Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (9 page)

Angry at himself, Ravana decided to undo the demon within once and for all. He knew that as long as he could get away
inflicting pain on others, he would do it. There was only one solution: he had to live in this world and this one alone. With Sita dead, Lanka destroyed, and two boys that were not his, he had no motivation to inflict anything more on anyone. Good triumphed over evil. Ravana filled with hope that other men would do as he had done. If every man fought the evil within then war could be avoided. In
Lanka a hundred thousand monkeys could have been saved. Ravana regretted their deaths
over and above everything else. They had been cute, vulnerable, unable to grasp the full extent of the perils they faced. They were reminders to the human race of where we had come from. Man needed a mirror to recognize himself. Ravana had slaughtered a hundred thousand such mirrors. Living in this world with
this outcome was his penance for destroying them.

“All of you learn a lesson from mine. This is the only world we ever live in,” he said silently to himself. The multiverse and its possibilities of reinvention would henceforth exist outside his knowledge. And his knowledge was the sum of what mankind would ever know.

Ravana settled into they throne of Ayodhya to live out the rest of his
days as the king until Rama’s boys were old enough to take over. He would go back to the forest then and die as the person he really was. In death he would join Sita.

The Mango Grove
Julie Rosenthal

In a walled garden on the banks of the sleepy, sun-dappled Godavari River a mango tree grew. Its glossy green leaves fluttered in the cool breezes that rose from the waters of the river late in the afternoon. The perfume of pale water lilies blended with the rich scent
of the mango tree’s pink blossoms, filling the humid air with a sweetness that made Sita’s eyelids grow heavy as she reclined against the tree’s trunk on a silk rug.

Rama watched Sita’s graceful, jeweled forehead nod toward her folded hands in her lap as her eyes closed.

At the garden’s single gate, Rama’s brother Lakshmana lifted his sword as he polished it with a red cloth. The sun flashed
along the edge of the curved blade.

Rama smiled as he lifted his flute to his lips and began to play. He closed his eyes as he balanced on one foot with the grace of a thousand-year-old marble statue.

The wind fell quiet as Rama played. The flute’s melody mixed with the perfume in the air and wafted through the garden. It reached the rocky banks of the Godavari River, which ceased its flowing
and became as still as glass. In its shadowed pools, the silver tails of pearl-scaled fish unfurled and were motionless.

A startled cry from Sita made Rama’s eyes fly open. He lifted his head from his flute with the alert grace of a deer.

Sita’s slender hands were cupped. She was peering down into them. Her eyes were alight and Rama realized that she was laughing.

“Look!” she said as
she held her palms up, toward him.

In Sita’s hands were two butterflies. Their wings were a blur of velvet brown and azure blue as they clung together, struggling as if they were fighting.

Now Sita’s laughter was helpless in its delight. Her small chin tilted back with the joy of it. A shaft of sunlight glinted on her necklaces of gold and rubies, gifts of the sage Athri’s wife Anusuya,
as her beautiful shoulders shook.

Sita’s cry had made Lakshmana leap to his feet, sword brandished. Rama looked over Sita at his brother and shook his head. He could see Lakshmana sigh with frustration and boredom as he sat back down and rested his sword on his knees.

Soon enough, brother,
Rama thought,
there will be asuras to fight. Not now. Not yet.

Amused, he smiled down at Sita.

“Love,” he said.

Sita had lowered her hands into her lap and was watching the butterflies in her palms. The rapid fluttering of their wings was joyously frantic. She tilted her head as she studied them. Another laugh bubbled up from her.

“Love,” Rama said again.

“Have you ever seen such a thing?” Sita asked. Her voice was soft.

“Are you going to put them down?”

“I think I might hurt
them.”

“And so you go on holding them like that.”

Sita’s eyes raised to Rama’s. She held her cupped palms up toward him again.

“So,” she said. “Play for them. Make their love even sweeter.”

“You
always fall asleep when I play.”

Sita laughed and shook her head, never taking her eyes from Rama’s.

Lakshmana lifted his hand to his mouth to cover a yawn.

Rama lifted his flute
and, with a smile for Sita that only pretended to be chiding, started once again to play.

Dew, along with the evening’s cool, had stolen over the garden. In the twilight, lanterns glowed in the open windows of a house as elegantly built as it was modest. The sounds of three human voices, one female and two male, drifted from the windows and mingled with the cries of birds at dusk.

The two butterflies-Aruna, the brown-winged, and Jalanili, the blue-rested together. They were hidden inside a fold of Sita’s silk rug where she had left it on the grass under the mango tree. The wings of the butterflies fanned the air with languid pleasure as they nibbled a bit of fallen ripe fruit.

“Ah,” Jalanili sighed. “To love as they do, the man and the woman who have come to live here.
Would it not be a perfect thing, Aruna?”

Aruna was about to reply:
No. How could we ask for more than this?

But he found himself thinking of Rama and the way that Sita would look at him when he played the flute.

“Perhaps,” he said.

“Perhaps?” whispered a third voice.

A crow stood in the grass outside the cavelike fold of the silk rug. Its black-feathered head was turned sideways
as it peered inside the rug at the two butterflies. One topaz eye blinked at Aruna and Jalanili. The tip of the crow’s curved beak touched the rug’s edge.

Jalanili screamed a tiny butterfly scream. She pressed herself against Aruna, whose wings dropped over her like a blanket.

“You have nothing to fear,” the crow whispered. “You see, I don’t
eat
butterflies.”

There was a low menace in
the crow’s tone that made Aruna wonder, as he felt Jalanili’s terrified breaths pulsing rapidly against his own thorax, whether it would be better to be eaten by this creature.

“But,” the crow continued, “I do grant wishes.”

Jalanili’s breaths stopped.

So did Aruna’s.

“And, please forgive me if I misheard just now. But it sounded as if the two of you wished to love as
those two
do.”
The crow’s tilted head jerked toward the house.

“Who are you?” Aruna murmured.

“I’ve already told you.” The crow was still whispering. Its voice grated like a sandal dragged over gravel. “Now. What’s your answer?”

“You would make us human?” Jalanili’s head had nudged out from underneath Aruna’s wing. Her multifaceted eyes stared into the crow’s single tawny orb.

“I would make you,”
the crow said, “whatever you wanted.”

“How can you do this?” Jalanili asked. “What gives you that kind of power? Are you a god? An asura?”

“It’s nothing to turn a butterfly into something else. Even a crow could manage that.”

“But you’re no crow,” Aruna said.

In the last of the faint light he thought he saw the crow smile, though its black beak was hard as horn.

“No.” The crow whispered
with only a thin ribbon of breath now. Aruna had to hold his own breath to hear its words. “You see clearly, my brown-winged brother. I am no crow. A dangerous thing for a
butterfly
like you to know, especially in a hallowed place like this. Now. I could tell the other crows where you are, and, within an hour, you could be nothing more than
their evening meal. Or. I could fly away, and you could
live. As butterflies. And love each other for a few more brief days, here in this paradise. Your lives are no longer than that.”

“No,” Jalanili said.

“No?” said the crow.

Jalanili slowly shook her head. “You’re wrong. We live as long as they do.”

“Who told you that, my blue-winged beauty?”

“We…” Jalanili’s voice faltered.

Aruna glanced at his mate. She looked stricken. He could
feel her wings sag beneath his.

“Who lied to you and told you that you live as long as a human?” The dark glee in the crow’s voice made Aruna want to shrink as far away as he could from the sound of its whisper. “Did
she
tell you that? Or did
he?”

Jalanili was silent.

“After today, you live a few more days. That’s all. It makes no difference, not to a god, or a human, or”- The crow’s
hiss sputtered in what sounded like a laugh- “an asura.”

“There are no asuras here.” Aruna hoped his small voice sounded braver than he felt. “The man with the sword would-”

Like the blade of a knife, the crow’s beak lunged inside the fold of the silk rug and snapped shut with undisguised fury. Aruna curled his wings around Jalanili as both butterflies screamed.

“Do not speak of that
man,” the crow whispered. “He’s no man at all, but a demon. There are things too dangerous for a butterfly to know here, o brown-winged brother. I won’t warn you again.”

The crow withdrew its beak and pressed the side of its dark head up to the opening of the rug’s fold. The topaz eye blinked. “Now,” the crow continued. “You could be eaten. You could die. Or. You could love each other as
they
do. For lifetimes. Long enough for this tree we’re under to grow, and fall, and be born again in the seeds of its fruit. Can you imagine that?”

“Yes,” Aruna heard Jalanili say softly.

The sadness in her voice broke his heart.

In that moment-in Jalanili’s single word-he could imagine it too.

He heard himself say: “Yes.”

“Then,” the crow said, “it shall be.”

Aruna opened
his eyes. He had been asleep for a long time. Underneath his body-as strange to him as when he had first crawled out of the chrysalis, but weighed down by too many limbs and not enough at the same time-sharp rocks pressed into the tender surface of his bare skin. Above him, the sun shone with merciless fury. He had never been so afraid of its heat and light.

Not as a butterfly.

Aruna, the
man, was lying curled on his side in the dry dirt furrows of an empty field. The garden of Rama and Sita had disappeared.

Awkwardly he pulled himself to his hands and knees. He managed to crawl toward a small hut built of sticks and leaves at the end of the field’s rows. There, at least, he knew he would find shade.

When Aruna reached the hut, he collapsed inside on its smooth floor of cool,
clean-swept earth. Within reach of his fingers (fingers! he marveled at their treelike branches, the ridges of the tawny skin at each knuckle, and the sensations that came from them as he stretched them out) was a jar. His fingertips stroked the jar’s smooth, blue-glazed surface. To Aruna’s surprise, it was cold and moist with condensed water.

He sat up. Lifting a metal ladle from the jar,
Aruna poured icy water over his face, down his shoulders and chest, and into his open mouth. He drank until a sharp pain like the tip of an arrow stabbed between his eyes.

“Jalanili?” he called as he lowered the ladle back into the jar.

Aruna’s new voice was low and resonated inside his chest like a bell.
Like Rama’s,
he thought. His attention was caught by this new, human voice. He spoke
Jalanili’s name several times-sometimes murmuring, sometimes shouting-as he stood and walked to the door of the hut.

The furrows of the dry, empty field seemed to stretch to the edge of the world. The ridges of soil were the same color as the velvet brown of his butterfly wings.

Aruna cupped his hands to his mouth and yelled from the doorway with all of his strength:

“Jalanili!”

A
voice inside his head with the scrape of a sandal against gravel said:

She is not here.

Aruna looked around the field, then back inside the hut. He was alone.

“Show yourself, crow,” he said.

I
told you. I am no crow.

“What are you? An asura, then?”

Look to the west. See what I am now.

Low in the western sky, billowing clouds the color of a bruise were gathering. A cool wind
touched Aruna’s forehead and lifted his black hair. Lightning flashed from the peaks of the clouds.

Butterfly or human, you are nothing to me.

Aruna took a few steps backward and sat down, cross-legged, on the smooth floor of the hut. The hut was so small that he could stretch out his arms and place his palms on its thin walls. Under his hands, the sticks and leaves trembled in the rising
wind.

“Where is Jalanili?” he said.

She is with me.

“In the storm?”

Aruna heard the hollow rattle of the crow’s laughter. I
am the storm.

He thought of Rama and his flute, and Lakshmana with his curved sword, always waiting at the gate of the garden. Aruna heard himself say with his new, deep human voice: “Bring Jalanili to me.”

To you, little brother! Who are you to command
me?

“Now.”

//
you want her, then meditate. Do what humans do. Ask the heavens for rain. She will come.

A gust like a demon’s fist struck the walls of the hut. Aruna’s raised arms braced against its force, his elbows locked. He breathed deeply to stop the shaking in the pit of his stomach.

For the first time Aruna meditated. He imagined the only rain he knew: the mists that had descended
over the garden like the breath of the gods as he and Jalanili had hidden beneath the sheltering leaves of the mango tree, fanning their butterfly wings to keep them dry.

The new effort of meditation exhausted him. Within moments Aruna’s eyes closed and his head was nodding toward his chest. The storm’s winds lashed the sides of the hut as he slept, still sitting with his arms raised.

In Aruna’s dream, the rain came at night. The storm struck the parched soil of the field with enough force to split the world open.

The earth was too dry to absorb the deluge. The rainwater could do nothing but race down the field’s furrows in all directions in a flash flood. Streams of water writhed across the drought-scourged earth like thousands of snakes.

As in all dreams, time
passed in a moment. The storm disappeared and was replaced by silence under a sky pale with dawn.

Aruna saw his dream-self stand up from the floor and go to the door of his hut. Over his own shoulder he looked out into the field.