Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  The men began to jibber excitedly, waving their arms about. The light from their torches sent fantastic shadows scudding across the ceilings and floors of the vast showroom. Mandodari could not follow a word of what they said. Kicking aside a couple of clothes racks that toppled over with a satisfying crash, she strode towards the guards. She had been fully prepared to reward them for their services. Instead of behaving with decorum however, or showing the least respect, the two idiots began shrieking and running away, like baboons startled by a lion.

  Recognizing then that there was no point wasting time, she reached out, grabbed a man in either hand and dashed their heads together. The instant silence was wonderful. Then she sucked out their still-warm blood, dismembered them with clinical precision and ate them slowly and methodically. She started with the limbs, moving onto the squishy but delicious internal organs, ending with the tongue, the eyes and the brains.

  Being manifested in a physical body was hard, hungry work.

  Basra Dott, the famous television anchor was single. Whenever some one pestered her about her marital status she grinned and said, “Every night I go to bed with eighty million people!” And counting. Her current ratings were so high that she was seriously considering hiring a second security detail for herself. She knew some celebrities who had two lines of defence, one uniformed and visible, the other dressed to merge with the crowd while continuing to perform their duties.

  Nevertheless, she did not actually live alone. There was a middle-aged couple who looked after her daily needs. Lal cooked and did the grocery shopping while Renu, his wife, did the laundry and the floor swabbing. There was a separate person, a scrawny young girl connected in some way to the local presswallah, who came in once a day to do the dusting, the toilet-cleaning and the garbage clearance. Another two men, both young and interchangeable in terms of height, size and general deportment shared the task of being her drivers. On account of the unpredictable nature of her work-hours, she could never do with less than continuous chauffeuring. Indeed, these two formed part of her security shield, having been supplied by the same agency that provided her with a permanent on-site sentry outside her front gate and with body guards when she was out in the field.

  She owned a two-storey private home, in a quiet residential colony with tall, nodding asoka trees along its boundary wall. Ms Dott often had house-guests, many of them members of her extended family, some of them staying for several months. However, it so happened that she had just seen off her younger brother and his wife the day before. In the lull before the next visitors a week from today, she enjoyed the luxury of sitting up in bed drinking her first cup of coffee undisturbed. It was brought to her by Renu, who also brought in the stack of newspapers that was delivered to the door.

  Right beside her she kept her DingleByte, a hand-held device that permitted her to watch TV while surfing the net while playing Mahjongg Solitaire, while answering e-mail and sending SMS. But like so many other public personalities, Ms Dott greatly cherished the few hours of her time when she was truly alone. So the device was switched to silent at night and however much it hummed and flashed and cavorted there on her bed-side table, she ignored it and would continue ignoring it until after she’d had her morning shower and was ready to face the world.

  So it was during this glorious lull, while she was still becalmed and listening to jazz on her room stereo, the coffee cup still warm in her hands and the air-conditioner humming sweetly, that with no warning, her DingleByte blared with unwanted sound. First there was an ear-shattering screech, such as might be made by a transcontinental airliner revving its engines prior to take-off, then a stranger’s face appeared on the device’s display.

  A woman.

  Her voice scythed through the air as she said, in a peculiar mixture of languages old and new, none of them English, “Good morning! Welcome! I am needful of an audience. I shall come now, yes?”

  It was not really a question.

  Basra was so shocked she had no time to spare on being angry. “Wha—?” she stammered, before instantly recovering her famous poise. “Wait! Who are you?” There was no point asking her how she’d got the number. It was obvious that this person, whoever she was, had access to some extremely sophisticated software-overriding capability. That made her instantly a force to reckon with.

  By way of an answer, the air above the arm-chair in Basra’s room began to shimmer as if with heat-haze. It would take fifteen minutes for the whole body of her unexpected guest to fully materialize but since she had helpfully arranged for her own head to appear first, she was able to talk within the first minute or so.

  “I am Mandodari,” said the apparition, speaking slowly and sounding each syllable with care. “You is hear of me many times. I will give interview on your TV show. It is time to tell my side of the story. So you must interview me. In exchange for this I am filled your empty womb with half-dozen sons.”

  She paused now, as her mid-section made the transition to physicality. “Also, though I am not yet hungry, soon I will be. Keep many live goats ready. Horn-less and hoof-less is best but I is no fussy. Some plus-size dresses also. Your room is too cold. What is wrong with it?”

  Basra had always been nimble-witted, able to sort through her options within seconds between what she had to accept about reality and what she could push into place to suit her needs. Even before Mandodari -”Call me Mandy!”—had fully downloaded her mortal frame, Basra had (a) recognized that her guest really was a supernatural entity, (b) had the potential to provide viewer-cocaine for at least a couple of weeks and (c) would undoubtedly be a monumental pain in the rectum for the duration. In the short term, the house was big enough to provide space for the goats. Lal and Renu’s silence could be bought at the rate of one gold bangle per day. The maid would be a problem and would have to be sent away. The drivers were naturally laconic and wouldn’t talk about anything they encountered in the course of their work.

  In the long term? Well. She’d have to wait and see.

  An hour later Basra and her guest were sitting in the patio.

  “All right,” said the professional TV anchor. “Let’s get started on why you’re here, what it means for our viewers and what it means for our country.”

  Mandy said, “What is means for world. Silly.”

  The divine was facing out towards the hedge that screened the care fully tended lawn from external views. The seasoned journalist, veteran of four general elections, a woman in her early forties who had been called everything from “hard-boiled idealist” to “crypto-fascist” faced towards the glass-fronted sliding doors behind her guest. She could see her own reflection: short hair, tawny eyes and the type of smooth, wrinkle-free skin that signalled good health and an even temper. She was attractive in a friendly, street-wise way and her viewers trusted her because she looked like one of them. From where she sat, she could enjoy the play of sunlight falling through the slats of the wooden trellis overhead and a back-view of the crimson silk kimono she had given the demoness to wear.

  Though at first glance Mandy could pass for human, at second glance it was impossible not to want to recoil away from her. It wasn’t just that her dimensions were several centimetres larger than life-size. It was also the peculiar hue of the skin: pearly white—not blue, not brown, not even green—but nacreous, echoing the sea, not the land. The hair was black but with fiery streaks that sizzled on and off unexpectedly.

  The eyes weren’t merely dark, but impenetrably so, with no discernible pupils. The mouth was lush and warm and curved upwards. But when she smiled—which was often—her teeth were all identical, very white and a tad larger than was comfortable. Behind them flickered a long black tongue.

  So she was beautiful, yes. In a repellent way.

  She was talking animatedly, holding the gorgeous silk kimono around her full, extravagant body. “Until two months before,” she said, referring to mortal time, “I am invisible to mortal world. I am
waking up and sleeping and waking and sleeping, but there is nothing for me to do. Nothing for me to be.” She tried to explain what it was like to live outside the four dimensions of the mortal sphere. “We is not die. So there is not wear, not tear. Not today, not tomorrow.”

  Then suddenly, the change began. Variations appeared in the routine pleasures and events around the Iron Palace. “My peacock is dancing for me, for instance: he is not do it since the time of my marriage. Which is many mortal centuries past. It is wonderful that I am see him. Maybe you is too simple to understand? You must not try.” Mandy’s speech was fluent but contained anomalies of grammar and syntax. Basra could not tell whether her own grasp of Sanskrit was too weak to make sense of her guest’s speech or whether the divine’s knowledge of mortal language was too outdated.

  The thing Mandy most wanted to talk about was the reason she had appeared in the physical dimension. “You is not know it, I am sure?” she asked Basra, who shook her head politely, knowing it was expected of her. “I am looking, looking, looking for long times, before I did work it out. It is the high court in your country. There is some case about land. About property. A temple.”

  While trying to tease out meanings from the mass of information available in the physical world she had accessed the internet. The one really significant technological breakthrough that had occurred since the early days, she said, was the proliferation of electronic media. “I am not idea how it is works,” she confessed, “but it is works. My husband is have fast connection. So I am return home to palace, I am go online and I am Google my name. And by clicking, clicking, clicking, I am begin to understand what is change, what is happen in some very near months that is make different for every of us. Not just Them—” she meant the royal couple whose names were synonymous with the epic to which she was so intimately connected “—but even me also, even my husband also and all mortals also.” She stopped. “What is problem? You is frown.”

  “Oh!” said Basra as if caught by surprise, though this was one of her standard ploys for adding variety to an interview, the carefully positioned frown. “I was just wondering, you know— you’ve mentioned your husband several times already—and the fact is, I mean, I hope you’ll excuse me if what I ask seems impertinent or…or…you know, rude—”

  “You is mean his so-called death?” cut in Mandy. She held both her hands up with her fingers curled over, making the sign for air-quotes. Apparently she had spent more than enough of her spare time watching mortal television. “Pooh! I am just told to you: we is not die. It is like you mortals enjoy playing battles—you is call them sports?—you know, like kicking head made of cow-leather from one side of battlefield to the other, for example—”

  According to her, engagements between divines took a form similar to football, but with less good will. “My husband is never agree to lose. He is always great warrior, he is always great genius. There is not ever doubt he will win.” The features of the beautiful face knotted together in a fierce sneer. “So of course he is not die.”

  “What are you saying?” said Basra, leaning forward with her eyes all agog. She was so practised at feigning emotions in order to get her subjects to talk that she could do it now without even noticing that she was putting it on. It was a shame that all this amazing raw footage was being lost in a private conversation. She was recording it, discreetly of course, on her DingleByte, so that she’d have evidence to take to her CEO. But an audio transcript would have no news value. Besides which, she was starting to worry that Mandy’s version of events was too far removed from the popular one. “Are you telling me that the battle—the one that’s been the high point of every version of the epic since it was first written up—that battle was rigged?”

  “I am say it is not happen at all. You tell me: how else it can be for my immortal warrior to lose? And that too, when his enemy is a so-small hero king, so short, so thin and having only one head? Huh! It is a lie, a sham, a nonsense. That is why I am here. Your courts is talking all the time about truth? Well! There is many sides to truth. Your courts is want see hero king’s birthplace? Is want to put mortal flag on mortal plot of land? Well! One plot is lead to other plot. So I am come. To tell my story. To change the plot. At last.”

  “But why now?” asked Basra. “Why you? Why here?”

  “Because,” said Mandy with a smirk, “this is age of womanses free dom. This is age when hidden womans is coming out from cupboard of past. When mistress is become master. When wrong is become right.” She narrowed her eyes. “I am have big wrong is done on me. Whole world is laugh on me. But who is take my side? When is anyone hear my pain? No-one. Never. Until now. World is change. And talk-shows is there. Truthshows is there. Everyone is listening all the time to everything. Even to me.”

  Basra’s mind was ticking, ticking, ticking as she listened to the divine ramble on.

  Eventually, she claimed she needed a break from the information over load. She showed Mandy the room in which the goats were tethered and a few rudiments of using the facilities of a modern home. Then she left for work.

  A hurried conference was called in the inner sanctum of ENDOTV. Basra’s CEO was a grizzled power-house of a man called Ved Mentor, who had been in the news business for over forty years. He and the only other senior news anchor Ornob Gosh listened in silence to what Basra told them. Their expressions morphed from mild amusement, to disbelief and finally disquiet. By the time they were willing to listen to the recorded conversation, a silence had fallen over the room.

  Mentor was standing with his back to the other two, his hands on his hips, facing towards the picture window that showed him the urban sprawl of South Delhi. The jumble of roof-tops, satellite dishes and trees welled out as far as the eye could see. Several minutes ticked by. He said nothing. Then: “How long can you stall her?”

  “A couple of days,” said Basra. “A week at most. I don’t really know.”

  Ornob, who was Basra’s contemporary in age as well as ambition and fervour, said, “It’s interesting how she locates the source of the ‘change’, as she calls it, to the birthplace issue.” He glanced up at the other two. “I mean, for us here in the so-called ‘mortal dimension’, it’s been about land and settlements, communal riots and cynical politicians. Meanwhile?” he shook his head and raised his hands towards the ceiling. “Up there in the mythos? An entire pantheon stirs to life!” He ghosted a chuckle. “I don’t know about the two of you but I’ve…never had faith. In anything. Not gods, not devils, not four-leaved clovers. Along comes a court judgement and that’s it! The entire game changes! Suddenly, we’re battling the demon hordes with our little match-stick ideals.”

  Mentor raised his shoulders high and spread his palms wide. He was a tall man, clean-shaven, with a square jaw and a quirk of hair that fell over his forehead. “Ornob—I disagree: you did believe in something. You believed in the courts and the rule of law. What we have here is the result of the courts ruling on something that had always remained outside their purview: the smoke and mirrors of the realm of faith. For those who are true believers, every character in a mythology is as real and as physical as this desk, this carpet, this chair. They have no need of land records or certificates to know where their hero was born or the exact spot upon which he died. In fact, NOT having a precise spot makes it possible to locate him everywhere: on earth as well as within their own hearts.

  “But once the courts mark one particular spot purporting to be a real birthplace, with a real X on a real map of a real city, ah! That changes everything. The stuff of pure faith is dragged down into the muck of who-said-this and I-said-that.” He raised his hands then plunged them down. “What was once mystical and sublime tumbles into the lies and muck of human affairs. And we are left to argue about how many demons can dance on the head of a journalist.”

  He hauled upon the belt of his pants, a familiar mannerism of his. “Basra, for better or worse, that journalist is you. We’ll air the broad cast,
but I suggest you take a week to prepare for it. There’s a Supreme Court decision coming up that could overturn the high court’s ruling. The fate of the Universe may depend on what you can get your demon lady to say.”

  “At my marriage,” said Mandodari, looking straight into the cameras as she spoke, “the path to the wedding platform is lit with one hundred living candles. It is a glory sight: one hundred slaves, chained inside iron cages, and set on fire. They is so happy to die for us. This is how they celebrate. This is how they show we are strong.

  “Centuries is pass since that time. Nobody is look in my direction. But here I am now.” The full red lips curved up in a feral smile. “My time is come,” she said, with no attempt at false humility, as she turned both her hands towards her full body. Though tightly encased within an outfit in green and orange cheetah-spot velour with fluorescent blue or gandie flounces at the elbows and knees, there were no unsightly bulges. “I am tell the true story of the war against my people.”

  Basra Dott drew in a breath, reminding herself to pace her questions carefully. “So…Mandy,” said the famous television anchor, “ever since you made your presence known to me— for which I must tell you, I am extremely flattered—the one question that’s been at the top of my mind is, Why now? You’ve had literally centuries in which to make yourself known to the world of…of…”

  “Mortals,” said the divine, nodding her head as if encouraging a child.