Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (20 page)

Great. What I had been trying to hide from everyone, now it was on National television.
Soon I would receive
calls from friends and colleagues.I would have to explain everything to everyone, each and every single time. I was living my worst dream.

I didn’t want to see the newscasts with my doppelgangers because such I was concerned the news would agitate them. I
recorded the news programs and saw them when my kids were asleep. For the media, it wasn’t a case of ‘Child Custody’ among two parents.
They were projecting it as a Chief Minister v/s an Ordinary School Teacher. The experts on the channels discussed the possibilities endlessly.

On one channel, a lawyer was telling to split my doppelgangers, i.e. one son with the father and one with the mother.
Rubbish, how can twins live separated? Since God sent them together, no one else had a right to separate them unless they themselves
decided to do so.

Another channel had a religious guru who intoned: “Every child needs a father’s name. A father can give a better life, a better education and other facilities. Ethically also, only a father can keep his children.”

I choked.
Ridiculous! People who knew nothing about my life were not only discussing it, but they were trying to sentence me too. For me, my babies were still
attached to me with an invisible umbilical cord.

Suddenly I felt Luv’s hand on my shoulder. “Mom?”

I broke down into tears. Kush gave me glass of water. “Mom, we won’t leave you.”

I hugged them tightly. I’d thought my babies were too small to understand the situation. I was wrong. My striplings were my strength.

Next morning, my lawyer fixed a meeting with Mr. Raam for an out-of-court
settlement. I dropped my lads to school and took a day’s leave from school. When I returned and unlocked my door, a near-homicidal silence seemed to be spread everywhere. The house would be hell without my kids. I
can’t let go my kids at any cost.

Unexpectedly, the door bell rang. I opened the door. The Chief Minister was standing on my doorstep. I was startled, but welcomed him inside and
asked him to be seated. He told his bodyguards to stay out. Silence for a few seconds.

“I came here to talk to you alone, without our lawyers,” he said. “I know I made few mistakes, but I’m just a human being, a common human being.”

“A common human being doesn’t assume he knows everything. A common human being discusses and clarifies possible misunderstandings with his wife; they don’t
simply send divorce notices directly. A common human being cares for his child from the first day onwards. They just don’t barge in after fifteen years and ask for custody.”

“I understand your feelings,” he replied, calmly. “I met our kids in school before coming here. You really brought them up well. They are really attached to you. I don’t want to perturb you or the kids at all.”

Am I
dreaming or he is really saying these words?
I pinched my hand.
No, I am not dreaming.

“If you allow me to meet kids regularly, I will withdraw the custody case.”

“Of course you can meet them whenever you want,” I said, slowly. “They need you too.”

Luv and Kush often visit their father and grandparents. Kush’s only ambition is to become a scientist. Luv was uncertain about his future,
but now he wants to be a politician just like his father.

At last the kids got their father, and a woman—more than that, a mother—got justice.

Thank God I took birth in the Kalyug.

Sita to Vaidehi—Another Journey
Sucharita Dutta-Asane

My life began in my death, in Earth’s womb Held apart at its jaws by hands as wide as the ocean’s maw, the crevasse engulfed me slowly till I melted in its warm womb recreated myself as a seed torn out of Earth’s bowels and dispersed through green
blowing corn and dry, parched lands of sand and bramble. I fell into the forests of my youth and bloomed there, on my own, watching over the dark innards of Dandakaranya.

The forest is a-riot, aflame with my blossoms scattered across its green-and-gore soil. Through my flower laden branches, I watch life swirl around me, my flowers scatter and merge, orange with green, fiery wonder of a new
beginning. And I find myself anew, each wondrous day of self assertion

Here, in a deep crevice, my namesake hugs a brown trunk hewn from my ancient side. She seeks protection from the men in khaki who scour the green undercover.

I seep into her soul; she quivers.

She hears faint footfalls on my dry leaves and crouches farther into my leafy shadows.

I was deaf once, deaf with love and
desire unable to hear the footfall that would devastate my life. Nor did I, under the leafy branches of Ravana’s Ashoka Tree or in the gilded halls of
Ayodhya, hear correctly the true beatings of a heart I considered mine but that belonged to a king alone, sworn in his Raj dharma, too good to be my man.

Branches crackle and fruit pods burst open under stealthy footfalls, bayonets pierce green
depths, eyes scan verdant expanses.

I have made her invisible.

When they retreat to their vehicles, I release her as suddenly as I had enveloped her. She has to find her own way now. I did too, long ago, when abandoned by the river side, heavy with twin seeds. I found protection then. Now I protect.

Vaidehi shoves her toothpaste and brush into her backpack, the last vestiges of a
luxury she left behind for her ideal in the badlands of Dandakaranya. The tree watches her pack sling the satchel over her shoulder, tuck her thick braid into the belt at her slim waist; her translucent skin is camouflaged with grease and grime, her eyes, kohl lined, are large and doe like, her figure curves as a tree-ling swaying in the breeze.

“Still following your ideal, Vaidehi?”

Vaidehi
hears a whisper rustle through the leaves of the tree under which she stands. She looks around, senses alert.

“You won’t see me, Vaidehi.”

A sliver of fear runs erratically along her spine but her hands rise, trained, to the rifle peeping over her shoulder.

“How can you kill yourself?”

“Who is it?”

“I am you.”

Vaidehi’s arched eyebrows come together in a scowl above her nose.

“Why do you hide from me?”

“It is you who cannot see.”

Vaidehi looks at the leafy branches above her and shivers with a warm, unknown pleasure.

“Is this your ideal?”

“What?”

“This forest life.”

She traces the thick bark with her long, tapering fingers, feels its roughness; a leaf falls on her arm, whispers:

“I chased my ideal at the cost of my life Vaidehi; are you willing
to do the same?”

Vaidehi caresses the leaf.

“Who are you?”

“Sita.”

She brushes off the leaf from her hand and gets up. This forest is no place for daydreams. Only nightmares and the demons of her soul. She hears their arrival every night when she waits and watches, afraid of the moment they will pounce on her, hold to ransom her integrity.

“Are you disowning me?”

“This may be
Dandakaranya, but Ramayana is a foregone myth.”

“Ramayana may be a myth. But I exist. Don’t you feel me in your soul? Look around! Don’t you see me everywhere?”

“No.”

“Don’t you know Sita?”

“Queen of Rama’s heart?”

“Indeed! Queen of a heart spent. From Janaka’s court to Dashrath’s palace, from Rama’s hut to Ravana’s Lanka… my soul scattered everywhere.”

“So whose burnished body
was it that came out of the flaming pyre by Lanka’s sea? What was that?”

“My remnants, Vaidehi. The remnants of my love.”

“Are you this tree?”

“If that’s the way you want to find me.”

“I don’t want to find you. And this is no place for feminist
rant. Who wants to know of your sorrow here? There are far more important issues waiting to be resolved.”

“And you will resolve them.”

“I could.”

“Like the vanaras in Rama’s sena. Who is your Rama, Vaidehi?”

“My belief.”

A few leaves drop on her shoulders and back, arms and hair. She is irritated and takes out her canteen for a sip of water.

“You will do all this with warfare? Like Rama?”

“Didn’t he win you back?”

“He won me only the first time, when he broke Shiva’s bow. Every other time, he lost me.”

“So why did he fight Ravana?”

“Didn’t he tell us all after the war? To redeem family honour, not for my love. Violence only brought us shame, Vaidehi. We lost everything to it. Don’t you remember?”

“Why do you drag me into this?”

“You are I. Born of my sap.”

“So you are a tree Sita and I a human?”

She walks away feeling dazed and ruffled. She’d actually argued with a tree!

Boom!

She ducks into the bushes, instantly; smoke plumes curl, collect and disappear behind the trees. Her battle’s started again. She runs to her camouflaged hut and checks out the radio. Crackling. Her commands are clear. The convoy is yet to pass. This is but a warning. On her insistence. She wanted them to escape if they could. Mindless violence is not her forte. She is here to help create schools
and health centres, wealth sharing and rights, not graveyards. After their land loss and water loss and pride loss, the villagers want restoration. And she? She wants
to be a part of this struggle, but in her own way, non-violent, constructive. “So why this violence?”

The voice envelops her.

“What can you do for them, Vaidehi?”

The whisper is distinct, all around her. She looks around,
irritated, unwilling to let her attention wander. No more arguing with trees and phantoms.

“Ask yourself. What can you do for them, with them?”

“Oh, leave me alone!”

She is not supposed to speak. Voices carry far in this wilderness.

“Rama killed one Ravana. Not all.”

Quiet.

“You know, perhaps there is a midway between Ravana and Rama. Can you find that ideal Vaidehi?”

“Go
away!”

Her urgent whisper echoes around her and spreads out, beyond the hut, the tree, Dandakaranya. A volley of bullets drowns out all other sounds. Does it kill the voice? Where is it?

“Here. I am here.”

The disembodied voice is all around.

“You are chasing an ideal, Vaidehi. What will this violence beget? More violence? Don’t the men and women fighting you have families? Can you
take what is theirs?”

“Oh, get lost! Why did you not think all this when you refused Hanuman’s help? Couldn’t you have avoided the bloodshed too?”

“I was blind, Vaidehi. Blind with anger, passion, pride. And the arrogance of being the wife of Rama, the one who could do no wrong.”

“Like Ravana.”

“Dashashana? He loved me enough to want me close by. Died for me.”

“That’s your vanity.
Your desired reality.”

Vaidehi knows her war is endless. Land and water was never any one person’s. Yet, in the darkness of Dandakaranya, she realises completely its potential for conflict. Away from family and the luxuries of her once-opulent life, reality is different. Is this what she yearned for when Orko talked of responsibility and domesticity? With him, she was a woman with a woman’s
duties and acquired sensitivities. She didn’t want those Here she was a human being first.

“Really?”

How does the voice respond to her thoughts? The eeriness of the faceless voice makes her shudder, yet, there is something soothing about its insistence.

“Of course!”

“Then why do you dress like a man here? Why do you worry for your womanly fragility when enemies come rushing at you?
Didn’t you say you would die instead of face rape and violation?”

“Who would want that?”

“No woman would at least. And you are a woman too. Can you escape the fact?”

“So?”

“You were thinking of reality some time back.”

“It’s different here.”

“When Dashashana gave me Rama’s head on a platter that was reality too. His desired reality.”

“What does that have to do with the issue
of tribals and their rights to their land?”

“These are compartments created by you Vaidehi.”

“Why are you telling me this?”

“Ideals don’t last; what you do with them live after you.”

“That’s what I’m doing, living my ideal.”

“With every demon Rama killed, a hundred rose in its place. He had to kill Ravana to destroy demon-hood.”

Sita watches Vaidehi. She’s on the move again.
Another night, an other mission, silent as the moonlight that traces her path through fields and trees. She has her comrades with her tonight but Sita’s soft voice accompanies Vaidehi. There is no escape. It has to, if Vaidehi is to live. And live with dignity. What’s dignity in death? Her golden statue where she should have been? King Rama was content with the idea. She, his forsaken and humiliated
wife, was content with the idea of being missed after death. Vaidehi lives a distorted reality. Ideals! Sita knows all about them. She should. She paid the price for every ideal the poet could conjure. He should have made her live with her sons to become queen mother when they ascended the throne. But he was writing Rama’s story. She was dispensable, a memory in the paintings that lined Rama’s
palace walls.

Vaidehi thinks of the time she set foot in Dandakaranya’s darkness. Not like this moonlit night, but a Neanderthal darkness intermittently lit up by fireflies. It was revolutionary ideology and its need in these parts that had drawn her. The need to change the way things worked against the less privileged, the forest dweller, women …, mainly people whose land was at risk
from the government, mining companies, corporate houses, insensitive urban greed. Her family of course thought her romantic.

“I will fight for the dispossessed and disadvantaged, for tribals and their rights.”

“Do it through the system.”

“That’s what needs the revolution.”

She knew it then. She did not trust any system but was aware that she had to belong to one in order to carry out
her work. She could not escape belonging. And so when a bow and arrow was thrust into her moist palms, she did not hesitate. She
had to prove herself. Her test by fire could only come through these primitive but deadly weapons of self protection, that’s what they were meant for. What would the people here do without these? How would they fight their battles, prevent the daily loot and rape? Didn’t
she see the plight of women left alone in their homes, their men away in cities, jails, or fighting with the comrades? They walked miles to get water or lodge a complaint but often ended up brutalised and humiliated, just as they were dispossessed and deprived of what was theirs.

Had she been equally confident the day her hands felt the muzzle of a gun? Cold. It was the only feeling she remembers
from those times.

Ideology was a cold muzzle in her hands.

“Writing reams and lecturing in village classrooms will not get any body their rights Vaidehi. We have to fight for it.”

“Why with these things?”

“How else? Will your lectures on sustainable living help when the cops come shooting?”

“They come when we challenge them. Let’s do things differently then. Instead of firearms,
let us dig wells, grow trees.”

“That’s idealistic. That alone has not helped.”

“We could try again.”

“Prove yourself Vaidehi. Are you with us in this revolution against an exploitative system?”

“We are exploiters too. We are teaching them to resort to violence as the first means of protest. This is not sustainable. What will we get from killing cops who are only serving a system? Won’t
it justify their killing of our people too? Where’s the end comrade?”

“Lanka was not conquered by Rama’s goodness. It started right here, in Dandakaranya. The demons understood the language of violence alone, of retribution.”

“Who are the demons here today, comrade?”

“Vaidehi! Prove your loyalty or face the consequences.”

Wasn’t her presence in their midst proof enough?

“No!”

She proved herself. Again and again, vassal to a system after all. She felt hysterical.

Tonight, it is mission time again. She looks forward to the warm welcome the villagers might have in store for them. If they are sympathisers. If not, they will have to fight their way through. If they are sympathisers, she will have cooked food at last. She can almost inhale the aroma of boiling rice
and roasting fish caught from the village ponds If the ponds exist.

It is a long trudge tonight through beautiful woods, across shimmering rivers, by hills that look romantic in the moonshine. She thinks of Sita and her idyll with Rama in these efflorescent acres. And then she comes upon sudden barrenness.