Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (23 page)

“Soon. When the news is finished, I’ll come.” Let him toss and turn in the bed, hungry for relief that will not come from her. A brief warm pleasure kindles in her stomach
at the thought. Perhaps this is why she hates Arvind most of all—because he has turned her mean and spiteful, bitter and old. When they met, Samiksha placed her hand in his, let herself be drawn down, down to the sweet green grass. She listened to his words of love, and thought she had found her prince, her Rama. Later, she felt herself betrayed; she comforted herself with bitterness, thought herself
trapped with an uncaring demon, a Ravana. But she finds it harder these days to disappear into either fairy tale, either fantasy.

When Samiksha is feeling particularly fair, she doesn’t hate Arvind at all. Sometimes, she only hates herself.

At the end of the story, Sita is rescued, the demon is killed, the monkey king dances in triumph. But the people demand that she die, for she is only
a woman, and undoubtedly she has betrayed
her husband by now. She could not live so long in a barbarian land and not open her thighs for the demon. They know that all women are faithless, in the end.

She is lost, alone, and when Sita turns to her prince, he does not stand by her, he does not hold her up, exhausted as she is by all of these difficulties, more than any princess should bear.
Rama claims to love her, to believe her—yet he gestures to the screaming crowds and says sadly that he cannot defy them. He is not an evil man, but he is, in the final analysis, weak.

What should happen now? Should Sita walk away from her prince?

Eventually, Samiksha cannot keep her eyes open any longer; she checks on the sleeping girls, then goes to her bedroom, to her marriage bed. Arvind
is long asleep, turned towards her half of the bed. She stands there, watching him sleep—then climbs under the covers and lies down with her back to him. Samiksha closes her eyes, feels the heat of Arvind’s body beside her, slowing warming the chilled sheets. She wishes she knew how to open to him again, wonders if he could warm her. Or, if it is too late for them, wonders if there might be another
path for her.

But what would she do, without her husband, her children? Whatever else she might have been is long gone; the paths are barred by walls of thorns.

It is late, and Samiksha knows how this story ends.

Sita volunteers to undergo the trial by fire, to have her virtue tested; what else can she do to keep Rama by her side? She is nothing without her husband, so what can she do,
alone in a strange forest, with the sun going down?

Sita walks into the flames, her body consumed, her spirit rising up, up, up. The princess flees home, to her sisters’ bedrooms, her mother’s arms. But they do not know her, they shriek in horror at this ghost, this pale stunted monster. Her father might have known her, but he is long since dead. So she returns, weeping salt tears in
the night,
her spirit crossing the bitter sea once more. Sita returns to her burning body, walks out of the fire, cooling so quickly as she goes, until she is solid again, composed of ice and snow. She never knew ice until her exile began. Sita walks out of the fire, her body transparent and brittle, but the prince does not notice. Perhaps he chooses not to notice. He takes her in his arms to the crowd’s
acclaim, he lays her down in the forest grass.

This is supposed to be a happy ending.

Sarama
Deepak Unnikrishnan

It’s quite simple really; my family owes its existence to the forest demon, Surpanakha.

My maternal great grandmother, Parvathy Amma, was born in a village near Talikulam, Kerala.

The word for great grandmother in Malayalam is Muthassi. She was the first woman to hold
me, to bathe me, my first loved one to die. She decided on my name, Bhagyanathan. She would call me nothing else, she hated nicknames. “Bhagyanathan!” she would yell. When she called my name, she said it like one would address a king. When she said Bhagyanathan, you would almost expect to hear the sound of chariots, the neighing of horses, the sound of footmen. I was her king.

Muthassi was
a renowned story teller in my village and in her younger days used to be invited to participate in festivals all over Kerala. Her specialty was stories from The Ramayana.

Some people have a voice made for stories, as though their vocal chords have been fashioned by Brahma himself. Muthassi’s voice was like that. Her pitch was unusual for a woman, very low, a rumble, like the purr of a cat.
Age only added to its mystique. Her voice grabbed you, didn’t let you go; the stories would then pour into your veins and intoxicate your brain. You listened until she finished; you didn’t have a choice.

But she was also a treasure trove of other tales, much darker
ones, which she was always happy to share with me. Popping balls of rice into my mouth, she would often warn me to beware of the
snakes in our garden: “They transform into human form at night, eager to snatch game they slink into the netherworld.”

I was around four years old when she started telling me stories from The Ramayana. She recited the epic to me out of sequence, concentrating more on the characters than the story itself. “Everybody,” she liked to say, “has a past that ought to be heard. The present is paralyzed
without a past.”

The scriptures I know come from her. I preferred listening to reading. I think she innately understood that.

The night she decided I needed to know the story I am about to share with you, four crows cawed outside our house at twilight for over an hour. I had just turned ten. It was monsoon season but the rains still hadn’t come. I was listening to the radio when the power
went out. She called out to me as usual for help. She needed someone to talk to in the dark. My parents were to be back the following morning. I had been left in charge, the man of the house.

I was still a small boy and struggling with the kerosene lamp, its heat kissing my thighs, I walked into her room and asked her if she needed anything.

“Close the door, my dear,” she said slowly.

“Blow out your lamp.”

I did.

The room smelled strongly of the after breath of smoke and kerosene.

“Give me your right arm,” she said.

I did, and she began rubbing my fingers one by one.

When I was still a child, people would notice quickly that my palms and feet were frog-like, too big for the rest of my body. Some kids in the village hopped like frogs, pretended to be toads, or
stuck their tongues out like lizards when they wanted to make
it clear that I couldn’t play with them. It didn’t bother me at all. I was built to be alone.

Muthassi started tugging at my fingers, at weird angles, bending them in degrees I didn’t think possible. When she snapped my index finger off, breaking it like a twig, I stared at her. There was no pain. I was more alarmed than frightened,
worried about Amma’s reaction when she would notice the missing finger. Muthassi smiled kindly.

“Don’t worry, little one, I will put it back, I wanted to check, that’s all,” she said.

And before I knew it, she stuck my index finger back on. I stared at it, wiggled it a little bit to make sure it still did what it used to do.

My eyes had adjusted to the darkness by then.

“Don’t be afraid
now,” is what she told me gently before she calmly unscrewed her head, twisting it off like a bottle cap and placing it on her lap.

“I would like to go outside, Bhagyanathan,” she decided all of a sudden, “it’s too hot here; let’s go by the pond, it’s cooler there, carry Muthassi out.”

I didn’t think too much was out of the ordinary as I held Muthassi’s’ head carefully and walked out of
the house towards the pond, a place I was forbidden to venture out by myself, especially at night.

I placed Muthashi’s head on the flat stones where Amma did our washing, facing the black and slimy water, which would turn green again at dawn. In the darkness, the pond looked like cobra skin.

“Water is significant to us,” she began, her eyes drifting towards the pond, “one of our ancestors,
The Male, crossed into Lanka over water.”

“This creature, a monkey, we are almost certain,” Muthassi said, “was a soldier in the Monkey King Sugriva’s army, first
working under the supervision of Nala and Neel, famed builders without whom the construction of The Floating Bridge would have been impossible. He, our ancestor, along with others, slaved night and day on this massive under taking
until his muscles hurt, until his body refused to cooperate.”

At night, he tended to blisters swollen with pus. It was tough work.

A significant number of monkeys and bears from the kingdom of Kishkinda had died building the bridge. Many collapsed out of exhaustion, some forgetting to eat or drink, perishing on the job. They were driven hard, not allowed to venture home, forced to sleep
near the construction site.

Sugriva was a hard task master. Yet in his eagerness to repay the debt he owed Rama, Sugriva often forgot his soldiers were mortal. Some of them didn’t appreciate the treatment and began to bitch and gossip. The situation took a serious turn when rumors started circulating about Sugriva’s chicanery in getting rid of Vali, his elder brother. Without Ram, Sugriva would
still be on the run from Vali, the grapevine opined—an honorable warrior wouldn’t have resorted to treachery in battle; only an honorable warrior deserved a seat on the throne, deserved to bed Queen Tara. The following day, the parties who started the rumor were executed.

I picture this creature often, The Male, marching with other beasts, forced to deal with the drudgeries of war, crossing
into an alien land to do battle for the prince of Ayodhya, a prince he possibly did not speak to, and I begin to wonder whether the air started to smell of war as soon as he walked over the bridge with other comrades in arms, whether giant vultures circled in the foreground, waiting to feast, and whether my ancestor felt fear.

But the story of my family’s lineage does not begin with Rama looking
out to sea, imagining the tip of the land that held his
young bride captive, as monkeys and bears busied themselves hauling stones to get the bridge built quickly. It doesn’t even begin when The Male, a biped like I, marched onwards to Lanka. Our history begins with the humiliation of Surpanakha.

The women in our family, Muthassi shared, could be traced back to a long line of demons. These
were women granted numerous boons by the lords of the netherworld and the gods in heaven, rakshashis with power, who were feared, who made mortals realize they were mortal, women who were shape shifters, unafraid of the sound of forests and of being alone with spirits who refused to be born again after their bodies were fire-lit on pyres.

In my great grandmother’s words, “The Female of our
race was one-legged, two-legged, three-legged, many-headed, short, fat, squat, tall, alive, hideous, glorious—so alive! We were so swollen with life, with glut, that we frightened those who barely lived.”

“The word demon is tainted,” Muthassi lamented, “riddled with hyperbole, caked in fear. Demon only implies evil, beings from the nether world. Rakshashis may only be beasts, may only be beasts.
It is a simplification, alluding that those who navigate the netherworld can only possess organs as dark as soot. The truth, my child, is that our ancestors were women who did what they wanted, for whom dharma meant accepting their urges, following it to the very end, not belittling it by suppressing it. Our women tested the gods, made them wish they were half-god, half-demon, down to our level,
one foot knee-deep in vice and pleasure, the other foot still tentatively holding on to Mount Meru.”

Muthassi’s head pivoted to face me, moving like a little clay bowl on the flat stones where Amma smashed wet clothes. Her hair, a mop of dirty white curls the color of gnawed bone, danced in the breeze. She stared at me for a long time,
as Amma’s great grandmother may have done when she told
this very tale.

“Bhagyanathan,” she finally said, “our women folk made mistakes. But sometimes we wanted to make them. We learned by being!”

She calmed down after that outburst, her head rocking a little from side to side from all the fuss.

It was then she spoke her name. Muthassi said: “The womb of Sarama, the Old One, is where we believe our line begins.” It was the first time I had
heard the name. Muthassi had never mentioned her before.

Among the rakshashis entrusted to guard Sita at the palace groves, Sarama was as old as the trees themselves, Muthassi said. She was from a time when our women folk were constantly abused by the mortals, hunted like vermin, pinned to trees and sacrificed at will and without warning. It was why they turned to the gods, performing penance,
sacrificing. The gods, pleased, granted them many boons. But over time, even the gods grew envious of their power, of their grasp on the underworld, and started scheming and turning against them, wary of the consequences if the rakshashas decided to invade Mount Meru.

“This war between the netherworld and the heavens lasted eons,” Muthassi said. “It has not ended.”

Sarama, our ancestor,
was old enough to remember Tataka, Sur-panakha’s grandmother. She remembered Tataka’s beauty. And she remembered the monster she mutated into, taller than a mountain, tusks sprouting out her nose like daggers, wearing the skulls of the ones she killed, a body of pure hate.

“Agastya turned her into the beast she became,” Muthassi said, “he killed her husband; in turn, she tried to kill Agastya.
Only the forests could home that rage. It was her turf.”

In Surpanakha, Tataka’s beloved granddaughter, whom Sarama had seen since she was a baby, she could clearly see glimpses of her grand mother. A beautiful child, like Tataka, Surpanakha’s spirit belonged in the forest, where she was most free, becoming one with the land, living, sleeping, hunting, mating. It was her home as much as it
had been her grandmother’s.

Many years later, after the war, the Old One still shuddered when she recalled the state of Surpanakha’s mutilation. What Lakshmana’s blade had done! Oh, what it had done!

“There are texts that write lies about her form,” Muthassi seethed. “It is as though the scribes are afraid to be truthful. They write her skin is polluted, calling it foul, bloating her physique,
making her out to be a monster so vile she putrefied anything she touched. They lie!”

“She was beautiful,” Muthassi said, “a beauty that could drive men and women mad.”

“She knew fully well every inch of her body; her form evoked de sire, possibly frightening the young God-king and his brother equally. Frightening scribes to have their quills lie so boldly.”

“Surpanakha was not Sita,”
Muthassi admitted, “but Sita could never have been Surpanakha.”

“They write that she was brutal,” Muthassi said, giving me a wry smile. “Her brutality lay only in the manner she acknowledged and chased her desire.”

“She refused to suppress her wants,” Muthassi concluded.

She paid for such audacity, marching through Ravana’s palace doors with sliced breasts, no ears and a disfigured nose.
Ravana’s guards, men used to the bedlam of war, stood by, stunned into silence, letting her pass. She would not crouch, she did not whimper, she was defiant, walking bare-bosomed into Ravana’s court; she met everyone’s eye. When she spoke, the courtiers and the ministers turned their faces away, un able to look. She was visibly in pain. But they heard her; they heard the screams, of
rage, of
hurt, of vengeance. And when the king himself jumped from his throne to comfort his mutilated sister, the siblings, reunited for the first time since the troubling circumstances of her husband Dushtabuddhi’s death, embraced in anguish. And wept.

The ten-headed Ravana, weeping tears of fury, caressed his sister’s hair, held her body like she was little again, running after her older brothers
in the forests, watched by Tataka who doted on her grand children. He did this openly, in front of his courtiers and guards. But she would have none of it, composing herself quickly. Pity wasn’t what Surpanakha had come for. She refused to let Ravana drape her body with cloth. The pain would pass; her wounds would remain bare and unclothed, until she had her revenge.

Our ancestor Sarama awoke
from her slumber to the sound of a ten-headed scream that filled the air with dread, a scream Muthassi mimicked, her mouth opening as wide as the hole that swallowed Sita, so wide that her head became all mouth. It was a terrible scream.

In the village, those who heard that guttural cry that night woke and began to pray; animals whimpered; woodland spirits stopped moving. The gloom was exactly
as it had been when the leaves of Lanka turned gray, birds falling from the sky refusing to fly, and the trees beginning to bleed.