Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (34 page)

You’re pulling the door shut when he says, “Good thing we’re both decorative, isn’t it.”

You replace all the room fresheners with sandalwood scented ones. You arrange huge red roses in a new vase and hope Ram will bring
you their replacements.

“So why not dance professionally?” Lakshman asks over dinner. His eyes start on you, but he’s looking at Ram by the time he stops speaking.

In that moment you hate him. Because he’s poking at this, because Ram hasn’t, because the sweets he brought are covered in silver foil and smell of home. Because Ram is home early today. You focus on tearing your paratha
into bits. “It hasn’t come up,” you manage.

“You know what they’re like,” Ram says. “No respect for their own traditions, let alone ours. They’d think she was just an entertainer. They wouldn’t get it.”

Lakshman snorts. “In San Jose?” he says. “You wouldn’t see three white faces in the audience.”

“Think all Americans are white?” says Ram. “Plenty of them look just like us.”

You say,
“I’d rather not go on a stage, anyway.” You wonder if that’s true. Your paratha is a shredded mess. “But I might teach, sometime.”

“Not that you’d have to,” says Ram.

You nod, get up to get everyone’s lassi.

Lakshman comes with you to take a glass. His hands are unexpectedly soft, and far too close. Lips brushing your ear, mustache hairs bristly against your skin, he murmurs, “Never going
to happen.”

You bite your tongue, give Ram his glass with the best smile you can manage. A dozen stories remind you that Sita thought of Lakshman -always, properly—as a brother.

You suggest to Ram that night that Lakshman may be happier helping at the restaurant. He sighs. “Nobody’s happy working in a restaurant,” he says. “But Lakshman would cut his hand offfor me—and laugh, and insist
he was tired of that hand anyway.”

You dream of serving golden mud on supple banana leaves, their green too bright for California, the dirt too dead for the jungle.

You wake to Asha Bhosle remixes on full volume, bass rattling walls, shivering the air, humming in your chest. You’d yell at Lakshman—but he’s not in the living room, so you dance instead, your own improvised semiclassical
through the jungle in your mind; you end on your toes, arms thrown out, breathless, laughing.

“It’s a damn crime,” Lakshman says from the doorway, “to keep you locked away here.”

Ram brings you orchids, orange-gold, elegant, bare of leaves. “I’m glad he’s here,” he says. “I’ll have time—soon, surely—but till then, I’m so glad you’re not lonely.”

4. Capture

Sita saw a deer one
day, a glimpse of brushed gold that bounded into bushes and jungle vines and vanished in their shadows. Normally Sita cared little for pretty possessions; duty ornamented her more truly than any bangle or earring. But she wanted that deer and could not stop wanting.

The deer ran from Rama without panic or hesitation, and he realized it was an unnatural creature. So he shot it.

The deer screamed
out in Rama’s voice.

Lakshman was supposed to take care of Sita, but when they
heard that scream, he drew a protective circle around her and ran out into the forest.

Remixes wake you again; an invitation. You hesitate on the threshold. Lakshman looks at you out of the corner of his eye, grins, and starts singing along with Asha in a squeaky voice. You join in on the male part, voice
wobbling with laughter. When he attempts to dance as the girl, you lose the tune entirely.

Halfway through the second song, Lakshman has to lean against the wall to catch his breath. You keep dancing, feet lighter than they’ve been in months.

You spin, and catch the hopeless wish in his eyes.

You can draw a circle of space around yourself, keep Lakshman out of it, but not without
him noticing.

“Just tell me what I did,” he says.

You can’t answer.

He looks away, mutters, “Or is it what Ram doesn’t do?”

That note again; jealousy. Did you encourage him? Did you want to?

In the old tales, this could never happen; in a film, it would be the scene before he died, and grief would bring you and Ram together.

If this were a film, you’d have just killed him. You
reach out for the wall, needing strength, insight, a different tale. Needing.

The ground below you grumbles. Just a little shake; a reminder.

Lakshman looks around, disconcerted. You pull yourself straight. “Your elder brother,” you say, “works gruelling hours so we don’t have to. It’s time you gave him a chance.”

You’re not sure it’s Lakshman you are telling.

“Come on, no, let
me take over,” he says to Ram. “Just for a couple of days. You haven’t even had a honeymoon.”

Ram says, “You don’t know what you’re asking.”

“And that’s the problem. Look, what can I really screw up in two days?”

“I
would
like to see Napa,” you say dutifully.

Ram looks from Lakshman to you, then back again. He rubs the bridge of his nose. “Okay, come in with me for now,” he says. “but
promise you’ll tell me if it’s too much,
acha?”

Alone, you fill the vase with sunflowers and dance to them.

“He’s
managing,”
Ram says.

You’ve heard some variant of this every few hours all weekend. Ram checks his phone constantly, and he’s called home ‘just in case’ at least six times. You’re pretty sure he won’t notice a redwood till the photographs are printed. You say, “Maybe
because Lakshman likes people.”

Ram frowns, bewildered. “I like people fine,” he says. “Just not when they’re being asses.”

Lakshman’s grin and gestures are huge when he tells Ram how the weekend went. Ram’s frown just grows. “I’m glad it wasn’t horrendous,” he says. “You never know with Saturdays.”

Lakshman laughs.

Later, he asks you how the weekend was; you tell him it was nice.
His grin falls abruptly away. “No fibs,” he says.

You aren’t about to tell him you dreamed of dancing around redwoods with Ram—a Ram with hair long enough to curl, with a quick grin, with no worry between his brows. The silence drags out.

Lakshman says, “This is… you’re not…” He grabs at his hair. “Look. It’s your life, but he’s my brother. If you don’t tell him, or do something, I will.”

You visit a therapist in a glass hospital drenched in soothing music and diffuse light. She smiles kindly, and she enunciates without talking down to you; you would like to like her. But what can you say to her, this golden stranger? Truth would betray every vow you’ve made; besides, her concern is a role. How do Americans manage it? You leave her bewildered and don’t go again. Nor do you tell
Ram.

You make sure to smile brightly around Lakshman, to laugh at every thing, but his face grows longer and more drawn, and when he’s home Ram’s worry lines deepen. You tell Lakshman it’s all sorted out now.

He says, “You think I can’t see what it is?”

Two days later he tells Ram he’s going back to Mumbai. The brothers, both full of silences, look more alike than you have seen them outside
dreams.

The night Lakshman leaves you find a small vial, stripped of labels, on your bedside table.

5. Ravana

While both the men were gone, ten-headed Ravana came to the cottage disguised as a wise man; and Sita, compelled by the laws of hospitality, left her circle to care for the guest. The moment her foot touched ground outside Lakshman’s white line, Ravana snatched her up and
carried her away to his palace.

The perfect wife would flush these down the toilet. Or better, tell her husband everything.

You drop the vial into the drawer. Under it is a sheaf of papers covered in tiny print. Warnings, overdose, side effects. In red pen across this, Lakshman has written BE CAREFUL.

You shove that into the drawer too, resolving to tell Ram, to work out what to
do together. Hoping you won’t have to admit everything.

You’d left him nursing a drink in the living room, wondering why his brother left; you fetch a glass of water and ask if he’s coming to bed. He says, “Later.”

You go back to bed. The pills are white, engraved with Xes. You step out of the circle.

You dream of floating, weightless, and wake with cheeks strange from smiling.
Your neck’s not stiff. You wiggle your head back and forth, alive after all.

Later you dance, and you dance, and you dance.

The single pills stop working far too soon. You can’t focus. You can’t sit down for long. In your dreams you’re falling, always falling, never touching earth. You want to scream at Ram. Some nights later, unable to sleep, you take a second pill and fall back, smiling
again.

Light behind your eyes becomes a plane of perfect triangles, white, black, white, black, and the most beautiful golden deer you’ve ever seen steps out from geometry, from stories, looking straight at you with one hoof raised. You call for Ram. The deer startles, bounds away over triangle grass and triangle bushes, a green too sharp to grow: traffic lights, cellophane, glass.

You’re
not asking him to chase it. You know this tale too well, and its green is from too far a land. But Ram doesn’t wait to hear you; he just says “Later,” and runs after the deer as though it was Lakshman, and maybe it is. Lakshman is gone, after all.

Ram is beautiful as the deer,
kurta
glowing against that cutting green. And though you know he’s gone and you’ll soon hear his scream, you cannot
stop smiling.

“I thought we’d see a dance show for your birthday,” says Ram one day. “But I’ll have to work late. Maybe next weekend?”

You beam at him. Five pills last night; resentment lives outside your glass-lined cage.

“Are you all right?” The frown on his face makes you giggle, then sneeze. The house is full of sharp-edged dust these days. “Of course I’m all right,” you say,
but someone’s voice is screaming those words and someone’s tears blur the sight of someone’s fists pounding, pounding against Ram’s white kurta as he holds you.

Faces glare through the lattice. Tens, hundreds of faces, all the same, ten heads on one man leering at you, reaching for you through fragile interwoven triangles. “Rama will come for me,” you tell the faces.

They laugh.

And you knew all along that Ravana was waiting, that you courted him. Only triangles keep him away, now; white pills and knife-edges and the hope of Ram.

Who wears Lakshman’s face, sometimes.

You scream curses. Someone shakes you, holds you. Smudge-eyed, frightened, as he never is in tales. With triangles in his hair and dirt-green walls behind him, and that dead antiseptic smell underneath.
For an instant he is blue. You snicker.

“Sita,” he says in a tenth of his voice, “where have you gone?”

6. Rescue

The monkey people had engineers who could build a bridge to Lanka. To win their aid, Rama helped their king’s brother kill him and usurp his throne. We’re told this was honorable, but maybe he just did anything he had to. He needed Sita back. Then.

You wake in
a room not your own, dressed in clinical widow’s white. The bed, blanket, IV drip are sharp-edged with green, and the many-headed demon comes back in every counselor who talks you down—to four pills, three, two.

You taste his copper sweat in the air. You hear him speak from five mouths at once. He’s hurting you. You dream of him, reaching
for you while you stand at the edge of his tower. You
think of stepping off that edge, and hear yourself crying for Mama.

You fall into yourself instead.

The tower is gone. The rehab people are just people now; people who help you build a bridge that Ram can cross.

And he comes, scared, stubborn, too tired for heroism, cutting through every face the demon wears. You walk through fire to stand with him again.

Lakshman, he says later, told
him about the pills. The anger in his voice is a thin skin over hurt. “What did I do wrong,” he says, “that stopped you talking to me?”

You say, “When were you there to talk to?”

He loses a breath, crumples, like you punched him in the stomach. You start to stammer an apology. He reaches out to cup your cheek. “No,” he murmurs, pain shimmering in his eyes, “Please don’t say sorry. Not for
being right.”

He stays till they chase him out, and he comes back and back again. He sneaks Hindi films in on his laptop; and when you dance along, sitting up in bed, he dances with you.

7. Sanctuary

The story ends here, sometimes; the demon vanquished, Ram triumphant, reunited with his perfect wife and returned from exile to reign in peace.

And sometimes it goes on: Lord Rama’s
people start whispering that Sita has been tainted; it is shameful to keep a wife who’d been under another man’s roof. Rama listens to his people.

And exiles her again.

The doctors say a lot of long words that mean the drug hit you unusually. Their lips thin when you explain this to Ram, and they add that you never should have been medicated in the first place. They suggest a change
of location to help you recover.

“To lower my chances of relapse, they mean,” you say. Their lips thin again.

Ram ignores them. “I’ve been wondering,” he says. “if you might heal better back home. With your parents. Or in an ashram, maybe? With simple food and clean air and peace.”

His wistful tone speaks of jasmine, of rain on fresh banana leaves, but the words stop your breath. You
know this version of the story. Once Sita goes to the ashram, Rama will never take her back. He’ll take the twins she bears, but he’ll hesitate over her—and she will give up. She’ll call on the Earth her mother one last time; the earth will open under her feet, proving finally that she is pure.

You think of falling into safe earth, of cool dark-smelling damp.

You think of what you’d lose.

You call Mama, tell her. Everything. You talk and cry and talk into the phone, and she is silent for so long you think the call has dropped. “Mama?”