers the early stories about the backlash attacks, but it was always written off as a wealth and disparity issue. Of course Indians were subject to violent crime, the media reported at the time, they had the money and America was in economic freefall.

  About twenty years ago, India shut down its borders to preserve quality of life. That’s when it got real bad for any Indians left in America. There were bombings and fires at the gated communities in New Jersey, the center of Indian wealth, driving residents out into the streets where mobs were waiting them. It wasn’t much better anywhere else, even for my parents who never had enough to be considered even middle class. It’s been five years since the Backlash Laws, but it’s ignorants like Anita that screw it up for everyone. If only she knew that, even though I’m Indian, I probably have less of a chance than her of ever ending up there—especially if I want to help my mother.

  I sneak a peek up at the office again and see that they’re staring out the windows, pointing to where I am hiding. Dammit dammit dammit. I hear them come onto the balcony outside of Val’s office.

  “There’s the disfigurement room,” Val says. “You take clients in there for the role play, and then a hatch leads you back down.”

  “I know the DFR in and out, Val,” Anita says. “I know I could do a better Surpanakha than she does.”

  I hear their footsteps moving towards the spiral staircase that leads onto the floor. As they wind down, I take the opportunity to slip into the room and disappear.

  At the kidney center, my mother’s dialysis machine beeped louder and louder, like the UV alarm at our apartment on particularly bad days making sure we don’t even open the skylights. After the earthquakes of 2020, anyone on the West Coast who didn’t reverse ended up somewhere in the Greater Vegas area—even though the neon gas leaks have des
troyed the ozone layer, making it practically impossible to go outside without serious protection.

  The nurse actually pounded on the machine with her fist to make it work. “Does that usually help?” I asked her. She just pounded it again, making my mother jump. “Hello? Does that fix it?” I said. The nurse looked Mexican, or maybe Filipino. It’s hard to tell because everyone’s so mixed. Lately, there’s been a huge influx again from Mexico, the Border gangs have been especially active in bringing in new people, and pulling strings to get them into jobs. Jobs that they are not qualified to do. I glared at the nurse, who looked like she was nineteen years old. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

  “Don’t yell at her. It’s not her fault,” my mother said patiently, smiling at the nurse. “Que esta bien.”

  The nurse pounded the machine again and the beeping stopped, but then the machine powered down, all the lights and numbers disappearing.

  “What happened?” I said, getting up. “Wait, what’s going on? It can’t just stop. It’s…she’ll…that’s not good. Ma? Ma, are you okay?”

  After the nurses revived my mother from fainting, the other machine was freed up and the same nurse who broke the first machine hooked her into that one.

  “Don’t look so worried, Sapna,” Ma said.

  “How old do you think these machines are anyway? Do you know what they can do in India now? They have a regulator that they can inject into your bloodstream that replaces the kidney. You don’t even have to get surgery.”

  “I could get surgery across the border in Arizona.”

  “Ma, are you kidding? Do you know what they do to Indians over there? I’m going to take care of it,” I said, looking at my wrist browser for the next shuttle to the entertainment sector.

  “With your call center job?” She fixed her eyes on the machine.

  “I’m late,” I said, kissing her on her sagging cheek before leaving.

  The costuming room is overly bright, everyone’s LED mirrors turned to high. I rush into my area and quickly peel off my UV suit. I have a feeling that Val and Anita are going to show up and I want to be well into my skin-lightening process by then. The place is already toxic with the epoxy Monroe uses to put on the layer of hair for his Hanuman suit.

  “Monroe! How many times do I have to tell you to use the fan or go do that somewhere else?” I yell over to him.

  “Damn girl, you getting any sleep?” He says, looking over at me over the aerosol brush he uses to spray another layer of body glue across his large hairless chest. Samoans always play Hanuman because of their size and hairlessness. They also have the best REM reducers, which I need to keep up my pace of work. I sink into my makeup chair and think back to Val’s hand stroking Anita’s face.

  “Everything okay?” Tania emerges from the bathroom with her Golden Deer suit on. It’s not lit up and glowing, like it will be under the black lights, but she still looks beautiful. The last Golden Deer, Maria, looked like she was wearing one of those fat melting suits the rich kids in Mum-bai wear when she wasn’t on the floor, but Tania is different.

  “Lot going on,” I mumble. Tania makes me nervous, with her shiny dark skin and hazel eyes. She’s new here and I feel like it’s a cliche that I have a crush that’s so debilitating, since her job is to be slightly out of reach. Even the Lust Dust baggies I see on the floor at the end of the night come with Golden Deers printed on them.

  “Can you help me with something?” Tania asks and I come over to her table. She says she can’t figure out how to get the right color out of the eye makeup console. I give her some basic options: black, blue, brown.

  “But I think this color would really work for you,” I say and type in a code that produces a gold tinged green. “It’ll bring out your eyes.”

  Tania smiles at me in the mirror. “Thanks,” she says and I feel my cheeks get hot. When I am back at my station, undressing to go into the skin lightening chamber, she turns my way.

  “You really Indian?” she says softly. I clench my jaw. It’s always the nice ones that will give it to you the worst.

  “So?”

  “Oh no,” Tania says. “I mean, I didn’t mean anything. I just … was curious.” I keep my scowl on, but her big hazel eyes appear concerned and I wonder if she’s, maybe, telling the truth.

  “What’s your background?” I ask, still cautious.

  “I don’t know, some mix, like everybody else. Supposedly, I had great-grandparents that came from Brazil before the fires started burning down there. But I think mostly I’m Mexican,” she shrugs. “That’s why it’s cool, you know what you are.”

  Part of me wants to tell her everything that’s going on with me. She has that look. Her neck is impossibly long and fragile. Her lips are lush and she has slightly crooked teeth—the kind that don’t need a trip to the unlicensed dentists across the border to fix. I mean sure, I want to kiss her, but I kind of just want to talk to her. I want to tell her that without better dialysis, my mom’s not going to last two years. I want to tell her how in India, the health care system would mean we wouldn’t have to pay for dialysis or even wait for the implant. I want to tell her how I have it figured out, that already recruiters have been approaching me to work on the space stations, not just the moon—but the Mars satellites and further. It’s totally unregulated country out there, so the clubs are crazy but they’ll guarantee enough money in the accounts and enough connections to get my mom to India. Most contracts are two years at a time, but we’ve been living underground in Vegas long enough that I’ve forgotten the concept of living under regular earth sunlight anyway.

  But before I can say anything, Val comes in. I can hear him talking to the other character players: the Filipino drag queens that he hired away from some top tier club to play Kaikeyi, Sumitra and Kausalya, who complain that they don’t have their own costuming area; then round-faced Kika, who plays Jatayu, complains to him that her feathers fall out and then the clients steal them. She wants security to help her take them back from the clients before they leave the club.

  When I catch sight of him through the garment racks overflowing with silicon suits, prosthetics and glittery synthetics, I am so angry I want to spit at him for even engaging with Anita about giving away my job. I observe his thin, finely-shaped beard and his shaved head. It’s so obvious to me that Val’s just like me, an Indian left behind—meaning his family waited too long, like mine, or made some serious mistake. But Val could pass for anything: Mexican, Central American or even some Filipino mix and probably never had to deal with being Indian because of it. I never had it so lucky: my hair just curly enough, my ass not round enough, my skin a different enough shade of brown. And when my dad was killed, we were all over the news. Passing just wasn’t an option for me. It makes me a better player though, especially for Suparnaka, and Val knows that. I’m sure that’s why he hired me, but the knowledge between us makes things strained. He’s always given me a hard time, not like the other girls who fuck their ways to bigger percentages.

  I scramble to get the settings on the skin lightening bed ready, but the machine takes a few minutes to warm up. Then suddenly he’s there, standing behind Tania, placing his hairy knuckles on her shoulders.

  “How are you feeling?” he asks. Tania smiles back at him full-force. I bite my lip, mad at myself for falling for her flirting. She’s smart and knows how to get whatever she wants. This is Vegas after all. “You know, the Golden Deer look, it’s really all in the eyes.”

  Val grabs the laser eye liner and tilts her chin towards him. He punches a different color code into the controller. “Now, close for me.” He sweeps the glowing brush against her lid, drawing a tapering bronze streak towards her hairline. Tania opens her eyes and it kind of takes my breath away.

  “Perfection,” Val says and Tania giggles, her damn crooked incisor like a little stab in my heart. The lightening chamber dings and Val and Tania look my way.

  “You’r
e not ready yet?” Val asks, his expression turning stern.

  “Don’t worry about it,” I say.

  “I want you here early so you don’t look all rushed.”

  “It doesn’t seem to be a problem for me or my clients.”

  “Look Sapna, you’re supposed to lure the clients in by looking like someone they want to fuck,” Val says loudly, making a big show of it just to embarrass me. “If you’re just all demonness, maybe I can cut your pay in half.”

  “I got it, Val,” I say sweetly. “Now, if you leave, maybe I can get ready.”

  He opens his mouth to say something else, but then Anita comes into the room behind him and makes a big show of explaining why she’s late. Val ignores her and she rushes off to her area. I narrow my eyes at him and he hesitates at the door, but then turns and stomps off . Tania catches my eye again and gives me a sympathetic look, but I ignore her.

  I reach for my silicon suit that compresses my belly flat and concave. It even turns my large full breasts into small perky ones. It works better when I have to transform into Surpanakha’s true form in the DFR, where the client gets to cut off my nose, ears and breasts. It’s all done with flesh prosthetics and special disappearing blood serum that covers everything, but is gone by the time the client leaves the room. For as much as Val gives me a hard time, the club wouldn’t run without the Surpanakha player and the Deer. We make the most money, and it’s well deserved. I can turn demonness like it’s nobody’s business.