Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  So thoroughly has she been taken under Mandodari’s wing that she is safer in this city than anywhere else in the world. They even hear a story about how her new protector dramatically stepped in to save her from rape by a besotted kidnapper.

  In Vishravan’s city the physically strong are called upon to build. They make bridges and monuments and roads from strong blocks of grey and pink stone. The king himself is among them, carrying massive quantities of rock effortlessly. His sister is there too, as strong as he. Mythili has grown up among farmer kings and the first sight of the vast engineering works of Vishravan’s city fills her with awe. The great turbines are constantly in motion on the shore. Water and steam power the city, and massive machines powered by systems of toothed wheels. She will learn that Vishravan has war machines as well.

  Those who do not build apply their skills elsewhere. Mandodari is teaching Mythili how to weave cloth from the thin metallic wires that she herself draws from her forge. They are so thin as to be as soft and pliant as thread. Mythili learns to make elaborate pictures in the resulting cloth, and hangs her home with tapestries that gleam where the light touches them and make tiny chink-chink noises when the wind shifts them against the walls. Once she has become proficient their creator weaves for herself a cloth to wear in the rich copper of Meenakshi’s beautiful hair.

  She does not like the forges themselves. But the one time she enters Mandodari’s workshop she does make something—a thick ring of pure gold. She presses her fingers into it to decorate it; the metal is still hot and it blisters her fingers but she is pleased with the result. Even when she learns (Mandodari laughs at her) that pure gold is so soft that she could have let it cool. She has had no ornaments since her marriage either.

  She will give the gold ring to the first of her husband’s ambassadors along with a message: “Can he not rescue me himself?” By himself, for her, a personal act. Not some sort of cosmic war.

  Word comes that her husband’s army has reached the mainland shore.

  Ridiculous to imagine that it is outraged pride that propelled the long chase southward. He is hardly a jealous local king. Yet for some reason she has never quite understood he must act out these petty human performances, as if he could not merely think different circumstances into existence. So he performs rage, and standing on the edge of a sea he could part with the mere flick of a hand sends mortal creatures to do his work instead. A vanar is crushed to death when he strays into the path of a boulder that is being rolled into the sea. Her husband has already shot one vanar in the back for the sake of his story. He reaches out a hand to stroke a passing squirrel whose only contribution to this huge enterprise is a handful of pebbles.

  Everybody knows the war is coming.

  It is while her husband and his motley army are throwing stones into the sea that Mandodari leads her into the forges for a second time. Around them everyone who can be spared from their regular duties has been drafted into making more weapons of iron and bronze; Mandodari is the only one to use gold. Mythili watches as her friend crafts first a necklace and then a thick belt of linked panels of gold.

  “To remember us by,” she says, and Mythili realises that she knows how this is going to end. This is the worst moment of all.

  The belt is a story. She sees the birth of Vishravan in one panel, and she sees him praying for ten years for his city. And she learns what everyone in the city knows, no matter how hard Vishravan tries to escape it. And she learns that when he crouched in the bushes with his sister, he wasn’t looking at her.

  When the city catches fire molten bronze flows through the cracks in the paving into the forges below. She does not know if her friend has escaped.

  On the day that she is to be tested Mythili arms herself in metals as an act of defiance. She wears the copper cloth that she wove for herself as a sari, and covers her head. She wears Mandodari’s necklace and belt and covers her arms in bangles.

  When she moves forward the heat blisters her skin. She can feel molten copper and gold running down her arms and legs. The ground has already begun to rumble even before she steps into the fire. And then she does, and the earth shatters.

  The Good King

  Abha Dawesar

  The new barbers had yet to master the sequence Ravana had given them. One finished his work even as the other started shaving the last of Ravana’s faces. Ravana was irritated, he was a stickler for timing and symmetry. The idiots were out of sync and as if that weren’t bad enough the last of his faces had an itch. It was the only one he couldn’t reach without curving his contiguous heads. He should never have let his regular barbers go on their annual holiday at the same time.

  But this is Lanka, he reminded himself. Whatever the index, Lanka, his Lanka, came out tops—GDP, GNP, health, female literacy, retirement services, child welfare. The quality of life was excellent not just for him, but for every one of his subjects. That brought a smile to his face.

  “Anything else, Your Majesty?”

  Ravana looked at the eight-foot long mirror in his bathroom.

  “I have an itch on that far face just above my moustache on the left side,” he rolled his eyes in the direction of his five heads.

  “Yes, Your Majesty.”

  The barber gingerly ran his fingertips on the few centimeters of ex posed skin beside Ravana’s thick tangle of whiskers.

  “Majesties itch like other people, use some force, Barber. And your nails!”

  The barber scratched him harder.

  Ravana grunted. He knew the man’s name. He never forgot any name but when he was angry he preferred addressing people by their titles.

  “Your Majesty, there is an emergency. Your sister is here,” a sentry broke into Ravana’s chambers.

  His sisters followed on the guard’s heels. As Ravana opened a mouth to say something she bawled.

  Fine-tuned by modern science and amplified by his twenty ears, her cry seemed a lot louder to Ravana than it was. He interrupted it quickly.

  “I get it, I get it! Your rhinoplasty has gone wrong again. I told you not to get another nose job. They’re redundant these days. I can configure any form for your face and when you tire of it you can get an other. I don’t have ten brains for nothing. How do you think Lanka got to where it is? A small island that can boast of the best physicists and particle colliders, geologists, microbiologists, neuroscientists, surgeons. Name one thing in which we are not the best?”

  “He cut off my nose! This is about me! You were always so vain,” Surpanakha wailed.

  “Someone cut off your nose?”

  Surpanakha nodded.

  “Who would do such a thing? You’re my sister! Did the fellow know?”

  “Yes, he knew.”

  “Who was it? I’ll show him,” Ravana bellowed.

  “You’re smart. You figure it out,” Surpanakha gestured to the guard who produced a crude cleaving knife and laid it in front of Ravana.

  “It still has my blood,” his sister sobbed.

  “Take my sister to the Emergency room and take this thing,” Ra vana looked at the old-fashioned cleaver with disdain, “to the forensics department. Ask them to scrape the surface for particulates and see if they can get any DNA off the handle. It’s evidence now, which means you wrap it in a piece of plastic. Get going.”

  Ravana’s staff , which had been discretely lurking behind thin bam boo partitions, materialized. A man in a black suit whispered into his Bluetooth, men in lab coats came scurrying to take away the item with care.

  “What do you mean you can’t match it?”

  “Your Majesty, we can’t match this.”

  “You said that three times already and I heard with all twenty ears and ten auditory cortices.”

  “I’m sorry. We’ve compared the sequence to all the databases in the world. Eight billion humans, none a match. I’m sorry,” the Chief Geneticist hung his head. He had personally overlooked th
e integration of genetic matching platforms across the world and debugged them. The computing guys had developed a new generation of memory transistor chips to run the computations quickly. Ravana himself had come up with a brilliant algorithm that allowed the machines to sift through billions of useless data points so that they could devote their resources on those sequences that were most likely to match.

  “You’re sorry?”

  Three of Ravana’s faces were twitching which meant the other seven would soon begin to as well. The Chief Geneticist looked down at his boss’s feet. Forlorn.

  “Dammit it! Give me your theories. Why can’t we match these proteins and what can we do to match them?”

  “There’s only one possibility,” the Chief Geneticist said with a slight tremor in his voice.

  “And?” Ravana roared.

  “This man is off the grid. His DNA was never included in any database.”

  “That’s impossible.”

  The Chief Geneticist nodded his head vigorously.

  “Unless?” Ravana prodded.

  “Unless he has been continually off the grid for the last six years.”

  “Get my sister!”

  “I’m right here,” Surpanakha said. Was she really that transparent? Even when they were children her brother had refused to give her any importance. However, if matters ever came down to her status as his sister he would be out there protecting her like a piece of property before she could object.

  “Where were you when he attacked you?”

  “I’m not sure. I was playing on that new hybrid-reality machine you built but then the landscape looked so good I decided to parachute into a swathe of forest from the game for the real feel of things. He was quite beautiful though his brother was more beautiful.”

  “Wait, did you see these two fellows on the game before you went there?”

  Surpanakha nodded.

  “They were kind of the reason I went there,” she said shyly.

  “Get the game log. I can back engineer the game and work out the locations at which the GPS inputs were coming in from. Ask one of the space guys to beam us all the satellite logs so we can cross-check the satellite locations when she was using the system.”

  Ravana’s Chief of Staff opened a bamboo panel and pressed a button. Walls moved, windows opened, translucent panels slid from the ceiling to the floor. In seconds the area was converted into a large workspace with real time screens feeding information from the heavens and the earth. The oceans. The mountains. From below ground level a large executive chair came up. Ravana sat in it and pressed a button. Tiny precision devices calibrated his exact position and small but sturdy supports came out of the contraption so he could rest his chins on them. His minions put ten eyeglasses on his ten faces. Without these it was hard to keep the eyes from one head wandering to the zone of another and then his ten different brains went into overdrive.

  “I’m ready.”

  In minutes Ravana had what he needed. He pressed a button and turned the north face of the room into a large projecting screen and showed Surpanakha a re-run of what she had been watching. Two thin fellows in costume were walking around as if they were leading a boy-scout expedition.

  “That’s them.”

  Ravana consulted some information and spoke from his third face, he had a habit of indicating which of his heads had done the thinking.

  “Let’s go back there and sweep the area with some satellites. I’m going to focus three sub-orbital satellites in this area for a few minutes.”

  He pressed another button and a map lit up on the screen.

  “Check what these satellites are up to now,” he said.

  “Your Majesty, they are scanning looted ruins in Jordan to compute the extent of damage since last week.”

  “Three minutes won’t kill them. Let’s go. Everyone, watch for those two.”

  Ravana overrode the commands. Technically since the rest of the world loaned these satellites from Lanka they were not supposed to be veered off course unless there was a global emergency. The satellites recalibrated as they swept the region.

  “Wait, there’s the hut,” Surpanakha said.

  Ravana pressed another button.

  “My lord, who is she?” he whispered under his breath.

  “I thought that was one of the characters in your game, she was there on the screen last time but she wasn’t there when I got in,” his sister said.

  “I can tell the GPS data from what’s generated by the computer. She’s real. Get me that location.”

  “Yes, your Majesty,” his Chief of Staff said.

  “Brother, your new stuff is really good. One can’t tell the virtual simulations from the real inputs at all. Even when I got there sometimes I wasn’t sure if one of the items on the scene was real or not.

  “That’s the beauty of constructing virtual reality from realistic real time data!”

  “We have it,” said a scientist.

  “I need you to generate virtual images of the forest. Make them the best holograms you ever made. Sound. Smell. I want the works. No one in the forest should be able to distinguish between their environment and the artifacts we place in them from more than six inches away.”

  “Yes, your Majesty.”

  “Make some scenes with a cute cuddly little deer with small white spots. I think they are indigenous to the region. Can you check?”

  “Yes, Your Majesty, they are.”

  “Good.”

  Ravana focused. He was as deep inside as he had ever gone. Even Sita and his recent obsession for her had blown away like paper-thin peanut husks rising in a breeze.

  The fabric of space-time had more than one rip. And the rips created wormhole bridges. They were key to traveling across galaxies in short periods of time. Ravana had been sitting cross-legged for three days meditating on his great grandfather Brahma to acquire the power to cross these wormholes. Ravana had been across the galaxies before but he wanted hundreds of traversable wormholes now for near instant travel. He also wanted knowledge of all the coordinates and energy states necessary for quantum tunneling. He wanted to mix new science with old-fashioned magic so that he could seamlessly move from the internal to the external world, from Earth to outer space, from Sita’s brain to his. The only one out there who could make it possible was the Creator himself.

  The Creator had been miffed with Ravana. At first he’d looked on bemused as Ravana recruited scientists from all fields and pumped them with the herbs he had been given as a boon. But things got less funny as Lanka outdid itself with each passing week. Just like the universe, which was accelerating its expansion, Lanka’s progress followed a steep upward rise, from geometric to exponential and then rocketed ahead beyond any known curve that had been defined. Relaxing one day inside his flower, listening to Saraswati play her veena, Brahma began to suspect that Ravana was trying to oust him. He was intent on reverse engineering all of Creation. The inert matter of physics, the forces of cosmology, the evolving systems of biology, nothing was excluded from the cool analyzing gaze of Ravana or his crack team. Brahma sighed. He let it be. He went back to Saraswati.

  Now he was puzzled by Ravana’s meditation. No one had prayed to the old man with such intensity in a while. And yet Ravana’s devotion was complete, pure. Like it had always been. Three days and four hours later Ravana shook out his limbs and stretched. He had been granted yet another boon. One of his computational heads would be able to work out the necessary equations on the fly and scan the known universe for rips. Gravity’s dance, the slowing of time, the stretching and bending of it, the weak force, the brane that limited the form of the universe, in short—everything, would yield it’s secrets to Ravana. The cosmological constant, formulae accumulated from decades of precise astronomy, data honed from thousands of terrestrial spectographs, the deepest nature of every gluon, muon, quark, and boson, would sit along the information superh
ighway that transmitted signals in and out of Ravana’s many brains. If science had yet to discover it, Brahma would pass along the necessary detail as a gift.

  “But you can do all of this through pure maya. What do you want all this information for? Why get your hands dirty?”

  “I’m tired of having my way through magic. I want to earn the results. I know I’m asking here for a short cut but my goal is to stop asking for short cuts all together one day,” Ravana had replied, bowing humbly.

  “So that you don’t have to pray anymore?”

  “On the contrary. I’ll want absolutely nothing in return from you. What better proof that the prayers are real?”

  Ready and prepared, Ravana barked swift orders to his team of scientists and technicians. They showed him the four hundred reality holograms they had prepared while he was meditating, all simulacra of the original forest that a fleet of GPS scanners and high-resolution satellites had mapped to the last detail. Even if Sita kept track of the small buds opening on the flowerpots of her tiny window she would be easily fooled by a movement here or there, a small animal grazing, a husband in the distance.

  His scientists fussed so much presenting the holograms that Ravana got suspicious.

  “Does this mean you don’t have the results of the other calculations we started running on the supercomputers last week?”

  “I’m afraid, Your Majesty. We should have them soon.”

  “Just one more thing,” he lectured the elite group of astronomers and physicists on his payroll, “last time I traveled across the galaxies the process was not perfect. I want this to be smooth. Sita shouldn’t guess she is anywhere but home.”

  “Yes, Your Majesty,” they replied together.

  “We’ve tweaked the teleportation algorithms a little and solved that problem,” the Chief of Staff said.

  Ravana set off.

  On the one hand, Ravana was irritated by the delay in getting the full list from his powerful network of supercomputers that were hammering at the problem. On the other hand, he was delighted. The delay could only mean one thing. The list was long, very long. Longer than anyone could have imagined had the Mathematics been tested before. In five years he would lift the publishing restrictions and his crack team would author papers, reiterating once more that the tiny realm of Sri Lanka, pollution-free, prosperous, and peace-loving was also, still, home to the world’s most brilliant minds. That is, in addition, to his own ten. A king is only as good and happy as the lowest, dumbest, and poorest of his subjects. This he believed.