Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (35 page)

“I’m here,” she says.

“What should I do?”

“You should come home,
beti,”
Mama says. Her voice is old and thin. And calm. “But tell me one thing first. Where is home?”

Even the old tales end two ways. Why not a third?

“I’m not
leaving,” you tell Ram that night, “unless you come too.” Your finger is on his lips before he can protest. “Call Lakshman back,” you say. “You know he’ll take over here if you ask. What you maybe don’t know is that he
wants
to. Let him help us, love.”

He looks at you, hopeful, uncertain; no more perfect than you are. Blood pounds in your ears. “Come home with me,” you say. “We’ll start a different
story.”

His lips find yours, and you say no more.

Contributing Authors

Molshree Ambastha
is a doctor’s daughter, the wife of a mining engineer and the proud mother of a son. She completed her B.Sc. (Mathematics) from Vikram University, Ujjain, and an M.Sc. (I.T.) from Pt. Ravi Shankar Shukla University, Raipur. Currently, she works as a Guest Lecturer at the
Government College, Raipur and as an anchor at the local Doordarshan Kendra. Earlier, she had been a software developer with an IT Company. She is fond of reading, found Painting and writing.

Neelanjana Banerjee
is a writer, editor and teacher whose creative work has appeared in
PANK Magazine, The Literary Review, World Literature Today, Asian Pacific American Journal, Nimrod, A Room of
One’s Own, Desilit,
and more. She is a coeditor of
Indivisible: An Anthology of Contemporary South Asian American Poetry
(University of Arkansas Press, 2010). In 2007, she received an MFA in Creative Writing from San Francisco State University. She has worked in main stream, ethnic and independent media over ten years, focused especially on helping young people tell their own stories.

Priya Sarukkai Chabria
is a poet, writer and translator. Recipient of the Indian Government’s Senior Fellowship to Outstanding Artists she has worked on the Rasa Theory of Aesthetic Rapture, co-founded a club that showed silent films, written the script for
Dhaara
that was showcased at Oberhausen Film Festival and collaborated with classical dancer Malavika Sarukkai. Her books include two poetry
collections, a novel and one speculative fiction narrative; her work is anthologized and on numerous websites. In 2012
Immersions in Bombay/Mumbai: Essays and Love: Stories
will be published followed by
The Autobiography of a Goddess,
translations of eight century Tamil mystic Aandaal hymns, and a book on cinema. She’s at
www.priyawriting.com
.

Indrapramit Das
is a writer and artist from
Kolkata, India, currently living in Vancouver, Canada. His fiction has appeared in
Apex Maga zine, Redstone Science Fiction, Flash Fiction Online
and
New Scientist
CultureLab. He has also written reviews for
Strange Horizons
and
Tan gent Online.
Having graduated with his MFA in Creative Writing from the University of British Columbia, he’s ready to flounder about trying to be an adult until someone
publishes his novel (which might make him officially an adult). To find out more, visit
http://flavors.me/indradas
.

Abha Dawesar
is the internationally acclaimed author of such novels as
Babyji
and
Family Values.
She has been honored with ALA’s Stonewall Award, a Lambda Award, a NYFA Fellowship in Fiction, and several writing residencies. More information on her is available at
www.abhadawesar.com
.

Sucharita Dutta-Asane
is based in Pune. She did her M.Phil in En glish Literature from the Department of English, University of Pune. In 2008, she received Oxford Bookstores debuting writers’ (second) prize for her anthology,
The Jungle Stories.
Her short stories have appeared in
Ripples, an Anthology of Short Stories by Indian Women Writers
(2010) and in Unisun Publications’
Vanilla
Desires
(2010). Her articles, book reviews, short stories, and a novella,
Petals in the Sun
have been extensively published
across electronic publications. At present she juggles writing with editing of fiction manuscripts and bringing up two very young kids.

Lavanya Karthik
When not writing and illustrating children’s books, Lavanya Karthik writes creepy tales about three headed mutants
and clockwork women. Her short fiction has appeared in
Crossed Genres
; her comics have appeared in
Comix India
Vol.2 and 4,
Kindle magazine,
and several issues of the
Indian Chicken Soup for the Soul
series. She also relives her misadventures in writing, parenting and pretending to be sane, through her comic strip
Maya Bizarre
(
www.mayabizarre.tumblr.com
). She also blogs at:
www.lavanyakarthik.wordpress.com

Swapna Kishore
juggles multiple roles in her personal and professional life, and one major role is that of a writer. She has written technical books and a business novel. She blogs regularly, creates content for websites, and writes fiction. Writing helps her sort out her thoughts. She especially enjoys writing fiction because it lets her explore worlds well beyond the boundaries of reality
and speculate about “what if worlds. Her stories have appeared online and in print, in reputed international and Indian publications.

Tabish Khair
Born in Ranchi in 1966 and educated in Gaya, Bihar, Tabish Khair has won the
All India Poetry Prize
and been shortlisted for the
Man Asian Prize,
the
DSC Prize
for South Asia, the
Encore Award
(UK), the
Crossword Vodafone Award
and the
Hindu
Best Fiction Prize.
His new novel
The Thing About Thugs
is already being translated into four languages. He is completing a play,
The One Percent Agency,
and a new novel,
How to Fight Islamist Terror From the Missionary Position,
both due in 2012. Web:
http://www.tabishkhair.co.uk

Sharanya Manivannan’s
first book of poems,
Witchcraft,
was published in 2008 and her fiction, essays and
poetry have appeared in
Drunken Boat, Killing the Buddha, The Nervous Breakdown, Pratilipi
and elsewhere. She can be found online at
www.sharanyamanivannan.com
.

Kuzhali Manickavel
is the author of a short story collection called
In sects Are Just like You and Me except Some of Them Have Wings
and an echapbook called
Eating Sugar, Telling Lies,
both of which are available from Blaft Publications.
She lives in a small temple town on the coast of South India and blogs at
http://thirdworldghettovampire.blogspot.com/
.

Mary Anne Mohanraj
wrote
Bodies in Motion
(a finalist for the
Asian American Book Awards
and translated into six languages) and nine other titles. Mohanraj received a
Breaking Barriers Award
from the Chicago Foundation for Women for her work in Asian American arts organizing,
and has also won an Illinois Arts Council Fellowship. Mohanraj is Clinical Assistant Professor of fiction and literature and Assoc. Dir. of Asian and Asian American Studies at the Univ. of Illinois. She serves as Exec. Dir. of DesiLit (
www.desilit.org
). Mohanraj lives in Oak Park with her partner, Kevin, and their two small children.

Shweta Narayan
was born in India and has lived in Malaysia,
Saudi Arabia, the Netherlands, Scotland, and California. As a child, she says, she got really angry with Ram; this story has its seeds in that anger. Shweta’s fiction has been published in
Strange Horizons, Realms of Fantasy,
and the anthologies
The Beastly Bride, Clockwork Phoenix 3,
and
Steampunk II: Steampunk Reloaded,
among others, and her poetry in places like
Stone Telling, Goblin Fruit,
and
Strange Horizons.
Shweta was the
Octavia Butler Memorial Scholarship recipient at Clarion 2007. She hangs out online at
shwetanarayan.livejournal.com
.

Manjula Padmanabhan
(b. 1953), writer and artist. Her books include
Hot Death, Cold Soup, Getting There
and
This is Suki!
Her most recent novel is
ESCAPE,
set in a dystopian future.
Harvest,
her fifth play, won first prize in the 1997
Onassis Award for Theatre
in Greece. Her comic strip character
Suki
appeared weekly in Bombay’s
Sunday Observer
(1982-86), daily in New Delhi’s
Pioneer
(1991-97). She has illustrated some twenty-five books for children, the most recent of which is
The World Tour Mystery,
a picture-puzzle book.

Pratap Reddy
was born in India and moved to Canada in 2002. He writes about the agonies and the
angst (on occasion the ecstasies) of newly arrived immigrant. His work has been published in Canada, the USA and India. He has received the
Best Emerging Literary Artist
award from the Mississauga Arts Council, and a grant from the Ontario Arts Council. He has completed a creative writing program from the Humber School for Writers.

Julia A. Rosenthal
is a freelance writer in Chicago. Her
stories have appeared in the US-based publications
A cappella Zoo, Ensorcelled, Kaleidotrope,
and Columbia College’s annual
Story Week Reader.
She is working on a novel about the murder of a young king in early medieval England. Julia’s first encounter with the Ramayana came through R.K. Narayan’s prose translation, to which she is deeply grateful for the inspiration for
The Mango Grove.

Pervin Saket
is a writer and editor. Her fiction has been published in
Kalkion, Page Forty Seven, Katha, Ripples
and
Perspectives
among other print and online anthologies. She has written a collection of poems
A Tinge of Turmeric
and her poems have featured in
Kritya
and
The Binnacle.
Pervin conducts workshops on Creative Writing and Communication Skills, as well as Teacher Training programmes
in various educational institutions. She blogs at
www.pervinsaket.blogspot.com
.

K. Srilata
A poet, fiction writer and translator, Srilata is Associate Professor of English at the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences, IIT Madras. Her books include a novel
Table for Four
(long listed for the Man Asian literary prize and published by Penguin in 2011, two collections of poems titled
Arriving Shortly
(Writers Workshop, 2011) and
Seablue Child
(Brown Critique, 2000),
The Other Half of the Coconut: Women Writing Self- Respect History
(Zubaan, 2003),
Short Fiction from South India
(OUP, 2007) and
Rapids of a Great River: The Penguin Book of Tamil Poetry
(Penguin/Viking, 2009).

Srilata was a Charles Wallace Writer-in-residence at the University of Stirling, Scotland as well
as a Sangam house writer-in- residence.

Aishwarya Subramanian
was born in the West Indies and grew up in England and India, a list of loyalties that makes watching cricket a fraught activity. She went to Delhi University and Trinity College Dublin, and worked for two years in the children’s publishing industry. She currently lives and works in Delhi as a freelance editor, columnist and
book reviewer. She sometimes writes short fiction, of which this is her third published work. She also maintains a blog, where she talks mostly about books.

Lavie Tidhar’s
most recent novel is
Osama
(PS Publishing). It has been compared to Philip K. Dick’s seminal work,
The Man in the High Castle
by both the Guardian and the Financial Times. His
other works include steampunk trilogy
The Bookman, Camera Obscura
and the forth coming
The Great Game,
all three from Angry Robot, the novellas
Jesus k The Eightfold Path
(Immersion Press),
Gorel & The Pot-Bellied God
(PS Publishing) and many others.

Tori Truslow
grew up in Bangkok, and now lives in the UK, having recently graduated from the Warwick MA in Writing. Her fiction usually features some combination of storytelling,
cities, the sea, gender and ghosts, and has appeared in
Clockwork Phoenix 3, Verge 2011, Paraxis
and elsewhere. Find her online at
http://toritruslow.com
. She is grateful to the Sala Chalermkrung Royal Theatre for the inspiration, and would like to point any visitors to Thailand towards it—it’s one of the few places you can still see a traditional Khon performance of the Ramakian.

Deepak
Unnikrishnan
writes. Short stories, mainly. He is Abu Dhabian, manufactured and product tested in the capital of the Emirates by a quiet yet befuddled South Indian family. His first set of shorts,
Coffee Stains in a Camel’s Teacup
(2004) was published by Vijitha Yapa Publications (Colombo, Sri Lanka). His work—essays, fiction—have appeared in
Drunken Boat, Himal Southasian, Ego Magazine,
among
others.

Abirami A. Velliangiri
has been published in
Danse Macabre, Nether Magazine
and
The Brown Critique.
In 2010, she won the third place in Poetry with Prakirti’s All-India poetry contest. Since childhood the Ramayana has taken many shapes in her mind, transforming from a beloved bedtime story, to racial propaganda, to a sublime love story and more recently to one of the most intense
tragedies Indian literature has produced. She is now pursing her Masters at the London School of Economics and Political Science and enjoys poetry, prose and good cinema.