Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  “We’ll talk about that later,” she said. “We are considering alternatives to keep the Navabharata agents at bay. I will call you back by evening.” Seniormost broke contact.

  I was very restless after talking to her. Why weren’t they finding a replacement and recalling me? Then it struck me maybe recall was not possible. Maybe that was why we never met agents, because sending an agent was a one-way trip, and this was a secret. Seniormost had been evasive about replacements when I had asked. We may not have the tech for it. Or maybe it was impossible to travel to the future, which is what my present was when I was in the past.

  Maybe I was stuck in this primitive world, homeless, and being tracked by the Men’s agent.

  I fought my panic and went through every sentence Seniormost had uttered, looking for information I might have missed earlier.

  Like that part when Seniormost had looked sad and said, No, we will not die if the mission fails. Almost as if proposing a corollary: the mission’s success meant their death.

  The thought stunned me.

  In the rush of the past few days, I’d not thought about anything other than survival and fitting a role. Not pondered about the concept of how changing the past affected the future, for example. Which future did it change? Were these alternate realities, parallel worlds, or just one world? If these were alternate worlds, why bother to change a different world? And if this was one world, and if the past changed, agents could alter history so that India continued as a jumble of cultures and conflicts and did not splinter into Ambapur and the rightwing- Hindu Navabharata, and other nondescript smaller countries. Where would that leave my Ambapur and all of us who peopled it? Were Ambapur agents knowingly working on missions they would not return from, missions designed to kill our own country, like suicide bombers and jehadis a few centuries ago? No wonder I failed the psych profile; I lacked such suicidal conviction.

  The moon was but a pale sphere barely visible in the dawn sky, and I remember seeking it out and staring at it, realizing how very far Mother was. I looked at the wart, my link to my world, and also my betrayer. Madhulika was possibly not the enemy I had assumed her to be. Maybe no one was an enemy.

  I was tempted to plunge into action that would make me safe. Attack the washerman, kill him. But Navabharata could send more agents and coordinators; it was a large country with plenty of resources. I would be safer if they thought me dead.

  After peeping into the cave to make sure Madhulika was still sleeping, I walked to a rock overhanging the river. I removed my necklace with its miniature toolkit, and snapped it open to expose a tiny cutting blade. I prayed for strength, knowing that I was about to close the doors to my past, my people, my support. Then I began working out the wart from my forearm. Lucky for me that they’d not performed the binder operation.

  Our journey upriver exhausted Madhulika and induced premature la bor. I used every bit of knowledge my implant held to try and save her. I may have succeeded in a normal pregnancy, but she was carrying twins. As she tried to smile at the feeble cries of her newborn daughters, I stroked her hand.

  “You will improve,” I consoled her. “You have to bring up your daughters.”

  Our interactions on our long walk upriver had been gentle and companionable. We had splashed our faces using water from the stream. Sometimes, I would notice a strawberry shrub and plucked the fruit, and Madhulika gathered it in a fold of her uttariya. Or she would spot a gourd growing on a creeper, and I would split it open with a sharp stone so that we could share the sweet, juicy pulp. We had not discussed our contrasting credos-I assumed we would have enough time later.

  Now she was dying.

  “You bring up my daughters, sister Vaidehi,” she whispered.

  “I don’t know your way of thinking,” I said. “My world was different.”

  “Do whatever seems right, sister.” Her life ebbed out.

  In the initial days, I was often tired as I adjusted to the sudden role of nurturing the girls. A secluded cave formed our base. Using implant triggers, I induced my breasts to produce milk. Luckily, the forests abounded with fruit trees and berry shrubs. Chores filled my days-collecting water, finding fruits, cleaning the girls, feeding them. Yet as life acquired a rhythm, I found time to soak the forest’s poetry, its flowers and animals and the sunlight-dappled wings of butterflies. Fire kept away beasts at night; I sometimes stayed up late, enjoying the texture of the night with the owls screeching, the soft descent of dew, the scent of the parijata that bloomed all night and carpeted the grass at dawn.

  Sometimes, I looked at the moon and thought of Ambapur.

  Years passed.

  I often missed Madhulika. She held a key to a view that would have complimented and enriched mine, and now I had no way of learning it. I wondered which value to bring up her daughters to-mine, or what I knew of hers, or the values typically inculcated in women in this era.

  I finally chose a mishmash, something not warped by politics and power games. My memories and imagined extensions emerged as lullabies sung to the girls. Over time, the isolated episodes formed a rich tapestry, till one day I realized I could well be a bard singing a Sitayana, not an Ambapur version, nor, indeed, a Navabharata version, but one where Sita was a fun-loving person, even naughty at times, and where she shared a playful and rich relationship with her husband.

  The girls thought I was their mother; it was simpler that way. When they were old enough to travel, I led them by hand from village to village. I talked to village women about life and its problems, and enacted fragments of what could have been Sita’s story.

  In one village my daughters, now twelve, chattered about twin boys they had met. “Their mother tells stories like yours.”

  I felt a flutter inside me. “What are their names?”

  “Luv,” said one girl.

  “Kush,” said the other.

  I could not speak for a few moments. That Sita really existed, that she had twin sons… Emotion clogged me, thick, heavy, and I tried to force myself into thinking rationally. Sita was not a single historical truth, I told myself, though I had no way of confirming this theory of the construction of mythology. This woman storyteller could well be an agent of Ambapur or Navabharata.

  Should I meet her? No, I thought, let me move away and continue my Sitayana. The world allowed hundreds of versions.

  I busied myself all day, but that night, with no distraction possible, I found myself recalling Seniormost’s sad look during our last conversation. What had she thought when she lost contact with me? Did she think me dead? Or had she hoped I survived and assumed that, untrained though I was, I’d do what I could?

  My gaze shifted to the moon. What remains fixed across time and space? What survives, what matters? Nothing, really. Yet one does what one should.

  Forgive me if I succeed, Seniormost, I whispered. Forgive me if I fail.

  Another new village, another day. We walk to the well, my girls and I, and women balancing water pitchers on their hips ask us, “Where are you from? Who are you?”

  “I tell stories,” I say. “Would you trade lentil soup for entertainment?”

  They nod.

  By evening, women and children gather around the village center, where I wait for them with my daughters; some youths stand warily at a distance.

  This is my life now, offering women stories that intrigue and stretch their world vision, yet fit within it. Listeners may wonder: did the story resonate because of its courage, hope, conflicts overcome? Should the mother-in-law have been meaner, the husband more righteous, the wife more chaste? Should the women in the story have laughed more, taken things more lightly? Could a woman rebel as the story claimed? Should she? Why not? Why?

  “Once,” my story usually starts, “in a land not far from here, a king found an infant in a furrow, and he named her Sita.”

  At this point, I pause to look at my audience.

  I somet
imes consider myself a vendor of silk to tapestry weavers. Listeners choose threads they wish to weave into their own stories. They may chant them to insomniac children, use them to inspire or scold. Fragments of my tales will meander down generations. Of the tales sung by multitude of bards, which would live on to form the world?

  My true story remains unsaid. I cannot speak of Ambapur or Navab-harata, nor mention Seniormost, who may never exist in the new reality. I cannot tell my daughters about their real mother. Those would be anachronisms, threatening the fragile fabric that worlds rest on. Yet memories are slippery, and stories strung with their fragments more so, and I dread that, when I am old, I will jumble up the past and the future with the present, sounding demented when I am being most truthful.

  Then a voice usually pipes up, pulling me back to the reality I am creating.

  “We have heard some versions of the Sita story before,” it says. “Tell us yours.”

  And so I tell the story I think will fit.

  Machanu Visits the Underworld

  Victoria Truslow

  In the Royal Cinema

  Hanuman is born at 7:45 every Friday night in a converted cinema in north Bangkok. It happens without fail, even now, when the audience at the khon-dance is smaller than it’s ever been: three university students, an elderly couple, a single tourist. Even now, oblivious to the riots in the downtown streets, cursed Sawaha stands as she always has, on her desolate mountaintop, stage left , only air to fill her wide parched mouth. She stands as commanded, balanced on one leg, until the god of the wind comes to her.

  He blows Lord Isuan’s cosmic weapons into her mouth (sings the re citer, standing red-uniformed in the wings, and L.E.D. subtitles translate for the lone tourist’s benefit) and inside her body she forges them into a child: sword for backbone, jewelled trident for torso, diamond discus for a head. He springs from her mouth (the reciter tells us; on the stage, he springs from behind the painted mountaintop). He hangs in the air, starlight the pigment of his mask and costume, and curse-freed Sawaha calls him to her side, tells him of his destiny.

  The audience feel the chill of the wide dark theatre, hear whispers like a ringing on their ear-rims. The front row is filled with hanumans, shades of Friday last and the Friday before, and before, and before. Their approval dances diamond motes through the stage-air: this new Hanuman will do. His face is spot-on, if his somersaults leave a little to be desired.

  “You were finer, of course,” one shade says to another. They would not be here but for all these empty seats, would have diffused gently back into the story-stuff except that the story wants watchers. They don’t make as potent an audience as a full room of living people would, can’t offer their breath and blood-beats and dreams, but they see the cosmic shadows inside the song and dance. They see the old heat when Hanuman torches Longka, see the starlight in his fur-true starlight, just like theirs.

  They jostle and whistle as Hanuman-on-the-stage pursues Supanna Macha, Totsakan’s lovely mermaid daughter. In the aisle, the shade of a monkey with a fish-tail taps his mother on the arm. “Is that you, ma? Why’s he chasing you?” They sit in the aisle because their great bulky fishtails won’t fold comfortably in the seats.

  “Yes,” she says, putting an arm as pale as dried-out salt around him. “And that’s Hanuman, your father. He’s chasing me because I got the better of him. Your father, ah, he can breathe the moon and stars, and pull a jewelled trident from his own flesh, but he’s never been thwarted by a tribe of fish before. He thinks he’s angry but really the whole idea has enchanted him. But look now.”

  The whole Ramakian would run too long for even these bold watchers. So Hanuman’s set pieces are strung together into a two-hour show, the programme notes explaining the jumps in his tale. Right now, the demon Maiyarap is creeping away from Ram’s camp, with Ram himself potioned asleep, light as hollow plastic, under his arm, to lock up in the underworld forever, or perhaps put into a soup-a heady soup that would be. He comes to a lotus pond guarded by a fish-tailed monkey. Machanu lets him cross to where the greatest lotus-blossom yawns; Mai yarap jumps up, and drops his captive into the hollow stem. Then he follows, vanishes down the lotus-chute into the underworld, Ram tumbling oblivious before him.

  He may be a dance-wrought shadow of an immortal story-creature, but the young fish-tailed monkey in the aisle is easily distracted, knows there’s more to him than this scene, but has forgotten the rest, too snared by the moment, must constantly ask Supanna Macha what’s happening. They, of course, don’t have a programme. “Is that me?” he gasps when Hanuman-on- the-stage comes to the pool, and wrestles exquisitely with the Machanu who guards it. The embroidered tail the dancer wears is so fine! “Why am I fighting my father?”

  Supanna Macha sometimes falls into thinking she really is an ocean-queen, not just the skin of one, shed by a dancer, snakelike. She remembers things she never danced, as from a dream.

  “It’s complicated,” she says.

  “Why?”

  “Well, I had to leave you on the shore, in case your grandfather ate you for being an enemy’s son. So Maiyarap-he works for Totsakan-adopted you, and see, you’re guarding the entrance to the underworld for him. Now Hanuman wants to get down there to rescue Ram, and you two don’t recognise each other, so you fight.”

  “But we look exactly the same! Except for my tail. What, did he forget he married a mermaid?”

  “Yes,” she sighs. “And look at you, you’ve forgotten everything too. It’s true, children have such terrible attention spans these days.”

  Hanuman reveals his identity, but Machanu-on-the-stage challenges that too: My father can breathe out the moon and the stars, he says. He is a great immortal god, you’re just a common soldier monkey! And Hanuman raises his head, and makes a funnel with his hands, and breathes stars, planets, and the moon itself in a mirrorball rush to whirl in the dye-blue sky over their heads.

  “Now we’re together again,” says Machanu-watching, with a wide monkey-grin. “We can be a family-you’ll come join us, right?”

  “That’s not how it goes,” she says. “You’ll have other journeys-just not in this show.”

  “Tell me!” he says.

  “Another time, watch this now!” But he pulls at her arm, again and again. “Well,” she says, reminding herself to be patient. If her son dreams of ancient adventures, it’s clear he doesn’t remember. ‘Your father steals Ram back from your foster-father. And you help in the war. Ram makes you vice-king of the underworld, with a great many monkey subjects.”

  “I’ll come visit you, and the sea,” he says. He can tell from the way Machanu-on-the-stage moves that water is his element.

  “You won’t need the sea. In the end, Ram cuts your fishtail off . You can live easier among the monkeys that way, you see.”

  He claps hands to his hip-fins with a cry. “But then I’ll have no tail at all!”

  “Don’t be churlish!” she scolds him. “Your tail for a kingdom? If you don’t want it you shouldn’t join in the wars of monkeys and men.”

  “I never chose to!” he whines. How unfair it seems-even Supanna Macha, stuck in story-tar along with him, can’t know how unfair it is. She’s not stuck with a mother, no one tells her what to do. And she thinks she knows all the answers, but how does she?

  “Who chooses anything?” she says. “You do it, it’s yours, so the consequences are yours, and you should be glad for them. What else would you do?”

  Machanu puts his hand to his mouth, the way he’s seen his father do on stage, to show mischievous laughter. “I think I’ll have a word with Ram,” he says.

  Hanuman-on-the-stage gets up to sneak into the underworld as Machanu sleeps. And this little Machanu, down here in the audience, screws him self up tiny as a fly, and leaps to sit in the whorl of beads on the shoulder of Hanuman’s costume.

  Hanuman looks into the stem of the lotus and sees it is a deep well into a dark red
land. He can hear the demons down there. With the spotlight-bright galaxy of his breath still spinning lazily above, he puts a mischievous hand to his mouth and jumps.

  On his shoulder, in a whorl of diamond fur, Machanu holds on, young fish-tailed monkey tiny as a fly.

  In the Underworld

  The underworld’s sky is red wet soil, just as the world’s sky is the wet blue soil of the lowest heaven. There are demon-cities in the distance, and before them stretches a plain sparse with black bone-palms, and between the plain and the lotus-chute are cave-bloated hills, and in the heart of the hill at the heart of the hills is Maiyarap’s workshop.

  Look what’s inside: Ram steeped in sweet grey sleep, lionhearts on his breath. Only lions would make a strong enough poison for him. He stands pretty as a shop-front mannequin, absent, scooped out from himself, admired by twilight-skinned Maiyarap who, stirring, stirring, pulls a long sinuous fish from his pot, cuts and peels, unwinds secrets from veins and cells. Secrets to tangle wars, stitch up cities, choke kings. At the back (or front, depending on which world you’re coming from) of the workshop, a door. Through the door, the entrance-chamber to the underworld. Here Jantraprapa sits in an alcove in the high wall, and her hair runs tear-tangled to the ground, and her deep red-earth voice laments the demon race. Her daughter Pirakuan stirs the broth in her great cooking-pot. Hanuman lands silently, makes himself tiny, and creeps under the workshop-door.

  So it always is, always was, in this moment, but now Machanu leapt from Hanuman’s shoulder and crouched as Hanuman crept. He crouched and watched his father slip deeper into the underworld, then slowly grew back to his right size. He looked about, he saw the demon-women, mothers of his false family. Now he’d met his true father, who looked so much like him but had no fish-blood and could breathe stars. What should he care for these women?