Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (26 page)

Then I was Kalpana, and I was Kavita, and I was Vaidehi, and it was evening by the time I recovered my balance and sense of orientation.

I was almost asleep on the dry grass apology of a mattress when I heard steps.
Someone was approaching.
I opened my eyes a peep. A woman stood at the cave entrance, and a shaft of moonlight fell on her face. Madhulika.

I sprang up and assumed
a defense stance. Crouched, ready to spring, I asked, “How did you find me?”

“I came to warn you,” she said, pulling her shawl tighter around her. “My coordinator knows your location. He may try to harm you.”

I had no reason to trust her. “Explain.”

“I asked him about you last evening. You see, we have been told things about Ambapur women.” Madhulika peered at me, as if deciding what
to tell me. “You are supposed to be ugly and malformed, and incapable of womanly emotions like love because you women are genetic freaks and clones who pleasure each other instead of men, and oppose the natural order of humanity to the extent of using intelligence to
compete
with men instead of supporting and serving them. But you showed sympathy to me, as did the Vaidehi before you, so I began
to have doubts.”

“You don’t look the way I expected a Navabharata woman to look, either,” I conceded, marveling that we were discussing the future while living a past supposed to change it. I stayed crouched as I spoke, though. Madhulika’s presence here could be a Navabharata trick.

She nodded. “My coordinator laughed and said your predecessor died because he sabotaged her fireproofing by
jamming some signal. He’s the washerman who taunted your husband for the fire test. He claimed you were now hiding in
a cave in the forest and he knew your location by tapping your sync signals. He downloads all data you transmit.”

My stomach felt heavy, like a weight had sunk in it.

“Till yesterday,” Madhulika continued, “I believed that I must be a role model-an ideal woman who complemented
men in accordance with our basic nature, our true gender role. Last night, when I realized that what I’d learned about Ambapur women was exaggerated, I wondered whether I’d also been fooled about other things.”

Ditto here, I thought.

“So, I came here.”

“Well,” I said. “Right.” I lowered the stone.

She sat down. She looked very tired. The walk here must have been exhausting for her,
given her advanced pregnancy.

“What’s your plan?” she asked.

Her mission was to nudge history in the opposite direction. I said nothing.

“Who is your coordinator?” she asked.

I kept my lips pressed tight. I wasn’t willing to expose myself yet.

“My coordinator may try to kill you,” she said. “He tried to kill me.”

“Kill you? Why?” I stared at her.

“When he realized I was rethinking
this whole Ambapur-women- are-abominations business, he got very agitated. He threatened me. He even kicked me. But I shouted out, as if I had just spotted some thieves, and he slunk away.”

Even across the years, I remember Madhulika’s grimace at that memory, her closing her eyes for an instant.

She sighed then, a tired sigh. “That’s when I decided to leave home. I don’t want to live in
fear of my coordinator. My husband means nothing to me; I lived with him only because of my
mission. But I don’t want to bring up my child in a place like that. I am so confused.”

She tilted her neck back and looked at me. I didn’t know what to say-we were opposites, weren’t we?

I stuck to practicalities. “He’ll trace you using your sync button.”

“No.” She removed her shawl.

The wound
was obvious despite the thick slathering of herbal paste. The right breast was tattered where the sync button was gouged out, and rags of torn skin hung from it.

I shuddered.

“I threw the button down the river. I also threw in blood-smeared clothes. They will drift back to the shore downriver, and people will assume I fell in the water.”

Night owls cried raucously, crickets chirped. I
spread the grass thinner to make another place. Moonbeams lent silver highlights to her night-dark hair.

“Sleep,” I told her. “We can talk tomorrow.”

After a while, her gentle snores filled the night. But I could not sleep.

The Navabharata coordinator could locate me. He was accessing my messages to Seniormost. Yet I needed to tell her about this development.

After much thought, I
encrypted my message using a code based on the Ambapur literature not available outside our country. The agent would know where I was, but would not be able to decipher my message.

Seniormost’s encrypted message came back fast enough, but brought no cheer.

You cannot switch off the sync signals,
I decoded.
The device sends out signals every few hours, whether or not you transmit a message,
but you cannot control that. You will have to mislead the Men’s agent.

I pondered over the information while staring at the culprit wart. It seemed to me that our country’s approach of Futurist agents changing past gender forks was doomed to fail. Navabharata, a country several hundred times larger, was flush with resources. If they wanted, they could send multiple agents to hunt down and
sabotage every Ambapur agent. They could flush every gender fork with required role models. They could keep the past favorable, because a favorable past had made them rich enough to manipulate the past-historical inertia closed the loop.

They could kill me.

As soon as it was dawn, despite the risk of being traced, I initiated contact with Seniormost. She had probably expected it, because
she was present in the control room.

Again, I used encryption. As I completed my explanation, my voice broke. “They will destroy me if I stay here.”

“Just hold on tight, Kalpana. The tech team is working to find a solution. Give them time.”

And live under such hostile conditions in this primitive world? “You are only thinking of the mission,” I said, my tension too sharp to hide. “So
what if it fails? It’ll just be status quo, it’s not like you will die.”

“No, we will not die if the mission fails,” Seniormost said, her voice low. “It was our fault we sent you without training. We did not explain things.”

“Trained or not, at least credit me for finding out valuable information,” I snapped. “And send a trained agent for me.”

“We’ll talk about that later,” she said.
“We are considering alternatives to keep the Navabharata agents at bay. I will call you back by evening.” Seniormost broke contact.

I was very restless after talking to her. Why weren’t they finding a replacement and recalling me? Then it struck me maybe recall was not possible. Maybe that was why we never met
agents, because sending an agent was a one-way trip, and this was a secret. Seniormost
had been evasive about replacements when I had asked. We may not have the tech for it. Or maybe it was impossible to travel to the future, which is what my present was when I was in the past.

Maybe I was stuck in this primitive world, homeless, and being tracked by the Men’s agent.

I fought my panic and went through every sentence Seniormost had uttered, looking for information I might have
missed earlier.

Like that part when Seniormost had looked sad and said,
No, we will not die if the mission fails.
Almost as if proposing a corollary: the mission’s success meant their death.

The thought stunned me.

In the rush of the past few days, I’d not thought about anything other than survival and fitting a role. Not pondered about the concept of how changing the past affected the
future, for example. Which future did it change? Were these alternate realities, parallel worlds, or just one world? If these were alternate worlds, why bother to change a different world? And if this was one world, and if the past changed, agents could alter history so that India continued as a jumble of cultures and conflicts and did not splinter into Ambapur and the rightwing- Hindu Navabharata,
and other nondescript smaller countries. Where would that leave my Ambapur and all of us who peopled it? Were Ambapur agents knowingly working on missions they would not return from, missions designed to kill our own country, like suicide bombers and jehadis a few centuries ago? No wonder I failed the psych profile; I lacked such suicidal conviction.

The moon was but a pale sphere barely visible
in the dawn sky, and I remember seeking it out and staring at it, realizing how very far Mother was. I looked at the wart, my link to my
world, and also my betrayer. Madhulika was possibly not the enemy I had assumed her to be. Maybe no one was an enemy.

I was tempted to plunge into action that would make me safe. Attack the washerman, kill him. But Navabharata could send more agents and coordinators;
it was a large country with plenty of resources. I would be safer if they thought me dead.

After peeping into the cave to make sure Madhulika was still sleeping, I walked to a rock overhanging the river. I removed my necklace with its miniature toolkit, and snapped it open to expose a tiny cutting blade. I prayed for strength, knowing that I was about to close the doors to my past, my people,
my support. Then I began working out the wart from my forearm. Lucky for me that they’d not performed the binder operation.

Our journey upriver exhausted Madhulika and induced premature la bor. I used every bit of knowledge my implant held to try and save her. I may have succeeded in a normal pregnancy, but she was carrying twins. As she tried to smile at the feeble cries of her newborn
daughters, I stroked her hand.

“You will improve,” I consoled her. “You have to bring up your daughters.”

Our interactions on our long walk upriver had been gentle and companionable. We had splashed our faces using water from the stream. Sometimes, I would notice a strawberry shrub and plucked the fruit, and Madhulika gathered it in a fold of her uttariya. Or she would spot a gourd growing
on a creeper, and I would split it open with a sharp stone so that we could share the sweet, juicy pulp. We had not discussed our contrasting credos-I assumed we would have enough time later.

Now she was dying.

“You bring up my daughters, sister Vaidehi,” she whispered.

“I don’t know your way of thinking,” I said. “My world was different.”

“Do whatever seems right, sister.” Her life
ebbed out.

In the initial days, I was often tired as I adjusted to the sudden role of nurturing the girls. A secluded cave formed our base. Using implant triggers, I induced my breasts to produce milk. Luckily, the forests abounded with fruit trees and berry shrubs. Chores filled my days-collecting water, finding fruits, cleaning the girls, feeding them. Yet as life acquired a rhythm,
I found time to soak the forest’s poetry, its flowers and animals and the sunlight-dappled wings of butterflies. Fire kept away beasts at night; I sometimes stayed up late, enjoying the texture of the night with the owls screeching, the soft descent of dew, the scent of the parijata that bloomed all night and carpeted the grass at dawn.

Sometimes, I looked at the moon and thought of Ambapur.

Years passed.

I often missed Madhulika. She held a key to a view that would have complimented and enriched mine, and now I had no way of learning it. I wondered which value to bring up her daughters to-mine, or what I knew of hers, or the values typically inculcated in women in this era.

I finally chose a mishmash, something not warped by politics and power games. My memories and imagined
extensions emerged as lullabies sung to the girls. Over time, the isolated episodes formed a rich tapestry, till one day I realized I could well be a bard singing a Sitayana, not an Ambapur version, nor, indeed, a Navabharata version, but one where Sita was a fun-loving person, even naughty at times, and where she shared a playful and rich relationship with her husband.

The girls thought I
was their mother; it was simpler that way. When they were old enough to travel, I led them by hand from village to village. I talked to village women about life and its problems, and enacted fragments of what could have been Sita’s story.

In one village my daughters, now twelve, chattered about twin boys they had met. “Their mother tells stories like yours.”

I felt a flutter inside me.
“What are their names?”

“Luv,” said one girl.

“Kush,” said the other.

I could not speak for a few moments. That Sita really existed, that she had twin sons… Emotion clogged me, thick, heavy, and I tried to force myself into thinking rationally. Sita was not a single historical truth, I told myself, though I had no way of confirming this theory of the construction of mythology. This woman
storyteller could well be an agent of Ambapur or Navabharata.

Should I meet her? No, I thought, let me move away and continue my Sitayana. The world allowed hundreds of versions.

I busied myself all day, but that night, with no distraction possible, I found myself recalling Seniormost’s sad look during our last conversation. What had she thought when she lost contact with me? Did she think
me dead? Or had she hoped I survived and assumed that, untrained though I was, I’d do what I could?

My gaze shifted to the moon. What remains fixed across time and space? What survives, what matters? Nothing, really. Yet one does what one should.

Forgive me if I succeed, Seniormost,
I whispered.
Forgive me if I fail.

Another new village, another day. We walk to the well, my girls
and I, and women balancing water pitchers on their hips ask us, “Where are you from? Who are you?”

“I tell stories,” I say. “Would you trade lentil soup for entertainment?”

They nod.

By evening, women and children gather around the village
center, where I wait for them with my daughters; some youths stand warily at a distance.

This is my life now, offering women stories that intrigue
and stretch their world vision, yet fit within it. Listeners may wonder: did the story resonate because of its courage, hope, conflicts overcome? Should the mother-in-law have been meaner, the husband more righteous, the wife more chaste? Should the women in the story have laughed more, taken things more lightly? Could a woman rebel as the story claimed? Should she? Why not? Why?