Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (22 page)

The Princess in the Forest
Mary Anne Mohanraj

It is always summer in the forest. The sun shines down through the tall trees, the leaves of spreading banyan and coconut palm. Monkeys race from limb to limb, hanging precariously by single arm or leg; parakeets swoop and glide, silhouetted for dark moments
against the brightness of sky.

The princess walks for hours, her face smooth as an undisturbed pool of water, her eyes laughing, light as butterflies. New-married, full of adoration for her husband, her prince. Rama hunts in the forest; he pursues the slender hart, lays traps for cunning rabbits. But always he comes to his Sita before the sun is down, comes to their modest hut, their gentle
home in exile. He smiles to see her, lays the game aside and takes her in his arms, draws her down to the forest floor, the soft grasses, and she loves him then, as the gopis loved blue Krishna, she loves him with everything she has, everything she is.

“Samiksha—you’ll be late!” Her husband scolds from the kitchen doorway, their youngest daughter tucked under one arm, a book nestled in the
other. Three days a week he watches the children, the days he doesn’t teach, so that they can spend that time with a parent instead of with the hired black nanny. Samiksha doesn’t know how he can read and mind the girls at the same time; she can’t even think when she’s with them. She can’t understand now what had possessed her to keep having children, one after another, until there were six small
heads to
be tucked into bed. It was only after giving birth to Lakshmi that she had finally come to her senses.

Samiksha had told Arvind that she would have no more children, that as soon as Lakshmi was weaned, she wanted to find a job. She had been ready with her arguments—had expected that she would have to win her husband over, talk him around. None of the other professors’ wives worked.
But she was different; she was smart, special. Samiksha had left India at nineteen, had attended graduate school at Oxford, one of very few women admitted. She possessed a doctorate in physics from Oxford, even if it was now a decade out of date—surely
someone
would hire her to teach. Samiksha had been unaccountably angry when Arvind hadn’t given her a chance to use her readied arguments, had
only placidly agreed to her proposal.

Lately, even his gentlest words have driven her into a fury.

“I’m going, I’m going. I can’t find my gloves. Where’s my coat? What did you do with it?” She’s frenzied, stomping from one room to the next, looking behind overstuffed leather chairs, under sofa cushions.

“Your coat’s in the closet; I hung it up. The gloves are in the left pocket.” Lakshmi
has fallen asleep against Arvind’s shoulder, soothed by the solidity of his thick body. She is four now, too old to be carried around on her father’s arm, but she has been a strange, slow child from the beginning, and Arvind doesn’t seem to mind the extra attention she needs.

Samiksha should be grateful for his care for the children, for her, but a wave of resentment sweeps through her instead,
at the criticism implied. It isn’t fair, but she can’t help it. Should she be grateful, that the important University of Chicago professor allows his wife to work, takes time out of his busy day so that she can teach at the high school for money they don’t need? Other wives would be grateful; her own mother would tell her to thank Mother Mary for such a saint of a husband, and would then scold
her for not spending more time at home, taking care of such a good, brilliant man.

“You’ll have to reheat the rice and curries from yesterday; I need to meet with a parent after school; I’ll be home late.” Instead of feeling grateful, Samiksha takes a small, petty pleasure in making Arvind eat old food, a pleasure somehow more intense because she knows he would not have noticed if she hadn’t
pointed it out. And without a kiss, or another word, she pulls on the coat, storms down the hallway and out the door, not bothering to button the buttons or pull on her gloves, taking satisfaction in the winter wind that will undoubtedly give her a cold before nightfall. Let Arvind work a little harder the next few days. It will be good for him.

In the evenings, Rama cleans and dresses the
game; Sita slices wild onions, cooks savory curries and coconut roti over a small fire. They each have their appointed tasks and perform them together, companion-ably, in perfect harmony. The prince’s brother arrives, just before the meal is ready. Lakshman is a lazy thing; he rarely brings anything to add to the pot. What does he do in the forest, all day long? There is nowhere to go, no one to see.

They have been in the forest for days, weeks, years. They have been in exile so long that the princess has forgotten what it is to see a familiar face, a face other than that of her husband or his brother. Sita has only monkeys for company, who screech and gibber in the day, in the night, endless in their complaints. With wide faces and brazen eyes, they follow her as she moves barefoot through
her days, her crimson wedding sari (all she owns in this exile) like a slender flame in the forest. The monkeys do not worry her; she is a princess, after all, and her husband is a prince. She has nothing to fear from monkeys.

Sometimes she imagines a demon watches her too, with eyes wide and shameless. A handsome creature; his heated gaze strips the silk from her skin, leaving her naked and
trembling.

Samiksha cannot pay any attention to the white man, the concerned father who sits across from her desk. There was a time when Samiksha would have worried about a student of hers who was doing so poorly, would have taken extra trouble, extra time to tutor the child. In her first year of teaching, she’d been so grateful to be out of the house, away from the endless rounds of washing
diapers and cooking dishes (two sets—one spicy for her husband, one mild for the children), that she’d thrown all her frustrated mental energy into her students. But the endless weeks, one after another, teaching the same things to the same slow minds—it was just as bad as diapers. What they called algebra, geometry—it was only arithmetic, really. It wasn’t anything that stretched her mind, made
her feel like she was actually doing something interesting, worthwhile, important. Only the novelty had made it seem an improvement over diapers and dishes.

As the man drones on about his errant daughter, Samiksha slips into her familiar daydream, the epic story her own father had told her, at night, as she fell asleep. He had filled her head with stories of brave Rama, his beloved wife Sita,
loyal Lakshman. As a child, Samiksha had believed every word, had absorbed them as she slowly fell asleep. Her father sat under the mosquito netting with her, smoothed sweat-damp hair from Samiksha’s forehead in the heat of Madras summer. He even fanned her with a handy piece of paper so that she could fall asleep. The paper invariably scribbled over with math; it was from her father that Samiksha
had learned to love math and physics, the clean sense of their underlying structures. He had taught his eldest daughter as a game, an amusement, at first. But she had been quick to learn, eager for the challenge; he had become caught up in her excitement, ignoring her mother’s protestations, until the day when Samiksha stepped on the boat for England. Only then did she see the stricken realization
in his eyes, that everything he
had taught her had only served to send her away from him. She had wanted to tell him that fathers always lost their daughters in the end, but she hadn’t had the words.

He had gotten sick in the midst of the war, while she was away at school. Mail, already slow, had been disrupted by the Japanese blockades; letters took months longer than normal to traverse the
long distances. He had died before her letter back had arrived; she had heedlessly offered to come home, though there was no guarantee that she could even find someone to carry her back across the dark waters. Arvind had al ready proposed by then, and Samiksha had accepted, though she had not yet had the courage to write to her father, to tell him that she had met a man, had fallen in love, that
she wasn’t coming home, not yet. And then it was too late. Would her father have wanted her to marry Arvind, to move with him to his new job in America? Would he have worried about her, as this father worries about his own daughter?

The poor student’s plight is not enough to focus Samiksha’s attention—now she considers the body of the white man sitting across from her, at a student’s desk.
His long legs fit awkwardly under the low desktop, and Samiksha wonders what he would look like if he could stretch out properly. On a low sofa, perhaps, or a broad bed. He stares fixedly at her, and she wonders what he sees. A brown woman who should better know her place? Or does he see an exotic beauty, a princess from the storybooks? After six children, she is no longer slender, but her breasts
are full, her broad hips might seem appealing. Samiksha is a respectable woman, a professor’s wife, a Catholic. She would never accede to any invitation. But she does wonder what it would be like, to be looked at, to be desired again by hot and feverish eyes— that, she imagines, would be satisfying. That would be some compensation.

Someone has stolen the princess! It is a demon, a monster,
who
stole her away, who flew Sita up over the mountains, across the sea, to the barbaric island of Lanka. The prince was away, hunting; the prince was not paying proper attention. And no one knows what Lakshman was doing; he has served his purpose, his part in the story is done. But now Rama gathers a great army, and it is the monkey king who leads them, through the dark forests, over the churning
sea.

The princess waits in a tall tower, resisting the demon’s advances. Sita wants to be a good wife; if the demon comes too close, she threatens to throw herself off the edge, down onto the sharp rocks. She has never been in a tower so high, and secretly, she wants to jump, to feel the wind rushing again as it did when the demon snatched her. His glossy obsidian claws came down around her,
caging her in, sweeping her through the air, her crimson sari trailing like a banner behind them. Nothing in her life has been as exciting as that flight. But Sita does her duty, she clings to the crumbling stone of the ancient tower, she teeters over the edge, but does not, in fact, fall.

Samiksha knows she should go straight home. The girls will be fed by now, but they will still be raucous,
full of energy. Leilani will be running up and down the stairs, Lekha and Laila will undoubtedly be fighting, over dolls, or clothes, or makeup they aren’t yet allowed to wear. Latika will be drawing in her sketchbook; Samiksha thanks God every day for giving her one quiet child, and tries not to worry that all the girl seems to want to draw are human skeletons. Lulu won’t have eaten enough, and
Arvind will be coaxing her to eat a little more, and Lakshmi— Lakshmi will be sitting on the floor, sucking her thumb. Samiksha knows exactly what it will be like, and so she turns east instead of west, heading along the Midway to the lake, heedless of the cold which bites her nose, her cheeks.

She kicks her way along snowy sidewalks until the hem of her sari is drenched. Arvind is always trying
to convince her to wear
Western clothes, insisting that she will be more comfortable; he has never understood that it is only the clothing from home which makes her feel comfortable. When Samiksha wears her saris, she can close her eyes and block out the brutal cold; she can imagine herself back in Madras, in her father’s study perhaps, sitting beside him under the lazy ceiling fan, working out
the answer to a problem he’s set her—or in the market with her mother, listening to the cries of the fruit and vegetable sellers, fingering the rows of cheap glass bangles. She would throw a few coins to an armless beggar and for a moment feel rich, and blessed, and lucky. Once, before she’d started working again, Arvind had refused to buy her another new sari, and so Samiksha had worn the same
green sari every day for a month, to faculty dinners and receptions, until he was so ashamed that he gave in.

She crosses the bridge over Lake Shore Drive, her fingers icy against the metal handrail. She walks out onto the broken stones, the massive rocks leaning into the lake. Her feet are still nimble, and for a moment, she remembers the dancer she was as a little girl, the dancer her mother
wanted her to be. If she had never studied math, never gone to England, who would she have married? Would she have become the perfect wife, the Sita of the story? Samiksha stands there a long time, watching the waves crash hard against the unyielding stone, feeling the wind whip against her, before turning back for the long walk home.

It has become apparent that the demon Ravana is only going
through the motions. Sita does not know why he stole her away at all; he appears to have lost all interest. If he really wanted her, he could have taken her by now, before she ever made it to the tower’s edge. If she jumped, he could snatch her out of the falling air. What could she do to resist him?

“Samiksha, come to bed. Come to bed,
rasathi.”

Rasathi. Princess. Arvind is full of soft
touches and honeyed words these days, the guilt lacing through him. She can tell.
You don’t marry a man against your mother’s wishes, you don’t give up your work to have his children, you don’t spend a decade sleeping by his side without knowing when something has changed. Samiksha doesn’t know who the woman was, but she knew when it started, and when it ended. Three months of carrying on, and
she never said a word, to anyone. If she had written to her mother in Madras, she knows what would have come back—written in a pale hand on fragile onionskin paper, instructions to be patient, be understanding, and perhaps to take a little more trouble with her appearance. Instead Samiksha cooked with abandoned fury, dissolving entire sticks of butter into the uppuma, tossing the rice with toasted
almond oil, heaping her plate high with spicy potatoes. Ate bite after bite until her stomach felt swollen, painful, and the sweat rolled down her face. When the affair ended, she almost relented, almost gave in. Almost.