Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (15 page)

Once again that vague
smile spread across Viswamitra’s face. “We had finished off the men of the tribe, including Tatakai’s son Subahu over a month ago. But the families would not leave. Now, is it not asymmetrical warfare for men to kill unarmed women? If the world knew, imagine the propaganda they could spread with it, despite the Asuras being inferior and low born. People don’t understand the significance of yajnas
these days. But it’s not wrong for a teen like you to kill the female Asuras. It’s a fair match then. That is why we needed you”.

Tears welled in Raama’s eyes. Lakshmana walked to a boulder nearby and slumped on it.

“That
is why we needed you. Be proud Raama and Lakshmana, the world will remember you as the young princes who killed the demon Tatakai and saved the great yajna.” Saying this,
Viswamitra callously walked ahead. Raama’s legs refused to move forward. After walking a few paces, Viswamitra turned back and asked with a sinister laugh “You didn’t really think we needed the help of you children to finish off a woman now, did you?”

Test of Fire
Pervin Saket

Fellow Styonkars,

As SigEv just transmitted to you, the experiment has failed and I have returned. Yes, three hundred and four kosos before I was due. But remaining on Earth would only have wasted waste precious time. The Planet of Colour did not meet the criteria and
I was compelled to ask Dharti to carry me back. We must begin the search for another, more worthy race. I intimate you now, before the official sabha meeting due in the eighth hissa, because it is best we resume the archive searches, choose from the volunteers and draw plan layouts. The time of the bequest approaches and another deserving race must be identified before the
444
^th
Chakker of Larissa
around Styon. And this time we must choose more carefully, lest our trial fails, like it did with Earthlok.

For the first time since the Rounds of the Bequest, a race has been denied what it should have easily earned. Certainly you will want to know why—particularly the Mantris, whose fate it is now to scout for the next beneficiaries. The matter however, will be much discussed at the sabha,
and it is futile to delve into details in so short a correspondence. It’ll suffice for now to know that our side of the test went on without a hitch, but they faltered repeatedly. Their last act proved them clearly unfit for such a historic revelation. Mercifully though, they will never know what they have lost.

The answer to the eventual ‘why’ of existence, the question plagues every race’s
soul. It requires either minds that are open enough to grasp its vastness or small enough to live only for the truth of the moment. Earthlok can boast of neither; the Planet of Colour is far too frivolous to deserve or appreciate such a gift . More so because the bequest can never be reversed. On the Planet of Colour, birds talk, chariots fly, humans perform miracles, but their minds are caught
in tight webs of mediocrity. The race of Manus is petty.

Subhi and Jaul, my patient trainers, you would have been proud had you seen your pupil merge so seamlessly into the role of a royal Earth princess, complete with all the conventions and ceremonies. Goka, the wisest of Mantris, on your advice we tested not any random Manus but he who was considered The Best among Men—
Purushuttam.
When
a race is ready for the reason behind its existence, the particular suffices for the examination. Yet, worried about mistakenly rejecting Earthlok due to the faults of an ill-chosen candidate, we picked the one who they deemed the highest among mortals. One who embodied every value that they cherished; one who acted on their highest principles; one who will in fact be hailed the Ideal Man for centuries
to come.

Morphed into an Earthwoman, I prayed to their Gods, wore their garbs and accepted their relationships, as planned. Their customs, like those of many Presight races we have already witnessed, are obsolete and reek of fear. I saw Earthwomen, clever but conniving, brave but narrow, their children shackled by tunnelled visions. These however, were not our criteria for the decision, and
they were accordingly ignored, allowing for the role of conditioning, the convenience of repetition over rebellion. And in any case, it was
Purushuttam
who counted.

You are already aware, due to Dharti’s SigEv transmissions of Significant Events that I chose him at a special Earthlok ceremony, to be what they call varyingly,
var,
husband or
pati
Later details
shall be divulged at the sabha,
but subsequently, situations compelled me to live like a nomadic Earthling, wandering alone, isolated save two Earthmen, one of whom was my Earth
var,
the
Purushuttam.
Strangely, those were blissful moments, spent in picking wild fruit, bathing in sweet streams, feasting on the colours of the famed planet, away from their ritualistic lives. A far cry of course from the comforts of the palace,
but what do fourteen Earth years of physical difficulties count in a sea of eventual youthful immortality?

Youth. Lust. The flying chariot—you were worried about me, I remember, and it took six SigEv transmissions to assure all Styonkars of my safety. But I did not blame him. For lust is fuelled within the loins and as loathsome as it is, it will never be a perversion of the heart. Isolation
again. This time within flowered gardens and perfumes, punctuated by wise counsel of beautiful women. The role, the test, the mute pretence—I thought it would all end when finally the battle was over and the ten heads smashed, smeared with blood and dust.

Only, it was far from over. A washer-man was all it took and I was sent through the blazing fire. You can imagine not the intensity of those
flames, the cold, mocking crackle of the orange, the first sting of human tears.
Purushuttam,
the highest among men fell prey to a mere rumour, and collapsed from his pedestal. The suspicion, the fear, the doubts that lurked his mind could be forgiven, overlooked. They could be pacified and explained. What doomed Manus was the need to seek approval from even the lowest of the rung. The desire
to be respected by those whom he could never have respected back. The act of giving up every scruple he had, every principle he upheld, only to be adored by one more person. The Ideal Man didn’t value his own opinions, only those that others had of him.

I felt then not the heat but the tightening corridors of their minds, lairs too binding for the wisdom of their origins. The
weight of all
our eternal years crashed down on me, the smallness of humankind pressed against itself.

I activated the Homecoming Hoop and Dharti brought me back. Earth failed. The Planet of Colour shall never know why it exists, why it was really made. Goka, let the next deserving race be found.

Sita.

The Other Woman
Manjula Padmanabhan

Mandodari stirred in her bed of crocus petals. She opened her eyes, sat up and looked around.
Something had changed.
But she could not tell what it was.

She got out of bed, bathed in pigeon’s blood, ate a breakfast of dolphin milk curds and stepped out onto her
terrace. From the highest level of the great iron palace, she could see the island nation spreading away on all sides like a living carpet: emerald fields fragrant under the sun, coconut palms nodding in the light breeze, peasants bent over and toiling. Then her pet black peacock sprang up onto the parapet wall in front of her and began to dance. He had not done that for many centuries.

Yes!

Something had changed.

But what?

Throwing on a peignoir of silk and opals, she went to find her husband. He was in his apartments, surrounded by glowing wall-charts, speaking with someone on a small device attached to one of his ears and tapping with the fingers of both hands on a flat tablet supported on the back of a slave crouching in front of him. His multiple heads each had their
own headsets. He smiled at Mandodari and reached out to pat her rump, but was clearly in no mood to talk. She left him and wandered slowly through the myriad rooms of her home, her expression thoughtful.

Her in-laws and co-wives were in residence, but she neither felt like disturbing them nor did she believe any of them would be interested in the change that was stirring within her eternal
world. The brothers-in-law weren’t famed for their intellects, the sisters-in-law were fawningly affectionate but could not be trusted to be sincere. And the co-wives? Well. Their attention spans extended only as far as their TV remotes. Yet even had she known someone who might have been willing to hearing her out, the realization was growing that the source of the change had come into being in the
mortal world. And that she alone was the target of it.

She could not remember anything like this having happened before. Her position had always been one of spouse-in-the-background, the face less bed-warmer who had less than a walk-on part in the great dramas of the mythic age. If ever she made an appearance, it was as a snivel ling nag or noble not-quite-cuckoldee. There were even some dramas
in which she had the joyous position of offering counselling services to a husband whose would-be mistress remained obstinately unavailable!

Any revisions to this unfortunate plot were welcome to her. Harnessing her swans, she made arrangements for an extended journey to the mortal dimension.

She visited shopping malls and amusements parks, stepped into homes and hotels, playgrounds
and prisons, factories and sweatshops. Initially she was careful to avoid manifesting herself on the material plane. It required all her concentration and she didn’t enjoy the sensations of be ing confined within a simple physical body, embedded in Time. But the sight of such teeming hordes of mortal beings fascinated her. There had not been so many of them in the past. When millions of them congregated
for parades or riots the sight was sometimes breathtaking. There were occasions when, watching them, she found herself
experiencing something very close to envy. Which was surely bizarre. As a divine, she should feel nothing but pity or disgust or amusement. There was an unspoken belief amongst her fellow-divines that descents into the fleshly dimension were at best an indulgence, at worst a
vice. Those who practised regular visitations did so furtively. It was understood that their activities should not result in major disruptions of mortal time-space, that the actual thickening should occur in secret and that alarming or fearful forms were to be avoided.

But discretion had never been Mandodari’s strong suit. Like many another demon, she adored excess and gloried in spectacle.
She tried to follow the conventions, by arranging her first couple of efforts in the midst of thick forests, where the local mortals were steeped in their beliefs about the spirit world. She was delighted that they recognized her as an immortal, reacting with respect and fear. For this very reason, however, they provided nothing in the way of conversation, leave alone entertainment.

Losing
patience, for her third attempt she chose a densely populated area. She believed she’d done her homework well by choosing a clothing store in the metropolis called, so far as she could tell, “Boss Town.” It was on the coast of a major land-mass that some humans referred to as North America. The inhabitants were extremely devout: they spent the major part of their day worshipping glowing screens. After
nightfall, they remained indoors while the great warehouses called malls closed their doors to the public.

Once her manifestation was complete, Mandodari admired herself in the mirrored walls of a changing-room stall. She was two metres tall and had modelled herself on a priestess called Lady GooGoo whose pink-skinned and golden ringleted likeness had been featured in a popular form of street
art called “bill boards.” She appeared very frequently on the glowing screens, howling in front of the shrieking, ululating hordes who worshipped her.

Of course it was darker than a moonless night in the tiny changing room. The lights and the ventilation were both off . The divine tourist was naked but had expected to help herself to the clothes on the racks outside. But when Mandodari exited
the stall, she found herself sur rounded by miles of tiny frilly dresses, stretchy sleep-suits, socks the size of new-born kittens and endless pairs of woolly booties. She was in the babies’ section.

Pale, watery light seeped into the main section of Sear’s via skylights, from the neon signs on the exterior of the mall. Clad in her heavy body, she struggled to find her way around the silent,
darkened store. But the buzzing hum of electric devices caused an unpleasant tingling in her ears so she didn’t even attempt to look for light-switches. Disconcertingly life-like statues draped in clothes that represented some of the styles and cuts available in that section, poked up above the mass of merchandise. She had as yet only a rudimentary understanding of mortal languages and certainly
no desire to memorize all the hundreds of different scripts available. The signs and labels in English made no sense to her. The blonde giantess had no choice but to stumble around until she was in an area where the clothes looked as if they might fit her.

Her research had shown that most women these days wore a combi nation of leggings and short, tight tops. Once she had found the jeans section,
she discovered to her consternation, that a majority were at least four sizes too small. The plastic hangers on which the clothes were displayed made an extremely annoying tinkling sound as she tried to riffle through them. An assortment of paper labels and dangling price tabs had been variously stapled, tacked on, glued and stitched into place on the pants so that she found herself snarling
out loud as she stomped her way into them. She hissed like an angry cat each time the zippered fastenings caught in her pubic hair when she tried to
do them up. And eventually she took to simply ripping them apart while removing them.

By the time she heard the sounds of approaching security guards and saw the beams of torch light stabbing into the depths of the store, she had managed to surround
herself with a mountain of discards. It was not in her nature to feel afraid, so when the two uniformed men approached her, she turned to face them, a towering figure with disshevelled blonde hair and a pair of Levi’s Loose ‘N’ Easy Cargoes ripped to shreds in her hands. In her carefully enunciated though archaic Sanskrit she explained that she was only looking for something suitable to wear
and wondered if they would care to help her.

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?”