Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (3 page)

Hi!

Wow! That’s quite a problem! Isn’t Love just a big, crazy game? No wonder you seem so confused! Trust me honey, it confuses all of us!
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Hi. So you’re saying my friend should do it, right? Because I totally think she should. I think it’s a good plan and would totally work and after it works, the guy, the one she likes, will see what a good plan it is too. I totally think she should do it.

Hi!

Wow! That’s quite a problem! Isn’t Love just a big, crazy game? No wonder you seem so confused! Trust me honey, it confuses all of us! That’s why this website is here to help! We not only have the perfect solution to your problem, we also have a certified Life and Love Coach on hand to walk you through the program and answer any questions you may have. But that’s not all! We’re also going to
give you a 12 CD set of soothing and inspirational songs and poetry about love, our specially-designed Strong Love Aromatherapy Kit, the Raw Food And Real Love Cookbook and a Huggin Armz Body Cushion which you can hug every time you feel a little down! Click the link below to chat with
ANGELA
who will take your credit card information and be your personal Life and Love Coach on your exciting journey.
Don’t worry!
ANGELA
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We are honored that you chose us to take this journey of Love with you!

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The Official Ramayana Twitter Updates

Surpanakha’s Bro Raavana To Join Cast? Check The Site For The Exclusive Inside Scoop!

Storm Clouds on the Horizon – Is Something Big Brewing for the Happy Forest Family? Watch Tonight’s Episode To Find Out More!

Who Is Raavana? Read All About Him On The Site’s Bio Page!

Don’t Forget to Enter Our Contest to Win a Free Stay With the Cast in an Authentic Forest Hut!

Statement on Surpanakha’s Blog to Fans

Hey guys, big shout-out to my fans, you guys are amazing.
I’ve been literally flooded with messages and emails and just a lot of goodwill from all you out there and I want to thank you all so much. I’m feeling a lot better now, being with my brother Raavana has been a good change for me. You guys probably saw him on last week’s show and he’s really an amazing guy. And I’m not just saying that because he’s my brother. I’m going to be real with you guys and
tell you that we’ve had our problems in the past. But in the end, he’s a man I truly admire and I think as you guys watch the show, you’ll see what there is to admire in him. I’d really appreciate it and consider it a personal favor if you guys could go over and show him some love on his blog and his Facebook fan page. He’s also just joined Twitter and I’m going to give you those links at the end
of the post so you guys can head over and say hi.

Also, I just want to say that I think some big changes are going to be happening soon. I’ve been having some really serious, heart-to-heart talks with my brother. I can’t talk about anything just yet but to all my fans, please stay tuned, you won’t regret it, I promise you. Some serious shit is about to go down, I can guarantee it. So don’t
forget to keep watching, show my brother Raavana some love at the links below and big love to all of you guys, you mean so much to me and I value each and every one of you. Peace out, ya’ll.

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Exile
Neelanjana Banerjee

I sneak through Exile’s side entrance, hoping I can make it into the costuming area through the Disfigurement Room, the DFR for short, without being seen. Val wants us here at eight pm on the dot, but it only takes me forty-five minutes before I hit the floor in full character.

It’s dark so I feel my way past the VIP section, which will later be cordoned off by a stationary smokescreen. Under my fingers, the plants and vines that cover the living couches break off and turn to dust. Something must be wrong with the irrigation system again, another reminder that we’re barely second tier in the Ramayana cosplay club scene here in Outer Vegas.

Sure, Val has ex-space
station security and fast-running kiosks to make sure the clients spend up to twenty percent of their expense budgets, but we’re just not classy. Our authenticity rating is low because the club just looks like the warehouse it used to be and not like you are walking into the Dandaka Forest. The clients’ Sita and Ram costumes are made with fourteen-hour synthetics and they tend to unravel at the end
of a long night. To be expected, since they’re mostly call center workers and web clerks, with a heavy smattering of border thugs and other analog criminals. We don’t see the hackers, enviro-moguls and blogcasters here—they stick to the top tier clubs like 800 BCE and Ayodhya on the Strip. Their gear is made from fiber-optic silks
programmed to shapeshift you into your favorite character. Even
us players are using second-hand equipment, skin lightening chambers and silicon suits from five years ago. Regardless, Val has an eye for raw talent in his players and it keeps Exile as busy as most clubs in the top tier.

I’m almost safely concealed inside the DFR when the light goes on in Val’s office. I duck down, hiding behind one of the dance platforms, still un-retracted from last night.
Val’s office looks over the whole club from the top floor of the building. It’s the only place in here that has any sense of authenticity design, with its ambient flame lanterns hanging from the ceiling and a desk that looks like it was cobbled together from axe-cut trees and sanded with monkey hair. But the big draw is the custom-built ant farm that runs through the far walls. He is Valmiki,
the scribe, meditating until the ants build their giant mounds around him; or Val, the club owner, watching his world play out below him.

It’s a great hustle, all of it. There’s something special about that office. People tend to buy Val’s whole “wise sage” con up there with his shaved head and ambiguous looks. I did, before I figured out who he really was. When you’re up there you forget about
the rest of the club, with its watered-down elixirs and poorly done character summary videos that loop in the atrium to try to catch people up on who’s who of the Ramayana. In top tier clubs, if you don’t know Sumitra from Kausalaya—you can’t get in. But top tier clubs here don’t even com pare to what goes on in India. There, it’s all gone CGE, or computer generated environments. You just plug
in and you’re deep in the forest, dancing with a ten foot tall Hanuman.

I peek over the platform and see Val perched on the edge of his desk talking to someone. I don’t want to risk moving, even though they probably can’t see out onto the floor. I can tell by the way he nods his head, his hand thoughtfully cupping his
chin, that it’s some girl. No doubt some new player that’s trying to bump
her way up the ladder by sucking up to Val. He reaches out to touch her, maybe stroke her hair. She stands up and I see Anita, one of the floor players.

Dammit

Anita has had it out for me ever since I started. At first I thought she was just pissed that I started as a character player and didn’t work my way up from the floor. Then I realized she’s just a backlasher, that she hates anyone
that ever had a possibility of reversing to India, especially Indians.

Most of it all happened before Anita and I were even born. Even the history books aren’t quite up to date, so what I know I pieced together from my mother and news archives on the web. I guess The Reverse started at the beginning of the twenty-first century as a slow trickle of retirees and young tech workers. Then about
forty years ago, India’s technology infrastructure began to hyperleap anything going on in the First World, especially in America. The massive “earthquakes” that destroyed the technology centers in California had a lot to do with it. Most people think that they were caused by some kind of underground nuclear attack from China, but there has never been solid proof. After that, Indians were the first
to reverse, followed quickly by anyone in the upper tax brackets, and then everyone else. But the population of India was so large, that there was no need for any industrial or even menial labor. India’s slums became refugee camps for American and European immigrants looking for a piece of the high-tech Indian Dream. Around this time, India began to control all media production, with everything—
cartoons, game shows, soap operas, huge action movies, interactive web series—coming out of the revamped Bollywood studios. The Indian epics became source material for all of it. The cosplay scene grew out of the super popular Ramayana web-comics and animated web series.

Ma says that during the heyday of The Reverse, India’s system was fairly corrupt, which meant that a lot of Indians—especially
rich ones—used family connections and bribery to push their immigration paper work to the front of the line. At the same time, as all manufacturing shifted to India, many remaining Indian Americans began to monopolize the lucrative import business. There were media exposes and protests against the corruption but it didn’t do much to stop the gradual transfer of wealth to this one community.
Rich Indians began to segregate themselves in clusters of premium, gated high-rise apartment complexes that mirrored those in suburban Delhi and Mumbai. Ma remembers the early stories about the backlash attacks, but it was always written off as a wealth and disparity issue. Of course Indians were subject to violent crime, the media reported at the time, they had the money and America was in economic
freefall.

About twenty years ago, India shut down its borders to preserve quality of life. That’s when it got real bad for any Indians left in America. There were bombings and fires at the gated communities in New Jersey, the center of Indian wealth, driving residents out into the streets where mobs were waiting them. It wasn’t much better anywhere else, even for my parents who never had enough
to be considered even middle class. It’s been five years since the Backlash Laws, but it’s ignorants like Anita that screw it up for everyone. If only she knew that, even though I’m Indian, I probably have less of a chance than her of ever ending up there—especially if I want to help my mother.

I sneak a peek up at the office again and see that they’re staring out the windows, pointing to where
I am hiding.
Dammit dammit dammit.
I hear them come onto the balcony outside of Val’s office.

“There’s the disfigurement room,” Val says. “You take clients in there for the role play, and then a hatch leads you back down.”

“I know the DFR in and out, Val,” Anita says. “I know I could do a better Surpanakha than she does.”

I hear their footsteps moving towards the spiral staircase that
leads onto the floor. As they wind down, I take the opportunity to slip into the room and disappear.

At the kidney center, my mother’s dialysis machine beeped louder and louder, like the UV alarm at our apartment on particularly bad days making sure we don’t even open the skylights. After the earthquakes of 2020, anyone on the West Coast who didn’t reverse ended up somewhere in the Greater
Vegas area—even though the neon gas leaks have destroyed the ozone layer, making it practically impossible to go outside without serious protection.

The nurse actually pounded on the machine with her fist to make it work. “Does that usually help?” I asked her. She just pounded it again, making my mother jump. “Hello? Does that fix it?” I said. The nurse looked Mexican, or maybe Filipino. It’s
hard to tell because everyone’s so mixed. Lately, there’s been a huge influx again from Mexico, the Border gangs have been especially active in bringing in new people, and pulling strings to get them into jobs. Jobs that they are not qualified to do. I glared at the nurse, who looked like she was nineteen years old. “Do you know what you’re doing?”

“Don’t yell at her. It’s not her fault,” my
mother said patiently, smiling at the nurse. “Que esta bien.”

The nurse pounded the machine again and the beeping stopped, but then the machine powered down, all the lights and numbers disappearing.

“What happened?” I said, getting up. “Wait, what’s going on? It can’t just stop. It’s…she’ll…that’s not good. Ma? Ma, are you okay?”

After the nurses revived my mother from fainting, the other
machine was freed up and the same nurse who broke the first machine hooked her into that one.

“Don’t look so worried, Sapna,” Ma said.

“How old do you think these machines are anyway? Do you know what they can do in India now? They have a regulator that they can inject into your bloodstream that replaces the kidney. You don’t even have to get surgery.”

“I could get surgery across the
border in Arizona.”

“Ma, are you kidding? Do you know what they do to Indians over there? I’m going to take care of it,” I said, looking at my wrist browser for the next shuttle to the entertainment sector.

“With your call center job?” She fixed her eyes on the machine.

“I’m late,” I said, kissing her on her sagging cheek before leaving.

The costuming room is overly bright, everyone’s
LED mirrors turned to high. I rush into my area and quickly peel off my UV suit. I have a feeling that Val and Anita are going to show up and I want to be well into my skin-lightening process by then. The place is already toxic with the epoxy Monroe uses to put on the layer of hair for his Hanuman suit.

“Monroe! How many times do I have to tell you to use the fan or go do that somewhere else?”
I yell over to him.

“Damn girl, you getting any sleep?” He says, looking over at me over the aerosol brush he uses to spray another layer of body glue across his large hairless chest. Samoans always play Hanuman because of their size and hairlessness. They also have the best REM reducers, which I need to keep up my pace of work. I sink into my makeup chair and think back to Val’s hand stroking
Anita’s face.

“Everything okay?” Tania emerges from the bathroom with her Golden Deer suit on. It’s not lit up and glowing, like it will be under the black lights, but she still looks beautiful. The last
Golden Deer, Maria, looked like she was wearing one of those fat melting suits the rich kids in Mum-bai wear when she wasn’t on the floor, but Tania is different.

“Lot going on,” I mumble.
Tania makes me nervous, with her shiny dark skin and hazel eyes. She’s new here and I feel like it’s a cliche that I have a crush that’s so debilitating, since her job is to be slightly out of reach. Even the Lust Dust baggies I see on the floor at the end of the night come with Golden Deers printed on them.

“Can you help me with something?” Tania asks and I come over to her table. She says
she can’t figure out how to get the right color out of the eye makeup console. I give her some basic options: black, blue, brown.

“But I think this color would really work for you,” I say and type in a code that produces a gold tinged green. “It’ll bring out your eyes.”

Tania smiles at me in the mirror. “Thanks,” she says and I feel my cheeks get hot. When I am back at my station, undressing
to go into the skin lightening chamber, she turns my way.

“You really Indian?” she says softly. I clench my jaw. It’s always the nice ones that will give it to you the worst.

“So?”

“Oh no,” Tania says. “I mean, I didn’t mean anything. I just … was curious.” I keep my scowl on, but her big hazel eyes appear concerned and I wonder if she’s, maybe, telling the truth.

“What’s your background?”
I ask, still cautious.

“I don’t know, some mix, like everybody else. Supposedly, I had great-grandparents that came from Brazil before the fires started burning down there. But I think mostly I’m Mexican,” she shrugs. “That’s why it’s cool, you know what you are.”

Part of me wants to tell her everything that’s going on with me. She has that look. Her neck is impossibly long and fragile.
Her lips are lush and she has slightly crooked teeth—the kind
that don’t need a trip to the unlicensed dentists across the border to fix. I mean sure, I want to kiss her, but I kind of just want to talk to her. I want to tell her that without better dialysis, my mom’s not going to last two years. I want to tell her how in India, the health care system would mean we wouldn’t have to pay for dialysis
or even wait for the implant. I want to tell her how I have it figured out, that already recruiters have been approaching me to work on the space stations, not just the moon—but the Mars satellites and further. It’s totally unregulated country out there, so the clubs are crazy but they’ll guarantee enough money in the accounts and enough connections to get my mom to India. Most contracts are
two years at a time, but we’ve been living underground in Vegas long enough that I’ve forgotten the concept of living under regular earth sunlight anyway.