Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (32 page)

“I don’t think you understand,” she says, rising. She’s an impressive woman, tall, all teeth and muscle, but also beautiful.

“This may be a game for you and him,” she says, “but my job is to keep him alive. If it hadn’t been for you, he wouldn’t have taken to planet-hopping. He wouldn’t have found this accursed place. It’s time we stopped playing, Vikram, or whatever you
are calling yourself now.”

I can sense her coming alive, the way a killer weapon comes alive when it finds its target. Through the fog in my brain it occurs to me that Suvarna might be Hirasor’s sibling, birthed by the same mother-machine.

I say the Word.

“What?” she says. She laughs. “Are you trying to distract me with nonsense?”

So it means nothing to her. She raises a finger-tip.

The next moment my alarm system begins to scream coordinates and trajectories; I leap aside just as a spot on the wall behind me blackens with heat.

I remember that she likes to play.

“If only you’d left us alone,” she says, watching me. “Hirasor is old and sated now, Vikram. All he wants—I want—is to be left in peace.”

“Don’t give me this old man nonsense,” I say breathlessly. “I know
Hirasor is a nakalchi. He could live for hundreds of years.”

She stares at me, the perfect mouth hanging slack with surprise. I tongue a mouth-dart, but she recovers quickly, catching it in mid-air with a burst of flame. It falls smoking to the floor.

“How did you find out?”

Before I can answer, a door opens behind her. I see real terror on her face, then, as Hirasor walks into the room.

Except for the slight shuffle, he still walks tall, like Ravan- Ten-Heads.

“Get out!” she tells him, covering the ground between them in long strides, watching me all the time. “I’ll deal with him!”

He gives her a glance of pure hatred.

“Let me fight my battles, will you?” A look passes between them, and I see in that instant that what they had once shared has turned bitter; that they
are locked in their relationship out of habit and necessity rather than passion, hating each other and yet unable to let go.

I study him as they glare at each other (one of her eyes is still tracking me). Now that I see him at close range, I am shocked by his appearance. How he has fallen! All that is left of his affectations is the silk tunic with the embroidered collar. His hair
is ragged
and unkempt, and his face, lean and aristocratic as a prize hound’s, is covered with scars. His burning dark eyes look out as though from a cage. I remember those eyes; I remember him peering down at me from the Harvester’s face. Silently I mouth the Word, waiting until he will be in my power.

He has turned toward me. He holds out his hands to show that they are empty.

“I want to die,” he
says. “Even here, I can’t get rid of… I can’t go on. I have a perfect memory; I remember everything I have ever done, whether awake or in my dreams. All I want now is death… at your hands—”

“No, no,” Suvarna says to him. “Don’t talk like that. I won’t let anyone kill you.” She holds his arm, trying to pull him away. Her voice rises in a scream. “Don’t let him kill you! I’ll be all alone!”

“She thinks it will get better with time,” he says to me, ignoring her. “But I want to end it more than anything. I have had not a moment—not one moment of peace. Six times I tried to kill myself, and six times she prevented me.”

He turns to her: “Foolish Suvarna, we are all ‘all alone.’ I can’t allow you to interfere this time. Now go away and let me die.”

He pushes her suddenly and violently,
throwing her across the room. She lies against the far wall in a huddle, staring at him with wide, shocked eyes.

“Death is not what I had in mind,” I say, coming closer. “Death would be too good for you, Hirasor.” I bring my armored hands up to his throat. He stands in front of me, not resisting, waiting. For a moment I think it is the old dream again, him and me at each other’s throats at
the world’s end, but it is all going wrong. His wild eyes beg me for death. He shudders violently. I dig my claws into his neck, feel the pulse of the machine that he is, prepare myself to rip him half to death, to say the Word that will condemn him to perpetual hell, a hair’s-breadth short of death.
“Please, please, hurry” he begs, half-choking, not understanding what it is I am giving him.

I cannot do it. This pathetic being—Hirasor, destroyer of worlds! He is no adversary. He sickens me.

Besides, he is in hell already, without my help.

I let my hands fall.

“Live, then,” I say angrily, backing toward the door.

His nostrils flare, his eyes widen. He begins a terrible high-pitched keening, clawing with his hands at his face and hair. Suvarna, who seems to have forgotten
about me, has stumbled to her feet and is by his side in an instant. She puts her long arms around him.

“You are safe now,” she says, crooning, putting her red lips to his hair. “I’ll take care of him later. Nobody will take you away from me.”

“Let me go, Suvarna,” he weeps. “Leave me here on Oblivion. Leave me alone!”

As he thrashes in her arms, she says it, loudly and clearly.

The
Word, which I had let slip in one panicked moment.

He becomes limp in her arms, his horrified gaze locked on hers. She lets him down gently on the divan.

She will not be alone now; she will have the perpetually suffering Hirasor to care for all her life.

I shoot him once, in the chest. She falls in a heap by his side, screaming and cursing. Over the wreck of his body, the slow and certain
ebbing of his consciousness, I begin to speak the words of passing.

“Shantih. Nothen ke agaman na dukh na dard…
”

And I walk out of the room.

Hirasor got his freedom, but what of me, the man-woman with a hundred aliases, none of which were Ram after all? There I was, boarding the first shuttle out of Oblivion, cheated of true victory
at the end, my life’s purpose lost. I had been
tempted to stay on, to live with the crazies and let my mind descend into chaos, but the people there wouldn’t let me. They seemed to think Suvarna had killed Hirasor; nobody cared to connect me directly with the crime, but his violent death was enough for them to send the stranger packing. I don’t know what happened to Suvarna; I never saw her again.

At the first opportunity I switched from
the shuttle to a passenger ship that made numerous stops on various inhabited worlds, thinking I might go back to my last residence on the planet Manaus. But when it came time to disembark I couldn’t manage to do it. I am still on the ship, waiting until the impulse comes (if it ever will) to step out under the skies of a new world and begin another life. What has passed for my life, my personal
Ramayan, comes back to me in tattered little pieces, pages torn from a book, burning, blowing in the wind. Like patterns drawn in the dust, half-familiar, a language once understood, then forgotten.

Here are some things I have discovered about myself:

I have no pleasure in life. I like nothing, definitely not absinthe or roses.

I want to die. But a curious inertia keeps me from it. The
things of the world seem heavy, and time slow.

I still have nightmares about the burning woman. Sometimes I dream that Dhanu has a mantram that will bring me peace, and I am looking for her in the tunnels of a dying city, its walls collapsing around me, but she is nowhere to be found. I never dream of Hirasor except as a presence behind my consciousness like a second pair of eyes, a faint ghost,
a memory. There are moments when I wonder what led a first-generation nakalchi to become a monster. The Ramayan says that even Ravan was once a good man, before he fell prey to hubris and lost his way. If legend is to be believed, there is a cave on some abandoned
planet where copies of the first-generation nakalchis are hidden. Were I to come across it, would I find Hirasor’s duplicate in an
ice-cold crypt, dreaming, innocent as a child?

Lately I have begun to let myself remember that last climactic moment of my encounter with Hirasor. I shot my Ravan, I tell myself, trying to infuse into my mind a sense of victory despite the loss of the chance for true revenge—but I no longer know what any of those words mean: victory, revenge. Still, there is a solidity about that moment when
I shot him, small though it is against the backdrop of all the years I’ve lived. That moment—it feels as tangible as a key held in the hand. What doors it might open I do not know, although I am certain that Sita does not wait behind any of them. Perhaps it is enough that it tells me there are doors.

Vaidehi and Her Earth Mother
Pratap Reddy

I’m a writer who lives in Toronto. My short bio says it all: He moved to Canada in 2001 and writes short fiction about the agonies and the angst (on occasion, the ecstasies) of immigrants from India.

A story I wrote recently is called
Mythili’s Place in the
Sun.
The title is a little ironic because the story is set in Canada, a country which is cold and dark for the best part of the year.

Mythli’s story is one of grit, determination and the desire to succeed against all odds. The tale drapes itself around Mythili, like the pristine snow which covers the slopes of Mount Meru. Mother to two lovely girls, Lavanya and Kushala, Mythili is a worthy
heroine.

Some of you might ask, isn’t it customary for such sagas to revolve around men, say like the
Odyssey,
the
Lusiads
or our own
Ramayana?
That’s true, but there are some excellent books out there which have a female protagonist as the focal point. They are not easy to come by—you will have to look really hard. Off-the-cuff I can think of two fine examples:
The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
and
No Orchids for Miss Blandish.
Besides, Mythili’s husband, like most men, is a prig, utterly self-centred, and capricious. On a whim, he had left his cushy job in India
and dragged a scared, mystified Mythili to Canada with an empty promise of a better life. I’m not inclined to make a male chauvinist like him the chief subject of my story.

When Mythili’s husband first sprung the idea of
immigration on her, she must have felt as astounded as Sita did when Rama ambushed her as she was returning from the garden, in the company of her giggly ladies-in-waiting. “Honey,” Rama may have said, of course using a Sanskrit (or is it Prakrit?) equivalent of the endearment. “I’ve to go away to the forest on a government matter. Would you like to join me?” Much like how a well-heeled Canadian
might say to his wife or common-law partner, “Pumpkin pie, I’m going on a business trip to Florida. Care to come along?”

Ever dutiful and deferential, Sita cast off her silks, shed all her jewellery, and got into rough and ready garments suitable for a life in the bush. She knew that the jungles of central India were no place for a lady, but not even in her wildest dreams had she imagined the
actual dangers that lay in wait for her. She had no inkling at all that armies of two men would wage a full-scale international war to see who could possess her.

For her part, Mythili too left her circle of relatives and friends be hind to start life all over again in a country half-way across the globe so that her husband could pursue his pipedream. As immigrants of limited means, they rented
a cold and dark basement apartment where no sunlight ever penetrated. The basement was like an icebox in winter, and surprisingly turned into a sauna in summer. In the nights, Mythili could hear rats running amok in the wainscoting. Sita’s Panchavati, in comparison, seemed like Xanadu.

It’s a fortnight since the Canadian magazine
True North
accepted my story for publication. Helen Yorke,
a proof reader, calls me on my mobile. Blithely mispronouncing my name, even though
it has only three letters, she continues: “I’ve a problem with your story.”

“Really? What could it be?”

“I don’t know how to put it. Your character—Mite-ly, she’s gone missing.”

“What do you mean?”

“When I had a glance at your story last night, she was very much there. But today when I sat down to
read it again, she’s nowhere to be found. She has disappeared completely.”

I’m horrified because, honestly, I didn’t expect this of Mythili. My other characters have pulled the vanishing act before and have stepped out of my stories never to return. Good riddance, I had told myself. Yet many readers, Vaidehi included, have complained of the abrupt way in which those stories end. They think
it’s a literary affectation—how little they know!

“What are you going to do about it?” says Helen.

I’m tempted to say, “Call 911, I guess. Let the police look for her!” But I don’t. For one thing, it’s never a good idea to cross swords with an editor, even if she’s only a copy editor. For another, I’m sure there’s no police force in the world, not even the Royal Canadian Mounted Police,
which can bring back, handcuffed and all, an author’s runaway characters.

If any of my readers were writers they’d sympathise with me. They’d know how fictional characters acquire a will of their own and thenceforth refuse to have anything to do with their creators.

I once spotted Lalita, whose profile looks so much like Bipasha Basu’s, in a night club on Lakeshore Road. This was soon after
she had upped and left from my
Demon Glass.
She was seated on a barstool drinking a cosmopolitan. Wearing a sarong-like skirt and a puffy cotton blouse, she looked hot (I’m not talking about the weather here). When I tried to grab her, she screamed and hit me with her sequined handbag. Heads turned, and some
hulky-bulky types started to move towards me. I made my escape before things got really
nasty.

I have an appointment to see Dr Cunningham later in the evening. But Helen’s news about Mythili has upset me so much that I don’t quite feel up to it. I’m going to call his office and cancel the appointment.

I had conceived Mythli not as any run-of-the mill character but as a paragon of virtue, comeliness, and fortitude.

On arriving in Canada, Mythili couldn’t go to work because
she had to look after her two infant daughters. Her husband managed to find a job at a gas station but they were always stumped for cash. In such circumstances, did you think Mythili just sat there in the Stygian dark ness of her basement apartment, twiddling her thumbs? Not a chance, she took to baby-sitting in a big way. The money wasn’t much, but it helped to buy those little extras of life—presumably,
timbits, beavertails, poutine and other such local goodies.

When the girls, Lavanya and Kushala, came of school-going age, Mythili took up a job. It was a temporary, part-time appointment in the mail room of an investments company. All Mythili had to do was to slip huge quantities of manila envelopes through a Pitney Bowes franking machine, yet somehow she managed to convince her boss of her
diligence and passion for excellence. Such was the power of her personality.

Soon, she was made fulltime. Then she moved into the main office as an admin clerk. Within a year, she became a team leader. Three more years, and a certificate in HR from Sheridan College, she was anointed as the office manager.

While their household income grew steadily, the family hopped, as people in Canada
do, from one home to another, each more expensive than the previous one. First they moved to a condominium tower in the downtown core, close to Mythili’s
office. Then they bought a semi detached house within the bussing zone of a good school, for their daughters’ sake. Eventually, they bought an independent house, with a small patch of lawn and an apple tree in the front.

Mythli, being green-fingered,
developed a simple but eye-catching gar den. The emerald-green lawn was always in good trim, and a herbaceous border, in a lighter shade of green, ran along the driveway. In a long narrow bed, she planted tulips, which returned from their hibernation every spring to feast in the sun.

Mythili was deeply committed to the Environment. She supported all green causes and voted for Elizabeth May’s
Green Party. She was particular, in fact almost paranoid, about disposal of household refuse (“Reduce, Reuse or Recycle” might have been embossed on her family crest). She knew all about the many coloured-bins and what went into them. (Though it’s a decade since I came to Canada, I find such things much too confusing—I had always let Vaidehi handle recycling.)

With Mythili, it was not just
a matter of being eco-conscious— it was something more. She didn’t merely respect the Earth, she loved it with an intense filial devotion.

It’s a clear and sunny afternoon in June. I drive down to Home Depot to buy some garden plants. The capacious lean-to which houses the garden supplies is deserted. I look for pink and maroon tulips, Vaidehi’s favourite flowers. I fail to find any. Panic
sets in and I break into a cold sweat. I’ve so much work ahead of me, all the digging and the replanting, to say nothing of the rescheduled appointment with Dr Cunningham. I can’t find anyone wearing the orange apron with the words ‘Home Depot’ splashed across their torsos.

I rush into the main building. I espy an idle associate, dawdling between the aisles in the electrical area. She looks
south Asian, an Indian probably. From the way she is dressed I reckon she’s a newbie, fresh off the boat. When I approach her she brightens up.

“It too late in the season for tulips,” she says grandly, shepherding me into the plumbing area. What did she think tulips were? Something they use in washrooms? I make a quick about-turn and, pushing my shopping cart, run for my life.

Back in the
lean-to, I load my cart double-quick with twenty-five pots each of pink and maroon geraniums (to hell with the tulips). When I reach the parking lot, I’m breathless. I look at my watch. It’s nearly four. I know I’ll never be able to make it to the meeting with Dr Cunningham. I call his office.

“Not again!” says Darla. She’s a big bear-like woman who dwarfs not only the furniture in the ante-room,
but also the visitors and Dr Cunningham for good measure.

“I’m sorry, Darla-ing,” I say. “Something unexpected has cropped up.”

“You’ve done this once too often. Dr Cunningham will not be pleased. You should be more serious about your health. Hmm, let me see if I can squeeze you in next week.” While I wince at the prospect of being caught in Darla’s bear hug, she continues, “How about 2
o’clock Thursday afternoon?”

“Suits me fine,” I say, hoping to terminate the conversation.

“Wait a minute!” Darla interjects. “What about your tablets? Don’t you need a refill?”

“No, I have a few left,” I say truthfully. I’m not a stickler for following doctor’s orders, especially Dr Cunningham’s.

“Don’t forget to take your medication every day. Aripiprazole isn’t something to play
around with,” she says and adds my name, mispronouncing it to sound like a constellation in the night sky.

You might say, as Shakespeare did, what’s in name? A lot, actually. The person who wrote Ramayana in Sanskrit had used the
nom de plume
(excuse my use of French, Canada is a bi-lingual
country) of Valmiki. His given name was Ratnakara. He had started his career not as writer but as a
full-blooded bandit. One day, deep in the jungles, he waylaid a traveller. Unfortunately for Ratnakara, his victim turned out to be Narada, a sage and troubadour rolled into one. To cut a long story short, the wily minstrel not only managed to save his own life, but he brought about a complete change of heart in the bandit. But Ratnakara had so steeped himself in crime and iniquity that the good Lord
Rama’s name simply wouldn’t roll off his tongue. So Narada advised him to utter the word ‘Mara’ (which means a tree) over and over again. Seating himself on the floor of the forest, Ratnakara began to recite “Mara-Mara-Mara-Mara…” In due course, even without his knowing, the repetitive chant turned into “Rama-Rama-Rama…” He continued to sit there repeating Rama’s holy name, day after day, washing
away all his past sins, until an anthill (‘Valmika’ in Sanskrit) grew around him. Valmiki means one who has emerged from an anthill.

This story is about Vaidehi, not Mythili. If you don’t believe me, take a look at the title again. But I’m not surprised that you thought otherwise. The blame rests with me for letting the situation come to such a sorry pass.

The presence of Vaidehi is
meant to permeate through this tale like the haunting fragrance of the night-flowering parijatha in Indra’s celestial garden. But I’ve let my obsession for Mythili get the better of me. She has insinuated herself into this story and usurped it completely. This is so totally out of character.

I had hoped to portray Mythli as an Indo-Canadian version of the docile and demure Savitri. Not just
the namesake in mythology who was married to the ill-fated Satyavan, but the champion glycerine-gal of Tamil and Telugu films in the 60’s. In almost every one of her films, Savitri essayed the same role: a wronged, woebegone wife who suffers in silence (except for
singing six sad songs) until her reformed husband returns at the bitter end.

When I go over the early drafts of Mythli’s story,
I’m appalled to learn how far gone she already was. She bears no resemblance to any of the ancient satis, like Anasuya or Arundhati, so dear to my heart. Witness the passage of arms that takes place between Mythili and her husband:

Husband: I think we should have another child.

Mythili: Two are more than enough. Remember the slogan—
Hum do, Hamare do?

Husband: We should have a son, Mythili.

Mythili: Nowadays, daughters are just as good and capable as sons. Don’t tell me you think otherwise!

Husband: Of course not. But according to our
sastras…