Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (21 page)

They keep walking, single file.

The village huts are visible against the brightening
skyline. Something looks out of joint. She looks closely at the brightness. In the semi glow from that distant horizon, her comrades’ faces look alert and drawn. She dares not stop and stare, yet. The flames leap up right then, the sky an inferno.

“What?”

“Ambush.”

Her whispered question and her comrade’s whispered answer.

“Whose?”

“A battalion.”

“How do you know?”

“Was planned.”

The ground seems to cave in under her feet; she feels the chasm opening up, sucking her into it. She wants to run but discipline winds itself around her ankles now.

She walks, single file.

The mud road and its surroundings are aglow. Jeeps burn, suffusing the air with their devastation. She looks closely at the limbs scattered around her. Something moves. A hand claws the air. She goes
to it swiftly. The mangled face looks at her and opens its maw. She pours water into it from her canteen, a few drops at a time till a hand snatches it away.

“He’s our enemy.”

“I’m only giving him water.”

“To the enemy?”

“He’s a dying man, comrade.”

“A dying enemy is still an enemy, Vaidehi. Get away.” She clutches at his sleeve.

“Why? And why wasn’t I told about this ambush?
What are we doing here now?”

“No questions! Pick up the arms and ammunition they were carrying and move on. Take the radios. Don’t leave them behind!”

She doesn’t move.

Vaidehi is in Sita’s embrace.

Hiding under her leaves, she feels the forest permeate her senses, verdant and cool. The leaves caress her naked body, lull it into restfulness. She inhales rapidly twice and holds
her breath.

“What happened there?”

The voice! Sita!

“Are you afraid?”

“No.”

“What happened?”

“I quit.”

“That’s easy. Vaidehi always quits”

“You play devil’s advocate.”

“What’s that?”

“Never mind.”

“What will you do now?”

“Go home. Teach.”

“Teach? That’s interesting! What will you teach?”

“How not to scuttle a revolution.”

Sita smiles. Vaidehi smiles.

“It’s never easy to return. How will you prove yourself?”

“Prove! Prove! Why should I? It’s all because of you, Sita. You set the trend.”

“You talk like a woman!”

“No. Well, yes. Why should I prove myself? They wanted me to use weapons, follow their cult of violence. ‘Prove yourself,’ they said. I did. I fed water to a dying man. ‘Prove you are not on the enemy’s side,’ they said. I
ran away.”

“How far will you run?”

“I don’t know. If they catch up with me, I have a cyanide capsule ready for the bite.”

“To prove your fear. You can’t escape it Vaidehi. Can you reverse the trend I set? Running away, dying. They are forms of escape. Can you do it differently this time?”

Vaidehi yearns for the coolness of the leaves on her body but throws them off to stand up unclothed,
stark and beautiful. Sita watches the radiance of her contours.

Vaidehi thinks of the distance she has to traverse. She stands mute as Sita envelops her once again, enters her spirit and clothes her in her leaves and flowers. She sets forth-earth woman, with nothing of the world on her and Sita’s words ringing in her ears.

“The abyss is not ours this time. Fight for what is yours. Whatever
it may be.”

The dense forest covers her on all sides. These tracts are imbued with violence and factional rivalry. Each abducting the other’s
agenda. Systems, groups, armed militia, insurgents, villagers. Identities overlapped in these parts. Could she escape? She walks away from water bodies and villages.

Dawn breaks out of the hills.

A group of women emerge from its shadows in the
distance dangling a carcass across a stake, their hips swaying to their songs, a lilting break in the monotony. She recognises the signs. They are returning from their annual hunt. She quickens her pace. Among them, she will be inconspicuous.

They sing of their hunt, they laugh, stop to dance; she feels happy; she feels safe. They reach the village by noon. A village of women.

“Where are
the men?”

“Taken or gone.”

Vaidehi braces herself for the familiar tales.

My man’s in jail…

My son’s a comrade now …

My grandson’s hunting comrades …

My man is in the city …

My man was taken away by…the police…the lal salaam people…their opponents…government babus…by death…

Rama had to kill Ravana to destroy demon-hood. How many more demons now? How many more Ravanas? Where
are the Ramas? She stretches out on a mat in the hut of a family caught between rival groups. The family is history now; their hut unused and bare. The mud floor is cool and she feels sleepy. She has to walk through the night again.

There is no wind, yet the door rattles on its hinges. She opens it. Outside, in the blinding daylight stand two men with guns.

“Chalo!”

“Who are you?”

“Who were with you in the ambush?”

“What ambush?”

“Don’t pretend.” They shove at her and try to enter the hut. She stands in the way.

“Where are your comrades?”

How did they know of her? Or was this a routine check? They weren’t men in uniform.

“I’m not a comrade.”

“Ya. We’ve heard that before. Come!”

They pull her by her wrist. Women come out of their huts as they drag Vaidehi
to a jeep standing under the Banyan. The women bar their way. The two men hit out with their guns.

“Wait! Where are you taking me?”

“Quiet!”

“I want to know. And why?”

“Why? Why were you with your comrades at the ambush?”

A sudden flash of light seems to illuminate the world for Vaidehi. She smiles to herself.

“Shooting in the dark, are you? Which ambush are you talking of? There
is no disturbance here.”

The ploy seems to work.

They look at her body now

“Can you prove your innocence?”

“How? I don’t have anything except my words.”

“You have everything. Prove your innocence. Tonight. Keep your doors open. And remember, no tricks.”

The women crowd around her.

“They do this all the time.”

“Last time it was the police. They took away our men and
burnt the school building.”

“Earlier the comrades used it as their hideout. It was full of bullet holes and the children refused to attend school after the fighting stopped.”

“This is another group. They all know we are helpless without our men. It is always some group or the other.”

“We tried self protection, with bows and arrows, axes and hoes. Nothing helps.”

Vaidehi listens to
the voices, a choral chant, almost. She will not prove anything this time. She will stand up and fight. Not for her the cold embrace of the chasm or the heat of the funeral pyre she will not call upon her lord or any god to save her. It is her fight and she will fight it her way.

“I have a plan, sisters. Will you help?”

“Will it work?”

“Depends on us.”

She sheds her leaves. The
women drape her in a saree, red and white. She is radiant; her freshly washed, flower bedecked hair shines; her face, scrubbed clean of grime and dust is resplendent. Her doe-eyes are bright and clear.

The women stand and stare.

“Who are you?”

“Vaidehi”

They sing and dance around her. The night is luminous. Soon, the fires die down and they return to their huts.

“How many come here
usually?”

They expect some. How many, nobody knows.

The night is opaque by the time the jeeps purr into the village com pound; the wall is broken at many places. The men park their jeeps by the breach closest to the tree line that marks the forest in this part. Feral smiles crease their faces; they thump one another’s backs and head towards the huts. They have heard of this from others.

Tonight is theirs to savour and recount.

The doors open into a darkness their eyes cannot penetrate.
They enter the huts and grope for yielding flesh. They claw the air, disoriented in the dark. They hear faint sounds, the creaking of neglected doorframes.

As they grope, torches erupt, one by one.

Blinded by the sudden light, they turn and freeze, effigy like. Women with burning torches.
They turn towards doors that are shut to them.

As the huts burn and their flames ignite the sky, Vaidehi and the women leave the village.

Petrichor
Sharanya Manivannan

There was a time when I believed the trees spoke to me. And the river, in its spate, churned songs. Now, no matter what I seek to augur, I am met with silence. Nothing gives itself away.

You’ve found me after a particularly beautiful twilight. One by one, small lanterns
were lit in the garden. Like reflections of the stars slow-burning like the fire inside me. Night-blooming cereus and jasmine dispersed their fragrances into the evening, and the women who wait on me wove them into my hair. I did not ask.

It’s something that they do, in their own kindness. I am like a doll or a little sister to them. In this garden, for the first time in years, I have known
the company of other women.

But that is only for a short while. Dusk is sublime in this garden, for there are songs and gossip and on some days, laughter, and then the night curtains the sky like the long sweeping of the train of a dancing woman’s dress. They take turns trying to get me to crack a smile, and it’s become a sort of game. I am not nearly so stoic as I pretend to be, but they are
indulgent, patient. Forgiving, too. Sometimes I catch myself in a gasp of glee not unlike a snatch of childhood, and I have to remind myself how I came to be here.

I’m not saying I am happy. I’m just saying that even the banished can sometimes acquire a small measure of peace.

Supper is always an exquisite affair, and I know I should be ashamed to admit how I give myself to the pleasure
of the feast. But after all that time in the forest, wouldn’t you too savour meat, sweets and herbs not only lovely in the mouth, but hunted, gathered, cooked and served by someone else? If I am still gaunt in appearance

it is only because of the one hunger not mitigated: that ache for my beloved. So each night, when the last round of wine has been passed around—women are forbidden to consume
it here as elsewhere, but my handmaidens are resourceful, and they would hardly waste arable as rich as this—a small sadness once more takes root, intensifying as the hours pass. One by one, satiated and tired, they fall into slumber. Only I, sleepless in paradise, am wakeful.

My handmaidens call me by many sweet names-precious as the eye, jewel of the heart. The only one I have forbidden is
“little fawn”. That one pricks the conscience. When I first came here I insisted I was to be addressed as my lord’s wife. But that first evening I wept, and one of them took me in her arms and cooed and lullabied me until all of the imperiousness I had brought with me fell away, like a tight coil loosening. From then on, my true nature sighted, I became their darling. Still, sometimes I long to
hear the syllables of my own real names. Sometimes I cannot but wonder if, if I gave in to him, the emperor of this country—he with more hands than a cacophony of clocks, more faces than a hall of mirrors—might speak them to me. For now, he addresses me formally, reverentially. Whatever else you have heard, you are wrong to accept it.

They say I was named for my father, he who is not the earth
but is the coolness that tempers her, assuaging the places where she sunders into cracks, flooding fecund the holy grotto of her womb. They say that my parents made love, and out of that mud I rose, daughter. That on some ancient night under an evanesced moon,
he had arrived in an electric flash, under cover of cloud, and buffeted into her. My father, the storm, and his bride, the soil.

And
on nights like this one, when the day’s brief revelries have vanished and once more I feel a distance from all that tethers me, I want to believe it. So I tell myself that it is true, and if it is true, then I can walk barefoot under a shroud of stars and speak to her, my mother, sole to soul. My cold skin against her dark, pacific body. My brothers, those tall ashokas, holding my hair to the wind.

O my loneliness.

To be of the earth is to be of exile. For a very long time after this body returns to its origins, they will speak of this as though I had been condemned by a fate not spun from their own limitations, their need to measure the immense, name it, stake a claim to it.

And even if they were right, tell me—is there a place where the child of the earth can walk and not be welcomed?
You pity me as if I have been held a prisoner. As though the child of the rain could become anything but a woman in the shape of water, neither captured nor contained.

Do you think I didn’t see you, crouching on a high branch of that bodhi tree, well before nightfall? I saw you and I stifled my scream because you saw me at that same moment. Your eyes met mine. Don’t ask me why I trusted
you. Even in paradise, there are those who plot escape. Besides, you also looked a little terrified.

Ugly one, you must have gotten hungry, because after I went back to acting like I hadn’t spotted you, you abandoned your scrutiny—oh, you call it vigil, do you?-for a few minutes, and that’s when I slipped away. By then most of my handmaidens were snoring, anyway, and the few still hovering
on the precipice would have fallen asleep from the sheer effort of trying to follow me, I am sure. There was something endearing about the way you were biting into that pomegranate when I found you, and
the way you dropped it and fumbled to stand at attention when you saw me. Don’t give me this stern look now. I saw you smile when I started to giggle. Even teeth like yours look charming in a
happy face.

No, thank you, I don’t want any. I don’t like pomegranates. They remind me of another story about what it means to be the daughter of the earth.

Now, you have to understand: I can’t go back with you. I have seen the ring you bear and I know it is my lord’s. I have seen your silly grin and I know that you are a friend. But—how do I put this?—my lord sometimes is as fickle as a
common man. I cannot tell you how often I was made to feel grateful in Panchavati that I have yet to bear children. Two petulant princes were enough to take care of. The stories I could tell you! Will you come and visit me again? I could tell you some stories then. Or stay till the girls wake up. If I introduce you to them, they will like you. Do you have a wife?

See, this is what I meant.
So you’ve been warned that if he doesn’t see your hairy face by daybreak he will storm the city walls. Ay, what did I tell you? So, listen, you can’t stay and I can’t leave. If I climb on your back and arrive there, there is no telling what he will say. No, you can’t uproot a tree with me sitting in it! Nature deserves more respect than that. Here is my ring. If my lord is my lord, he will know it
for what it is. Take it with my love and my faith.

What did you say your name was again?

Well, Hanuman, I have seen you to be a friend, and so I want you to treat me as one too. Call me Sita, or Janaki, or Vaidehi, or Tharini. Whichever you please. Yes, I like the last one too. Will you at least let me tell you why, before you go?

Before I was a prisoner, I was an exile, and before
I was an exile, I was a princess, and consort to the next regent of the dynasty
of the sun. Before all this however, I was a newborn found in a furrow by a king who loved me as his own child. And before even that, I was the furrow itself, freshly ploughed, a thriving, primal consciousness.

Women are not meant to be unmappable territories. My father, the king, so used to guarding borders and
the cartography of commerce, could not have understood. So much of this life of mine is a reaction to rumour, yet I myself am an infinite constant.

I wasn’t the earth’s daughter, dear monkey. I was the earth herself. I have no mother to call on in my solitude, only the memory of myself.

You seem learned. Look in the early scriptures. I am called there by name, the name my lord knows me by,
though that too is a diminutive. There’s a hymn to me. I am invoked to bless the harvest. I am abundance itself. I predate him. I predate everything.

Everything, that is, but my first conqueror.

It started with a drought. Have you ever longed for something, Hanuman, but only longed for it because it had disappeared when, before, it had always been there?

I long for my lord now in
that same way. I hope it’s a loneliness you will never have to know. You say my eyes light up each time his name is spoken, but so do yours. Maybe we would both do well to love more cautiously.

Please don’t take what I am about to tell you as disloyalty. It would break his heart to discover that I am not a province to be possessed, presided over. I’m only telling you because I think you would
under stand. Like me, you seem to be something other than human.

When I was the earth itself, an unfathomable topography, there came a time when the rain stopped falling.

I was used to him, of course. I expected him. In some ways I had always thought of him as an extension of me, and I began to feel his absence across the vast terrain of my body. Small crevices opened in me, deepening as
the days passed, and with them a thirst as blinding as any a mortal could endure, perhaps worse. I could no longer support life—and so I learnt barrenness.

Little by little, with every passing day, everything died. Plants, wildlife, languages. I absorbed those entities back into me, weeping without tears. That was the first time I knew loss, separation. That was the first time I understood
that even an island, by definition, can not exist without the thing that isolates it.

Eventually, it was only me—the last living thing, parched beyond belief. I had begun to hallucinate. I dreamt of sweat, of the taste of dew, of the relief of tears. Finally, defeated, desperate, I stared the horizon down, forfeiting eternity, willing my own death too, and then I saw it.

At first I thought
it was another mirage. A pageant of clouds in the distance, their shadows looming over the expanse of dust like a promise.

And he came to me in his thunder, sudden, a downpour in a drought. And I drank my fill of him, took him deep within me until every last rupture in me came alive in torrents of electricity. “Flood me,” I cried out in my yearning. And he did. I turned into liquid, a deluge
of desire overwhelming me—the tempest adoring, engulfing, the terrain. The storm of our love. Shocked arrows of lightning ran through me. The world dissolving into rivulets of mud. The rumble and roar of his spill onto me. When it was over, I wept deeply, sated.

“I’m sorry I’ve been gone so long, my love,” he said. And in that moment I had no other lord, no other husband. “Ask me for a boon.
I was at the service of the crescent-crowned one, the lord of the meeting rivers, and he will let me give you just one.”

Oddly enough, now, I don’t think of him when it rains, but
afterward, when from the ground rises that smell from the mingling of red earth and pouring rain. Petrichor.

“Life,” I breathed. “I want to know what it means to be mortal, to love and live within a limited
time.”

I asked for it. Just as I asked for exile into the forest, when I could have stayed in Ayodhya, a queen-in-waiting. Just as I ask you now to leave without me, and let my lord do what he will. Knowing even as I say it what it will come to mean to this garden, these friends, the strange peace I have come to make with myself in this place.

For that, I will take my lord as example. The
people admire him because he always does what he has to do. He makes his duty his destiny. I won’t deny him the spoils of a war fully relished.

I waited some millennia before I took this life. Why? Because I didn’t want to be lonely. How ironic! Some call it fate. I call it cosmic monkeyshine.

Good. That was meant to make you smile.

Look to the east. That’s the morning on its way.

You must leave now. Take heart, my friend. Avoid capture; my handmaidens are far kinder than those who guard this city. May you be swift.

I will wait in this garden until he comes. Don’t worry about me. I want nothing less than a love that submerges me completely, and so I can bear this lonesomeness a little longer. My lord will come. Don’t you understand that I can only tremor within myself,
even in despair? It is he who has the power to move. For the sake of his crown, if not his queen, he will come.

I will see you in Ayodhya. I will adorn you with my own jewels. Remember the night that has passed even if we never speak of it again.

Take as many pomegranates as your paws can carry.