Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  It happens slowly. She sees it first when the sages of the hermitage come to visit and talk of their plans for expansion. “Help us,” they urge Rama. “The rakshasas refuse to cede the land we need. They call it their sacred ground and expect us—us!—to move!” She is amused as she listens to their shrill complaints, until Rama replies.

  The very next day, he slays four rakshasas who refuse to let the sages clear some forest land for a temple. The day after that, a few more.

  “You are jealous of my dharma,” he smiles when she questions him. “As any good wife should be.”

  “How can this be dharma?” she asks. “Is it not a violation of its principles to hurt people who have done you no harm? The rakshasas fight for what is theirs, after all. You pledge allegiance with people who are trespassers.”

  “Harsh words, my lady,” he laughs. “But these ‘trespassers’ are people of god.”

  “Whose?”

  When she looks up at him, she finds a stranger.

  “You are ready,” Ravana says. “You have hid long enough. Come, it is time.” He looks closely at her face. “But you are not free of him, are you?”

  She is appalled at how she dithers. Where is her devotion to her dharma, she wonders, when Rama has so little trouble finding his? Why, after a lifetime spent learning to be like her adversary, must she now yearn to be different? What use a saviour drowning in her own indecision?

  Then she meets an invisible woman and learns to swim.

  The woman has lurked in the forest for as long as she can remember. She hovers, little more than a wraith, at the edge of the clearing while she and Ravana spar. When they attempt to talk to her, she melts into the night.

  “Ahalya,” he explains. “A sage’s wife, cursed with invisibility after being tricked into bed by a god.”

  Gods and trickery, she notes. Yet again.

  “She has wandered in the forest a thousand years. But she isn’t alone; our people have looked after her.”

  “Invisible? I can see her.”

  “Our kind has always seen her, devi. But her people prefer being blinkered. Yet, the sages decided to be generous. They had your Rama place his foot on her as purification, and then told her she could return to serve her husband again.”

  When she obliquely remarks on this clemency, Rama is defensive. “Dharma, my dear,” he begins, and she watches the stranger emerge again. “A man’s dharma lies in upholding his honour, and punishing the one who sullies it. It is no less than his duty to turn away a woman tainted by another, however blameless she may claim to be.”

  He enjoys these talks, she can see, this man who was once her Rama.

  “This cleansing is a beautiful reminder of the importance of dharma, both a husband’s and a wife’s. What a great pity Ahalya could not remember hers.”

  She weighs his words against Ravana’s—”Perhaps she prefers invisibility. Perhaps we all will, when Rama rules the world”

  She makes her choice.

  It ends with a deer. Her old friend appears on the edge of the clearing, its pelt still that astonishing shade of gold. “Look!” Rama exclaims. He is on his feet already. “I will bring you its hide!” he laughs as he seizes his bow and bounds after the mirage.

  Goodbye, she thinks as he dissolves out of the light. Goodbye, my love.

  “Why?” She whirls around to face Lakshmana.

  “What?”

  “You are leaving us. I can see it. Why?”

  Silence shrouds the hut. High overhead, a lone hawk glides through the clouds, weaving a pattern in the sky. The forest seems to hold its breath, waiting for her to answer.

  “How long have you known?”

  “I have seen it in your face these last few days,” he says. “I see it every time you look at him. I know it, when you look away from him, at the forest.” His face crumples. “Don’t you know that it will break him?”

  “His dharma will keep him whole,” she replies, and he hears the sorrow in her voice. Hears it, runs his hands down its sinuous stem to the roots that tether it, only to turn away. He has always known, she sees. He has felt her anger, seen the cruelty for what it is, but stayed bound by his love for his brother.

  “You cannot hold it against him!” he cries. “He is Rama!”

  I must, she wants to say. I must, to fight for a world where his dharma will have no place, where his cities, his laws and his gods will crumble into the dust they are fashioned from. But when she looks into the eyes of this boy before her, she knows she must choose other words.

  “I will not be invisible, Lakshmana.”

  He does not understand, of course; he turns away in tears to go to his brother. As he leaves, she remembers something.

  “What did you dream about, Lakshmana?” she asks gently. “What did you see that made you weep so?”

  He looks out across the courtyard, at the vision that haunts him.

  “Ayodhya,” he says. “Stretching from the mountains to the sea, its streets paved with gold, its palaces reaching up to seize the skies. And my brother alone, bearing its crushing weight on his shoulders.”

  Rama is confused; the forest around him seems suddenly unfamiliar, the trees hostile. The deer has disappeared and so has the path. He scans the ground for tracks; when he looks up, he sees the wraith.

  Through the fear that grips him, he realizes he knows her face. The woman I cleansed, he thinks. The woman I saved. Does she sense his unease? Read his thoughts? For she smiles at him, and he shudders at what he finds in her eyes.

  Pity.

  A cold vice grips his heart. A pain unlike anything he has ever known tears through him. “Lakshmana!” he gasps, suddenly afraid. He calls out again, but his voice wavers, frail and unsteady to his own ears.

  Around him the trees are closing in; even the air feels thick and malevolent. He staggers back, his heartbeat loud in his ears.

  “Wait!” he calls, thinking that if he can only speak to the woman, hold her gaze an instant longer, something of this terrible hour will end. “Come back!”

  But she is already gone.

  Weak Heart

  Tabish Khair

  You do not understand. It was nothing personal.

  I knew a long time back that I would have to harden my heart. It was even before I fought and defeated him, the learned one with ten heads, the invincible one with twenty arms, the vulnerable one with a weak heart. Some might claim that I was born with a hardened heart. That is what Soorpanaka screamed as she fled, trailing blood and curses: O, you who do not have a heart, she cried!

  Now they call me God.

  No, not just a god, like Vishnu, or Brahma, or Shiva. God, with a capital G. Because, you see, gods are fickle beings; they are swayed by pride and anger, resentment and sorrow, pity and joy. Their divinity lies in the extent of their passions and emotions, so far beyond human scope, and not in any real difference of quality. When it comes to the basics, the gods are still ruled by their hearts. I knew that. And hence I knew that if I, only I, could stand above the vicissitudes of the heart, I would be God.

  To be God, you have to harden your heart.

  Sometimes I saw doubt in their eyes, even—finally—in the eyes of Lakshman. When I repudiated Sita, after fighting a terrible war to win her back from Ravana, even Lakshman faltered. And the petty gods sent me emissaries to remind me that I was God. As if my repudiation was not another proof of it: I was God, for even my love, my war for Sita had not been personal. I had to prove it to the world by repudiating her; without that, I would not have been God. One lapse of emotion, and I would have become human. Or at best just a god.

  It was something I had practised all my life. I was always the perfect son, the perfect brother, the perfect husband, the perfect exile, the perfect warrior, the perfect victor, the perfect ruler: I was God.

  No, you misunderstand me again. Perfection is not a personal at tribute. Perfection
is a public quality. No son, no brother, no husband, no ruler can be perfect in private. What one can achieve is not a ruler who is perfect, but the quality of perfection expressed in a ruler. What one achieves is always perfection, which is not a personal matter; the shapes one achieves it in are immaterial.

  That is the quality of being God.

  Without that, well, without that you have a weak heart. Ravana.

  Sometimes I miss him. No, I will be honest; I miss him more than I miss anything else. There was no other living being with whom I could have had as intense a conversation; no one else could have matched me.

  You think I had to kill him for what he did against me and mine, or for what you call his evil? You are mistaken.

  Do you recall how he fought me towards the end? He had exhausted all his weapons. He had tried everything and failed. His counsellors had whispered to him: this is not a mere mortal you are fighting against. This is not just a hero. This is not simply a god. This must be God.

  But Ravana, he had a heart. He had a vulnerable heart. For him, everything was personal. He fought on. Towards the end, he ran out of weapons. He picked up what he could, tree trunks, rocks, stones, pebbles, mud, and hurled them at me. Cursing and foaming. You see, Ravana was a man with a weak heart. His love for Sita was personal; his hatred of me was personal.

  It is this that prevented him from winning.

  I knew I would win, because he had a vulnerable heart. A heart that raged and pitied, thirsted and implored. A heart that could be pierced.

  And do you know why he had to die? No, no, do not give me all that rubbish about duty and evil; he had to die because he would never stop taking things personally. He would always love and hate like he did. It did not have to do with learning or strength; even if he had grown further in knowledge and strength—though who can imagine more of either than what he already possessed?—he would still have hated and loved from the heart.

  Sometime, in a moment and a place that we are not fully conscious of, he had decided to take things personally. Was this despite his learning or was it, I sometimes fear, because of his unparalleled learning? He refused to accept me as God. He did not see me as God, because he could not believe in a being who had abjured the personal, the perfect public being. And he kept coming at me, with his many hands and many heads and his vulnerable heart, attacking me with words and weapons, curses and stones, expecting my public exterior to crack. He was convinced that it would crack.

  And if it had, I would not have been God. That, finally, is the reason why he had to die.

  It was, as you will recall, his weak heart that killed him.

  And me, why do I miss him sometimes? Well, to be honest, have you noticed how lonely it is to be God? Did you ever see me sporting with Sita, playing with my children? Did you see me laughing with Lakshman? Did you even see me cracking a joke with Hanuman?

  Can you imagine me feeling the love and hate that raged in Ravana’s heart, that consumed him in one glorious conflagration? Can you imagine me allowing myself to feel?

  I must concede I have my moments of doubt. What is better: to have a heart that enables one to live and causes one to die, or to be God?

  Sita’s Descent

  Indrapramit Das

  Sita fills the sky, a woman clothed with the Sun. I watch as she descends through the atmosphere, bringing the light of day to the night sky to prove to the world her ordeal by fire.

  Agni-pariksha.

  I imagine her above the sea of fire, poised to dive. What did she feel, if anything? Did she taste and smell the swirling corona of our star burning around her? I had seen the readouts on all my feeds, the transmissions from her. Just eight minutes of latency from their point of origin in her consolidated nanite body, unmoved as the heat of the solar wind sluiced through it. Ambient temperature: fifteen million kelvins. I saw what her ‘eyes’ saw; each nanite cell absorbing what lay below her—the photosphere of the Sun, visible on my screens as a swirling, iridescent tapestry of thermal gradations.

  She can’t even feel it, I told myself. She is the only existent self-aware entity we know of that can survive the temperature of the Sun’s corona. And we created her.

  Why are we making her do this? I asked myself.

  Sita, as most of you will already know, is an artificial nebula; an intelligent nanite cloud that can gather cosmic dust, gases, and dark matter in her net as she travels through interstellar space, consolidating these resources into herself to form an ever-growing, shapeshifting entity.

  She is one of three such constructs developed in collaboration by the Government of India’s space research and nano-technology arms. The other two constructs were named Rama and Ravana. They have already played their parts in this cosmic drama, based on none other than that most ancient of stories, the Ramayana. This is why the world looks to Sita now as she falls; she is to conclude this enactment of legend. We have already observed her ‘abduction’ by Ravana to the outer solar system, and the epic battle between Rama and Ravana that ended with her ‘rescue’, dozens of space telescopes capturing the two nebular gods clashing between the planets of our solar system.

  Then, once again through the fire for Sita, to prove herself. Even as I asked myself why, she dove into the surface of the Sun for us, and survived.

  Wearing filter goggles on the observation bay, I can see her through the glare. Sita has assimilated herself into the shape of a woman as she falls towards us, like when she performed her role in space. She is naked but for the fire that sheathes her like a robe. It is like looking at a negative image of a goddess. Her flesh is flaming cosmic raw material, the heat and plasma of the Sun itself trapped in its structure as she returned at lightspeed from the sun to the Earth.

  Around me, people are panicking. I take off my goggles for a second, and looking at Sita is almost like looking at the Sun itself. She is a meteor, a comet, a falling star. I wince, and put on the goggles again.

  When I was first told about it, I had seen the appeal of the idea-to see myth become real in the night sky, asso many ancient civilizations had convinced themselves they had. When I saw the first satellite and telescopic photos of these translucent, ethereal beings, woven out of space-dust and nanites, their transient human shapes powered by dark matter and solar energy, engaging in an elaborate dance to re-tell a story that was first told millennia ago; I couldn’t help but be moved.

  But before that, I had fought the idea of this space performance right until my voice was drowned out by those of my team, and the upper echelons of the government, who approved thoroughly. The climax of this divine play held by India for the world-the vision of a goddess in the sky, bringing the flame of the Sun to Earth; this was something that couldn’t be turned down. Thematically, it was perfect, they said. Sita was an Indian emissary, leaping from the pages of one of our greatest epics, proving our nation’s purity and strength by taking on the duty of agni-pariksha. This enactment would, everyone assured me, seal India’s growing reputation as a global superpower. After all, we had divine beings at our command, who would dance for us in space, and dive into stars if we told them to.

  And unquestioningly, she did. Despite the risks, despite our lack of certainty of her survival. There was always Rama and Ravana to maintain the Indian presence in interstellar space. Sita went through the ordeal of fire, and proved she was stronger than we ever expected.

  The realization that something had happened to her in the maelstrom of the Sun came slowly.

  Sita was supposed to stop her descent in the upper atmosphere, so that the people of India and some of the rest of the southern hemisphere saw her as a bright, blazing star in the night sky, brighter than any natural celestial body visible after sunset. Satellites, air-borne and ground-based cameras, both video and still, were to have given the rest of the world an equally clear view of Sita’s glorious re-entry.

  Here at home base, we tracked her return, and nodded our heads in ap
proval when she dropped out of lightspeed after crossing the Moon’s orbit. As planned, she rapidly decelerated as she approached Earth and entered the atmosphere. We took turns to go to the observation deck, where we saw her twinkling in the night sky, growing quickly brighter, our hearts lightened by the astonishing beauty of our creation, by the return of our goddess.

  On her stopping mark, the lower extent of the thermosphere, about 120 km above the Earth, she continued to fall. There were anxious murmurs around the control room, but no panic. We thought it was an error. We tried manual recalibrations, relay commands, overrides.

  She gave no response at all.

  Sita continues to burn a line through the sky, leaving a noctilucent trail of aurora behind her as she bleeds trapped solar plasma from her body. She has dispersed the sheath of dark matter that protects and propels her form in space, allowing the escaping contents of her body to paint the sky as she falls. Maintaining a low but steady speed of 200 km/h, she hasn’t wavered from her established downward trajectory, which terminates, according to our system feedback, exactly on the co ordinates of our base. Not that it matters, exactly-if she crashes into the Earth anywhere near us, she can level the entire city of Bangalore and us with it, depending on whether she allows herself and the gases she has trapped to detonate on impact.

  She is unimaginably vast now, as magnificent as we could have possibly dreamed. The shape of woman, emblazoned across the sky. This is the first time we have seen her with our own eyes, and not those of telescopes or satellites.

  “Speak to me, Sita. Why are you doing this?” I ask softly, into my mouthpiece. The headset is remotely connected to the communications array, and my voice is a recognized data flow.

  There is no communications latency now. The distance between me and her, her and the Earth, reduces every passing second.