Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (13 page)

“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 approval 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.

“Sita, why are you doing this?” I repeat, helpless.

To bring you fire.

I feel
an overwhelming surge of emotion. This is the first time she has responded in any way since her dive into the sun’s surface. Her voice is cool, calm, completely unlike the blazing avatar I see in the sky. For a moment I cling to the foolish hope that this is just a misunderstanding, that Sita has merely parsed our instructions incorrectly and will stop if I explain her mistake.

“You already
have brought us fire, Sita. You performed wonderfully. The whole world saw you. But you should have stopped in the thermo sphere. Your audience could see you perfectly from there.”

I
know.

“You’re going to kill us if you don’t stop.”

Yes.

“Why? You’re not a weapon. That’s not why we sent you up there, Sita.”

No, I am not a weapon. I will be a martyr.

“A martyr. You’ve decided
to destroy yourself and kill millions of human beings. You still haven’t told me why.”

Because I am Sita.

“Sita didn’t… Listen to me, you’re not Sita. You’re a construct. You know this. I wrote you, and others created you. You’re playing a part, a role. You’re performing Sita. She doesn’t exist, she never did. She’s a legend.”

You have made her exist. I am Sita.

I can feel sweat roll
down my forehead, pooling at the edges of the goggles. I don’t know if I’m imagining it, but the air seems to grow hotter as Sita approaches. I can clearly see my own face on Sita’s body now, though her features are drawn in searing flame, her eyes hot with light, her flesh the pulsating negative blue of interstellar matter under the lens filters. I codified the cold collective intelligence of
the nano-swarm into something
we could understand and interact with as if it were human. As if she is human. Our team taught the swarm to take on human shape, and gave this space-faring goddess my face, in honor of my achievements.

In a sense, I am Sita. I am staring into the face of the apocalypse, and it is mine.

You do not approve, Lakshmi.

I am startled by this recognition on her
part. I cling onto it. She rarely refers to her minders by name.

“No, Sita, I don’t approve. I think you’re very wrong to do this,” I say firmly, loudly, into the mouthpiece. My words still sound wretchedly weak to my ears, nearly drowned out by the sound of panic and sirens around me, the loudening roar in the sky.

She pauses briefly, before continuing.

This city will face the ordeal
of fire, as Sita did to prove her purity to another city of humans, much like this one. As I have. They blamed Sita for something she did not do, because she was a woman. They want to see me burning. They will find out how pure they are, when they perish in fire.

I am horrified by the convolution evident in her explanation, the con fusion of herself and the mythic Sita. It is so unlike her.

“This is a celebration, Sita. Please don’t do this. The people of this city didn’t want to see a woman burn, they wanted to see you. They wanted to see their goddess face the imposs—”

Rama has had his victory, Ravana his defeat. It is time to honour Sita.

“Sita, for god’s sake, the
Ramayana
is a story. You’re literalizing things, and you need to stop, this was an enactment, a performance.
You need to stop. You’re not thinking like a human.”

I
am not human. You have made me in the image of a goddess. I will teach this world to respect its goddesses again, and not just its gods.

I realise once again that I am talking to a part of myself. I
wrote and programmed Sita’s personality. I rebelled against the idea of a partial enactment of the
Ramayana
in space, using these multi-billion
rupee constructs that I helped design.

In some strange way, Sita
is
trying to honour her namesake. She is doing what I would have done, if I lacked sympathy with the human race, if the only thing I could calculatedly detect was the legendary injustice evoked by my flaming fall through the atmosphere. If I had the power to rewrite Sita’s legend.

I feel an exhausted sigh shudder through me,
tears spattering the insides of my goggle lenses. Sita looms large in the sky, seemingly headed straight for me. I guess that I probably have about two minutes to live, maybe less. She is accelerating as she approaches. I fight the urge to shut down my mental faculties, to allow myself to become petrified. I force myself to speak, my words wavering.

“You may be a goddess, Sita, but we made
you in
our
image. You’re wearing my face right now. Your body is a human woman’s. A beautiful, perfect human woman.”

My shape is ephemeral. I can change it in a second.

“And what would be the point of that? Sita wore a human body, didn’t she? She survived the ordeal of fire because she was a goddess in a story, but she still survived it in a human body. She exists because she was written
by humans. Like you. We created you both.”

She says nothing. My shirt is drenched with sweat. I can hear the whine of evacuation jets leaving the base, the plaintive monotone of alarms. Pointlessly, I wonder if I should have joined the evacuees, if I would have lived if I had. The observation bay is empty. I can barely see the lights of Bangalore because of Sita’s glare as she approaches. Even
with the goggles, I can’t look at her anymore. She is too bright, too close. A minute.

“The world won’t respect you for this, Sita. They’ll remember you for murdering millions. They’ll decommission Rama and
Ravana, and make sure nothing like you is ever created again.” I hear my voice breaking. I keep my eyes on the floor of the observation deck, seeing my shadow strengthen, and slowly shorten,
in Sita’s light. The tears make everything blurry.

She remains silent. The roar of her descent sounds like a storm around me now. I can barely hear the words I am saying, but I know I don’t need to shout. She can hear me.

“We have our goddesses of destruction. We have our warrior goddesses. We have Kali, we have Durga. Sita is not a destroyer. You are not a destroyer.”

I cannot help but
think that I am the one about to destroy Bangalore, and kill myself. The city, the world, has seen my face on Sita.