Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  In the Kingdom of the Naak

  Sida sits on a gnarled stump of rock, on an island in a great river, ghostlike in the light cast by the looming phosphorescent fort. The Naak-King, in man-form, sits and talks with her, offers her a plate of pale underground fruits. Then one by one the guests arrive, some by water, some by soil, some by air. The naak welcome them all, with hissing voices.

  Pirakuan comes singing on a raft built up into a hut, shelves lined with spell-bottles and jars of heart-broth. Her song is a new one. Malinu springs from the shallows in a budding of tiny golden lotuses, blooming up into a flower-monkey maiden. A whole crowd of demon women, some bringing their husbands along, come riding in on the tiers of a jewelled umbrella, buffeted on underground thermals. And up the river, look, here they come now—a mermaid and a fish-tailed monkey in a coral howdah bound on the back of a spouting tooth-clashing wild-eyed whalefish, led by a procession of eel-men blowing conches, tiger-fish leaping and flashing.

  The naak hiss their welcome, ask what it is they bring.

  “Oh,” calls Supanna Macha, beating her shining tail, ‘have we got a story for you.”

  But they arrived last, and must listen to the others first. They sit, Supanna Macha happily on her own curled tail, Machanu uncomfortable on his haunches. His tail has deteriorated further, all its threads tied off in clumpy knots to stop the whole thing disintegrating. He wishes it would hurt, because surely a real tail would. But he tries to ignore the sad and frayed thing at his back. He wants to talk to this legendary storyteller, explain himself, ask her to help him, but his mother hushes him.

  “Listen now.”

  Pirakuan sings of long ago, when she danced with her first lover on the red demon plains, and then Malinu opens a hole in her chest (Machanu tenses, but she smiles at him) and shows them the world at the bottom of her heart where a young rice-farmer who is Malinu incarnate within herself-fights with diamond-scaled lizards.

  “Every time I dream, I fill worlds with things, and this one most of all,” she says. “I made it beautiful, but it had no passion, so I had to go inside and breed love and war there, and now my heart beats better. But the story’s still forming, and I cannot show you the end just now.” She lets them see a little more of the unfolding, then closes petals over the hole.

  The demon-guards tell great roaring tales that have them all laughing on the floor, and then Supanna Macha orders the whalefish’s jaws bound open, and shows them the tale of Pii Sua Samut, complete:

  “They fought this way and that, and all the oceans trembled. Then the Lady of the Waters opened her mouth wide as a black ocean chasm,” Supanna Macha recited. “She swallowed the insolent Son of the Wind. So the monkey plunged, like a spear, into the yaksa’s stomach, and he slashed her insides with his diamond trident. He sliced and he tugged and he yelled, and dragged out her intestines into the light. He threw down her hands and feet for the fish to eat, and cast her body into the depths. All the fish that ate of Pii Sua Samut took some of her powers, and it was not the end of the demon.

  “She sank down to us, and we feasted on her hands and feet, and made her bones into arrows, and she makes us glorious, the greatest land the four seas have known. If Malinu can pledge new stories, I can too: Pii Sua Samut won’t go unavenged. But for today, I’ve brought some of her relics for you,” she says, and presents them to Sida and the Naak-King.

  And now it’s Sida’s turn. “I’ll tell you an adventure that’s never been told yet, of what I saw on my way down to this world,” she says, and all draw near. Her tales are like subterranean seas, dark, hard to navigate, full of stinging things. He feels it in his skin, and in muscles he’s forgotten he has, ones trained since childhood to dance in a monkey’s form, though he always had that quilted fishtail like an ever-tugging thought behind him, not quite as agile as the other monkey-dancers. But he’s not in that telling any more, he is a monkey. Finally, the knotted ends of Machanu’s tattered tail ache as they should, flesh made of matted cotton threads.

  When she’s finished her tale, she calls him up, and he doesn’t try to explain himself. She holds jewelled scissors-is this what it comes to, escaping having his tail severed by Ram so he can have it severed by Sida?

  She cuts through the knots and it hurts and beads fall to the floor like drops of tarnished blood, but when she’s finished his tail is free, out of its old skin, shining like the sea as he beats it, muscular and clean.

  In the Royal Cinema

  Hanuman is born at 7:45 every Friday night.

  That the city is under curfew tonight shouldn’t matter for the story-shades that hang about the Royal Cinema. They’re used to lying faded, almost nothing, on the other weeknights. But the space has got used to the ritual. There’s no actor to wear his face, but stage-air is used to the glimmers of star-gales that brush it when the Wind-Son is born, the glimpse of endlessness.

  And the stage recalls all its ghosts, air licking backwards through all the stories it’s carried, to see if it can find an entrance into their worlds.

  See if it can summon its players, rather than wait for someone play them. But with no one breathing, no one pulsing or waking-dreaming, it’s missing its conduit. Space clutches at space. To see if it can find the start. And… ah. There. This theatre, once a cinema, the city’s first-its own consciousness is rooted in a much younger form than the dances that haunt it. As shadows of khon-performers flit across the stage, the old movie-screen (long gone by now) wavers into light. Here’s the start, the space knows. The Hanumans and Totsakans, Machanus and Supanna Machas and Rams and nameless monkey-warriors and fish-girls and chariot-lions lean forward, waiting. They’ve given the show an audience; now a show gives itself to them.

  If a space can be surprised, it is, to discover it doesn’t always need flesh-and-blood transmitters, voice-and-memory portals-all a screen needs is something projected onto it. And here, now, the ghost-screen shows a deep underground light, a glow-in- the-dark city and a storyteller sitting on an island in a river, telling new tales with a wicked tongue. The screen has its own stock of ghosts, action heroes decades-forgotten, possessed now, playing out scenes their actors certainly never filmed, or are split, spliced, given extra limbs, or demon-eyes, or fish-tails, as the story requires.

  A Machanu in the audience nudges his mother. “Is that me? What am I doing?”

  “I don’t know,” she says. “Watch and see.”

  Oblivion

  A Journey

  Vandana Singh

  Memory is a strange thing.

  I haven’t changed my sex in eighty-three years. I was born female, in a world of peace and quietude; yet I have an incomplete recollection of my childhood. Perhaps it is partly a failure of the imagination that it is so hard to believe (in this age of ours) that there was once such a place as green and slow as my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was the last of the great world-shells to fall, so any memory of childhood is contaminated with what came after: the deaths of all I loved, the burning of the cities, the slow, cancerous spread of Hirasor’s culture-machines that changed my birthplace beyond recognition.

  So instead of one seamless continuum of growing and learning to be in this world, my memory of my life is fragmentary. I remember my childhood name: Lilavati. I remember those great cybeasts, the hay-athis, swaying down the streets in a procession, and their hot, vegetable-scented breath ruffling my hair. There are glimpses, as through a tattered veil, of steep, vertical gardens, cascading greenery, a familiar face looking out at me from a window hewn in a cliff—and in the back ground, the song of falling water. Then everything is obscured by smoke. I am in a room surrounded by pillars of fire, and through the haze I see the torn pages of the Ramayan floating in the air, burning, their edges crumpling like black lace. I am half-comatose with heat and smoke; my throat is parched and sore, my eyes sting—and then there are strange, metallic faces reaching out to me, the stuff of my nightmares. Behind them is a person all aflame, her
arms outstretched, running toward me, but she falls and I am carried away through the smoke and the screaming. I still see the woman in my dreams and wonder if she was my mother.

  In my later life as a refugee, first on the world of Barana and after that, everywhere and nowhere, there is nothing much worth recalling. Foster homes, poverty, my incarceration in some kind of soulless educational institution—the banality of the daily struggle to survive. But there are moments in my life that are seared into my mind forever: instants that were pivotal, life-changing, each a conspiracy of temporal nexuses, a concatenation of events that made me what I am. That is not an excuse—I could have chosen a different way to be. But I did not know, then, that I had a choice.

  This is the first of those moments: the last time I was a woman, some ninety years ago in my personal time-frame. I was calling myself Ila, then, and doing some planet-hopping, working the cruisers and blowing the credits at each stop. I found myself on Planet Vilaasa, a rich and decadent world under the sway of the Samarin conglomerate. I was in one of those deep-city bars where it’s always night, where sunshine is like a childhood memory, where the air is thick with smoke, incipient violence and bumblebees. I don’t remember who I was with, but the place was crowded with humans, native and off-world, as well as mutants and nakalchis. There was a bee buzzing in my ear, promising me seven kinds of bliss designed especially for my personality and physical type if only I’d agree to let the Samarin Corporate Entity take over half my brain. I swatted it; it fell into my plate and buzzed pathetically, antennae waving, before it became non-functional. Somehow I found this funny; I still remember throwing back my head and laughing.

  My fingers, slight and brown, curved around my glass. The drink half drunk, a glutinous purple drop sliding down the outer surface. Reflected on the glass a confusion of lights and moving shapes, and the gleam, sudden and terrifying, of steel.

  There was a scream, and the sound of glass breaking that seemed to go on for ever. This was no barroom brawl. The raiders were Harvesters. I remember getting up to run. I remember the terrified crowd pressing around me, and then I was falling, kicked and stepped upon in the stampede. Somehow I pushed myself to safety under a table next to a stranger, a pale woman with long, black hair and eyes like green fire. She looked at me with her mouth open, saying one word:

  “Nothen…”

  A Harvester got her. It put its metal hands around her throat and put its scissor-like mouth to her chest. As she bled and writhed, it rasped one long word, interspersed with a sequence of numbers.

  Her body turned rigid and still, her face twisted with horror. Her green eyes froze in a way that was simultaneously aware and locked in the moment of torment. It was then that I realized that she was a nakalchi, a bio-synthetic being spawned from a mother-machine.

  The name of the mother-machine is what pushes a nakalchi into the catatonic state that is Shunyath. When they enter Shunyath they re live the moment when that name was spoken. Since the nakalchis are practically immortal, capable of dying only through accident or violence, Shunyath is their way of going to the next stage. Usually a nakalchi who has wearied of existence will go to one of their priests, who will put the candidate in a meditative state of absolute calm and surrender. Then the priest will utter the name of the mother-machine (such names being known only to the priests and guarded with their lives) so that the nakalchi may then contemplate eternity in peace.

  For first-generation nakalchis, Shunyath is not reversible.

  That is when I realized that this woman was one of the ancients, one of the nakalchis who had helped humankind find its way to the stars.

  So for her, frozen in the state of Shunyath, it would seem as though she was being strangled by the Harvester all the rest of her days. No wonder she had asked me for Nothen, for death. She had known the Harvesters had come for her; she had known what they would do. I remember thinking, in one of those apparently timeless moments that terror brings: somebody should kill the poor woman. She was obviously the target of the raid.

  But to my horrified surprise the Harvester turned from her to me, even as I was sliding away from under the table to a safer place. While the Harvester had me pinned to the floor, its long, flexible electrodes crawled all over my skin as it violated my humanness, my woman-ness, with its multiple limbs. Through the tears and blood I saw myriad reflections of myself in those dark, compound eyes, from which looked—not only the primitive consciousness of the Harvester, but the eyes of whoever manipulated it—the person or entity who, not content with finding their target, fed like a starving animal on the terror of a bystander. In those eyes I was a stranger, a non-person, a piece of meat that jerked and gibbered in pain. Then, for a moment, I thought I saw the burning woman from my memories of childhood, standing behind the Harvester. This is death, I said to myself, relieved. But the Harvester left me a few hair-breadths short of death and moved on to its next victim.

  I don’t know how many they killed or maimed that night. The nakalchi woman they took away. I remember thinking, through the long months of pain and nightmares that followed, that I wish I had died.

  But I lived. I took no joy in it. All that gave my mind some respite from its constant seething was a game I invented: I would find the identity of the person responsible for the Harvester raid and I would kill them. Find, and kill. I went through endless permutations of people and ways of killing in my head. Eventually it was no longer a game.

  I moved to another planet, changed my sex to one of the Betweens. Over the years I changed my body even further, ruthlessly replacing soft, yielding flesh with coralloid implants that grew me my own armor-plating. Other people shuddered when I walked by. I became an interplanetary investigator of small crime and fraud, solving trivial little cases for the rich and compromised, while biding my time.

  It was already suspected that the man responsible for the Harvester attacks that terrorized whole planets during the Samarin era was no other than the governing mind of the Samarin Corporate Entity, Hira-sor. The proof took many years and great effort on the part of several people, including myself, but it came at last. Nothing could be done, however, because Hirasor was more powerful than any man alive. His icons were everywhere: dark, shoulder-length hair framing a lean, aristocratic face with hungry eyes; the embroidered silk collar, the rose in his buttonhole. It came out then that he had a private museum of first-generation nakalchis locked in shunyath in various states of suffering. A connoisseur of pain, was Hirasor.

  But to me he was also Hirasor, destroyer of worlds. He had killed me once already by destroying my world-shell, Ramasthal. It was one of the epic world-shells, a chain of island satellites natural and artificial, that ringed the star Agni. Here we learned, lived and enacted our lives based on that ancient Indic epic, the Ramayan, one of those timeless stories that condense in their poetry the essence of what it means to be human. Then Samarin had infiltrated, attacking and destroying at first, then doing what they called “rebuilding”: substituting for the complexity and beauty of the Ramayan, an inanely simplified, sugary, cultural matrix that drew on all the darkness and pettiness in human nature. Ramasthal broke up, dissolved by the monocultural machine that was Samarin. I suffered less than my fellow-citizens— being a child, I could not contribute a brain-share to Samarin. I grew up a refugee, moving restlessly from one inhabited world to the next, trying and failing to find my center. Most of the ordinary citizens of these worlds had never heard of the Ramayan epic, or anything else that had been meaningful to me in that lost past life. In my unimaginable solitude my only defense was to act like them, to be what they considered normal. When the Harvesters invaded the bar, I had been living the fashionably disconnected life that Samarin-dominated cultures think is the only way to be.

  Hirasor was so powerful that among my people his nickname was Ravan-Ten-Heads, after the demon in the epic Ramayan. Near the end of the story, the hero, Ram, tries to kill Ravan by cutting off his heads, one by one, but
the heads simply grow back. In a similar manner, if a rival corporation or a society of free citizens managed to destroy one Samarin conglomerate, another would spring up almost immediately in its place. It— and Hirasor—seemed almost mythic in their indestructibility.

  What I wanted to do was to find Hirasor’s secret vulnerability, as Ram does in the epic. “Shoot an arrow into Ravan’s navel,” he is told.

  The navel is the center of Ravan’s power. When Ram does so, the great demon dies at last.

  But Samarin, and with it Hirasor, declined slowly without my help. An ingeniously designed brain-share virus locked Samarin’s client-slaves—several million people—into a synced epileptic state. After that Generosity Corp. (that had likely developed the virus) began its ascent to power while the Samarin Entity gradually disintegrated. Pieces of it were bought by other conglomerates, their data extracted through torture; then they were mind-wiped until the name Samarin only evoked a ghost of a memory, accompanied by a shudder.

  But Hirasor lived on. He was still rich enough to evade justice. Rumors of his death appeared frequently in the newsfeeds for a while, and a documentary was made about him, but over time people forgot. There were other things, such as the discovery of the worlds of the Hetorr, and the threats and rumors of war with that unimaginably alien species. “Give it up,” said the few people in whom I had confided. “Forget Hirasor and get on with your life.” But finding Hirasor was the only thing between me and death by my own hand. Each time I opened my case files on him, each time his image sprang up and I looked into his eyes, I remembered the Harvester. I remembered the burning woman. Despite all the reconstructive work my body had undergone, my old wounds ached. Find, and kill. Only then would I know peace.