Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (27 page)

“Once,” my
story usually starts, “in a land not far from here, a king found an infant in a furrow, and he named her Sita.”

At this point, I pause to look at my audience.

I sometimes consider myself a vendor of silk to tapestry weavers. Listeners choose threads they wish to weave into their own stories. They may chant them to insomniac children, use them to inspire or scold. Fragments of my tales will
meander down generations. Of the tales sung by multitude of bards, which would live on to form the world?

My true story remains unsaid. I cannot speak of Ambapur or Navab-harata, nor mention Seniormost, who may never exist in the new reality. I cannot tell my daughters about their real mother. Those would be anachronisms, threatening the fragile fabric that worlds rest on. Yet memories are
slippery, and stories strung with their fragments more so, and I dread that, when I am old, I will jumble up the past and the future with the present, sounding demented when I am being most truthful.

Then a voice usually pipes up, pulling me back to the reality I am creating.

“We have heard some versions of the Sita story before,” it says. “Tell us yours.”

And so I tell the story I think
will fit.

Machanu Visits the Underworld
Victoria Truslow

In the Royal Cinema

Hanuman is born at 7:45 every Friday night in a converted cinema in north Bangkok. It happens without fail, even now, when the audience at the khon-dance is smaller than it’s ever been: three university students, an elderly couple,
a single tourist. Even now, oblivious to the riots in the downtown streets, cursed Sawaha stands as she always has, on her desolate mountaintop, stage left , only air to fill her wide parched mouth. She stands as commanded, balanced on one leg, until the god of the wind comes to her.

He blows Lord Isuan’s cosmic weapons into her mouth (sings the re citer, standing red-uniformed in the wings,
and L.E.D. subtitles translate for the lone tourist’s benefit) and inside her body she forges them into a child: sword for backbone, jewelled trident for torso, diamond discus for a head. He springs from her mouth (the reciter tells us; on the stage, he springs from behind the painted mountaintop). He hangs in the air, starlight the pigment of his mask and costume, and curse-freed Sawaha calls him
to her side, tells him of his destiny.

The audience feel the chill of the wide dark theatre, hear whispers like a ringing on their ear-rims. The front row is filled
with hanumans, shades of Friday last and the Friday before, and before, and before. Their approval dances diamond motes through the stage-air: this new Hanuman will do. His face is spot-on, if his somersaults leave a little to
be desired.

“You were finer, of course,” one shade says to another. They would not be here but for all these empty seats, would have diffused gently back into the story-stuff except that the story wants watchers. They don’t make as potent an audience as a full room of living people would, can’t offer their breath and blood-beats and dreams, but they see the cosmic shadows inside the song and
dance. They see the old heat when Hanuman torches Longka, see the starlight in his fur-true starlight, just like theirs.

They jostle and whistle as Hanuman-on-the-stage pursues Supanna Macha, Totsakan’s lovely mermaid daughter. In the aisle, the shade of a monkey with a fish-tail taps his mother on the arm. “Is that you, ma? Why’s he chasing you?” They sit in the aisle because their great bulky
fishtails won’t fold comfortably in the seats.

“Yes,” she says, putting an arm as pale as dried-out salt around him. “And that’s Hanuman, your father. He’s chasing me because I got the better of him. Your father, ah, he can breathe the moon and stars, and pull a jewelled trident from his own flesh, but he’s never been thwarted by a tribe of fish before. He thinks he’s angry but really the whole
idea has enchanted him. But look now.”

The whole Ramakian would run too long for even these bold watchers. So Hanuman’s set pieces are strung together into a two-hour show, the programme notes explaining the jumps in his tale. Right now, the demon Maiyarap is creeping away from Ram’s camp, with Ram himself potioned asleep, light as hollow plastic, under his arm, to lock up in the underworld
forever, or perhaps put into a soup-a heady soup that would
be. He comes to a lotus pond guarded by a fish-tailed monkey. Machanu lets him cross to where the greatest lotus-blossom yawns; Mai yarap jumps up, and drops his captive into the hollow stem. Then he follows, vanishes down the lotus-chute into the underworld, Ram tumbling oblivious before him.

He may be a dance-wrought shadow
of an immortal story-creature, but the young fish-tailed monkey in the aisle is easily distracted, knows there’s more to him than this scene, but has forgotten the rest, too snared by the moment, must constantly ask Supanna Macha what’s happening. They, of course, don’t have a programme. “Is that me?” he gasps when Hanuman-on- the-stage comes to the pool, and wrestles exquisitely with the Machanu
who guards it. The embroidered tail the dancer wears is so fine! “Why am I fighting my father?”

Supanna Macha sometimes falls into thinking she really is an ocean-queen, not just the skin of one, shed by a dancer, snakelike. She remembers things she never danced, as from a dream.

“It’s complicated,” she says.

“Why?”

“Well, I had to leave you on the shore, in case your grandfather ate
you for being an enemy’s son. So Maiyarap-he works for Totsakan-adopted you, and see, you’re guarding the entrance to the underworld for him. Now Hanuman wants to get down there to rescue Ram, and you two don’t recognise each other, so you fight.”

“But we look exactly the same! Except for my tail. What, did he forget he married a mermaid?”

“Yes,” she sighs. “And look at you, you’ve forgotten
everything too. It’s true, children have such terrible attention spans these days.”

Hanuman reveals his identity, but Machanu-on-the-stage challenges that too: My father can breathe out the moon and the stars, he says. He is a great immortal god, you’re just a common soldier monkey! And Hanuman raises his head, and makes a funnel with his hands, and breathes stars, planets, and the moon
itself in a mirrorball rush to whirl in the dye-blue sky over their heads.

“Now we’re together again,” says Machanu-watching, with a wide monkey-grin. “We can be a family-you’ll come join us, right?”

“That’s not how it goes,” she says. “You’ll have other journeys-just not in this show.”

“Tell me!” he says.

“Another time, watch this now!” But he pulls at her arm, again and again.
“Well,” she says, reminding herself to be patient. If her son dreams of ancient adventures, it’s clear he doesn’t remember. ‘Your father steals Ram back from your foster-father. And you help in the war. Ram makes you vice-king of the underworld, with a great many monkey subjects.”

“I’ll come visit you, and the sea,” he says. He can tell from the way Machanu-on-the-stage moves that water is
his element.

“You won’t need the sea. In the end, Ram cuts your fishtail off . You can live easier among the monkeys that way, you see.”

He claps hands to his hip-fins with a cry. “But then I’ll have no tail at all!”

“Don’t be churlish!” she scolds him. “Your tail for a kingdom? If you don’t want it you shouldn’t join in the wars of monkeys and men.”

“I never chose to!” he whines.
How unfair it seems-even Supanna Macha, stuck in story-tar along with him, can’t know how unfair it is.
She’s
not stuck with a mother, no one tells her what to do. And she thinks she knows all the answers, but how does she?

“Who chooses anything?” she says. “You
do
it, it’s yours, so the consequences are yours, and you should be glad for them. What else would you do?”

Machanu puts his hand
to his mouth, the way he’s seen his father do on stage, to show mischievous laughter. “I think I’ll have a word with Ram,” he says.

Hanuman-on-the-stage gets up to sneak into the underworld as Machanu sleeps. And this little Machanu, down here in the audience, screws him self up tiny as a fly, and leaps to sit in the whorl of beads on the shoulder of Hanuman’s costume.

Hanuman looks into
the stem of the lotus and sees it is a deep well into a dark red land. He can hear the demons down there. With the spotlight-bright galaxy of his breath still spinning lazily above, he puts a mischievous hand to his mouth and jumps.

On his shoulder, in a whorl of diamond fur, Machanu holds on, young fish-tailed monkey tiny as a fly.

In the Underworld

The underworld’s sky is red wet
soil, just as the world’s sky is the wet blue soil of the lowest heaven. There are demon-cities in the distance, and before them stretches a plain sparse with black bone-palms, and between the plain and the lotus-chute are cave-bloated hills, and in the heart of the hill at the heart of the hills is Maiyarap’s workshop.

Look what’s inside: Ram steeped in sweet grey sleep, lionhearts on
his breath. Only lions would make a strong enough poison for
him.
He stands pretty as a shop-front mannequin, absent, scooped out from himself, admired by twilight-skinned Maiyarap who, stirring, stirring, pulls a long sinuous fish from his pot, cuts and peels, unwinds secrets from veins and cells. Secrets to tangle wars, stitch up cities, choke kings. At the back
(or front, depending on which
world you’re coming from) of the workshop, a door. Through the door, the entrance-chamber to the underworld. Here Jantraprapa sits in an alcove in the high wall, and her hair runs tear-tangled to the ground, and her deep red-earth voice laments the demon race. Her daughter Pirakuan stirs the broth in her great cooking-pot. Hanuman lands silently, makes himself tiny, and creeps under the workshop-door.

So it always is, always was, in this moment, but now Machanu leapt from Hanuman’s shoulder and crouched as Hanuman crept. He crouched and watched his father slip deeper into the underworld, then slowly grew back to his right size. He looked about, he saw the demon-women, mothers of his false family. Now he’d met his true father, who looked so much like him but had no fish-blood and could
breathe stars. What should he care for these women?

The demoness before him sang softly as she stirred her pot, a song of her own making:

I’ll count the hearts a brother can hold

And I’ll count the hearts a sister can boil

And all the times my toil’s been told

Until I can see above the soil.

She saw him as he grew, and shook her head, half-glad for a young fish-tailed
monkey to pester her thoughts away from the task at hand. “Why are you wearing a mask, little ‘Nu?”

So he was-a white papier mache thing with a merry snarl worked into it, teeth crudely cut from oyster-shells. No memory of putting that on, but there it was. He hung it on a jag in the wall and scratched the fur of his forehead, hard to think through the song-stained steam that billowed about
the chamber.

“I came down, need a favour, Aunt Pirakuan,” he remembered.
“Need a spell to stop the human-king from hurting a scale of my tail, then I’ll be gone, I swear.” He saw the shelves on the wall held jars of hearts, great and small hearts, pickled and preserved hearts, ravaged hearts, deadly hearts. “Will any of these do?”

“He’s Ram, little monster, doom of all of us. Can’t change
that, or him. But my fool brother wants him in a soup, and here I am stirring up the broth, for all we’ll never taste a drop of him. Hanuman’ll come, whisk him away, win the war-you should go along with them. No need for you to stay on the wicked side. I’m sure you’ll be rewarded.”

“That’s what I’m worried about,” said Machanu, watching her season the broth with snakeblood, trying to remember
more. What was that place, that strange dark chamber where his mother warned him of his fate among seats like red teeth? He knew he had never seen his mother except in dreams. He felt like the mask on the wall, head filled with smoke.

“Why are you still cooking, if he’s getting rescued?” he asked.

“What else can I do? Maiyarap demands a soup, our mother sits in the wall and mourns, and I
boil up the water to cook the human-king.

You know, I’ve heard the rumble of the war being won up there too many times to count, but no one’s ever thought to kill me. My brother, at least he forgets being bludgeoned by Hanuman with those great black trees over and over. I’ve been putting up with mama’s moaning since time began—but my broth is so sweet by now, I could almost be happy. A thousand
stories spicy, this pot, but never to have its main ingredient. You wouldn’t think the world would miss just one Ram, just once, would you?”

“You said you can’t change him,” said Machanu. “Like you can’t even try.” Surely that was wrong. He’d come down here, hadn’t he, and that was trying.

“Oh, of course you can’t. He keeps the world together, everyone knows that. Even sleeping. He dreams
it. Probably we’re only still
standing here because he’s dreaming. Wouldn’t do to go and ruin everything, not now I’ve got my soup sweeter than it’s ever been. Go back to your pond, Machanu.”

She shooed him back up the lotus-stem, to his lonely gate-pond with Hanuman’s starry breath swirling above it still. But it all looked so suddenly small, even these stars. It was as if he could reach
them with his hands-and how big the night beyond was! Where to go? Somewhere, anywhere that wasn’t this spot, where all there was to do was to wait around for his true father to come out with tail-chopping Ram!

Through the Forest

Between the gate-pond and the sea lay a night-forest, all hung with dew, with fireflies and golden fruit, like a galaxy. He’d go tree-swinging as other monkeys
did, he thought. And up leapt he into a high moon-etched tree, clever monkey-fingers grasping swiftly-but his tail slapped and flapped against the scratchy bark, hip-fins snagged on twig-tips. The scuffed bark glittered his own scales back at him, stolen shine for some dumb bird to come and peck at in the morning.

This wasn’t dignified.

Down to the ground, then. The ground was better anyway.
The ground was a wonder-path of pools and streams, with golden fruits shin ing above the surface, dreaming golden fish below. He beat the water behind him as he went, scattering tail-splashed silver, and the flowers grew higher all about him, water hyacinth, water chestnut, and pale water-lilies that all spread wide to receive the moon.