His reverie was broken.
“Your Majesty, we have the list. We can upload the data to your ear piece.”
“Do that.”
“Done!”
“How many?”
“Eighteen thousand planets of which at least seven hundred and nine teen should correspond to ours until at least four years into the future!” declared his Chief of Staff .
“Good.”
“No doubt we shall have more information to pass you in the future since the set of multiverses with planets corresponding to ours is not a finite one.”
In the small forest where Ravana arrived, one of the few sweeps of dense green foliage left in the sub-continent, everything went as planned. Sita fell for the very first virtual hologram with surround sound that he tried. A small dear. Cute doe eyes. Tush as cute as a baby’s bottom.
Rama gave it chase, eager to please Sita. Ravana couldn’t blame him. He would have done the same. After some hawing, that annoying younger brother who had cut off Surpanakha’s nose drew a ridiculous magnetic field from an ancient physics textbook to keep Sita within the house and went looking for his older brother. What an idiot!
Time is everything. If one can live longer than anyone else one can know more than anyone else. Ravana had lived and lived. He knew much. And with ten heads he knew a hundred million times more than he would have with one. He had engineered the new neural net himself, making sure that the emergent properties of the network far exceeded anything known to complexity theorists of the time.
“Time is nothing, Sita, it doesn’t even exist. I’m going to still it and you won’t even know. We’re going to remain in these few minutes for an eternity. We will cross the known universe, we will live other lives, we will be together, we will be apart. You will see me as a monster with ten heads, you will see me younger and more handsome than any other being on earth, you might even see me as that darling husband of yours. No one, not even me, has ever gone on this journey before. And I am choosing to take it with you.
“Welcome to the multiverse, Sita, where a million versions of a million universes exist. So enormous is the magnitude of these worlds that even with the lowest probabilities, our own earth with you and me and all that there is in it, exists some eighteen thousand times over and over as of today.
“Welcome to a new physics of quantum entanglement that makes it possible for us to arrive in another place, however remote. And welcome to a taste of my charms. Without my maya even with all the science in the world you could never really live this experience from the inside out. Without maya you would be reduced to an outside observer observing a fake version of you,” Ravana thought to himself. The silent dialogue with Sita stoked him. His two brains devoted to emotion heated up his whole body in a way that nothing had in the recent past.
Ravana remained invisible and checked out the magnetic field. Obviously the little brother only knew about three dimensions. Ravana worked out the ten dimensions around Sita’s hut and computed a complicated path in and out of the hut that would leave the magnetic field undisturbed.
“Devi, I’d like to speak to you for a minute,” he called from outside, visible now with one head and a simple garb.
“Please come here, Sir, I am not allowed to cross this line,” she replied.
In the time it took Sita to blink he had materialized on the inner side of the magnetic field.
“I mean no harm, Devi,” he said politely.
Sita opened her mouth to speak. The Broca’s area of her brain lit up, her motor cortex fired neurons so that she would take in air to speak, her tongue moved forward. Ravana performed his moment of maya. In that tiny fraction of a second when Sita’s brain was concentrating on other things, Ravana gave his command for teleportation. The photons in their respective bodies moved into a state of entanglement, they moved across the galaxy to the first of seven hundred and nineteen planets. It was the only one on the list which was in their own Milky Way.
By the time Sita closed her mouth they were experiencing another possibility, another life. In the first parallel universe of their visit, Sita replied, “I believe you, Sir, please come in and sit down. My husband will be back soon. We are simple people but you can eat dinner with us and my brother-in-law will give you his bed to sleep on should you wish to spend the night before continuing on your pilgrimage.”
Ravana let them hang for a few seconds in this world. He had never combined his age-old boon of maya with strides in neuroscience and modern physics. String theory. Quantum entanglements. Shared Qualia. Personally, he had felt a little cheap in the previous Ramayanas when he had been forced to resort to sleight of hand to deceive people. Deception. How he loathed that word! It was this disgust that had propelled his interest in Mathematics, Physics, Neuroscience, Geophysics. More over, he was sick of the Ramayana, at least of the parts that involved him. He was interested in putting another one out there in the future, one that Sita and he actually lived. He could have replaced the traditional epic in every e-reader and audio book with his own version, in a few years no one would even suspect that it had been changed, but Ra vana wanted truth and reality over magic and maya. Sita and he would live it first. Authentically.
Reconstituting themselves, traveling in split seconds through worm-hole after wormhole, Ravana and Sita lived over and again. He was a great believer in small tiny variations in initial condition that accumulated to cause enormous differences of outcome over a period of time. When they found the right story, on one of the parallel Lankas and In-dias they visited, he wanted to tell her about the variations they had lived. In one parallel world Ravana showed Sita a flash of the real him with ten heads, in another he told her how the current Ramayana really went.
“Even though you wouldn’t come willingly with me and I was a villain, your husband threw you out of the house in any case,” he said.
“Rama is a good man. He personifies goodness.”
“Even you will be angry in the future, you will go back into the ground to prove your chastity to him.”
Sita had simply refused to believe she could be angry with Rama.
In another world he took her to Lanka and raped her. One of his heads fell off as a result. But then for the first time he could balance his body with an equal number of heads on each side. With the loss of his head he lost his sense of smell and a good chunk of declarative memory in that world. Both were restituted by custom-made prosthetics. Luv and Kush were in fact his children and when Rama’s physicians in Ayodhya ran a DNA test on the boys the daitya gene was writ large all over the screen.
He couldn’t help himself in another parallel universe from taking her to Lanka, showing off the technical advances his people had made under his rule, fitting her with ten heads so that she finally saw the superiority of his ways, and making her queen. When a bunch of monkeys tried to cross the straits from India, his neuroscientists caged them in the lab and ran a series of experiments on the origins of economic theory. Furious at the kidnapping of the monkeys, Rama and his brother charged in. Ravana welcomed and fed them. Sita, he told them, had made the choice of her own free will to stay put. He put them on a jet back to Ayodhya. Rama’s time in exile was not yet over but Ravana’s army went ahead of time and destroyed any opposition Rama might meet. That world left Ravana feeling magnanimous. But in the end it wasn’t the right one.
On a quick break from Sita, between parallel worlds, Ravana communicated with his original country.
“I hope someone is keeping track of us in all those other worlds after we leave. After all they are no more or less real than ours, I mean the first one, the one from which I originally left .”
“Yes, Your Majesty. It does boggle the mind. Our computers are having a hard time managing the various iterations you have on the agenda, their outcomes, the trajectories of the characters once you leave the relevant planet, and so on.”
“I want schoolchildren in ten years to unde
rstand all this science in fifth grade. It should be simple and poetic, like landing on the moon. Think of how to explain it simply.”
“Err, Your Majesty, in which world?”
“Ours.”
Ravana hung up the connection feeling stupid and humbled for the first time in four thousand years. All the seven hundred and nineteen parallel worlds they had chosen were identical. And here he was trying to communicate with the “original.” As if one was an original and the other copies. Why wasn’t he communicating with the local Lankan staff in each world? Maybe he could set up some kind of network between these identical worlds so they could all work together to figure out the paradox and fill the holes in scientific theories which, suddenly, seemed pathetic. He materialized the hologram of two dragonflies with deep transparent blue wings flying in tandem over Sita’s head. She was immediately taken. He slowed her time with a quick hypnotic gesture and then meditated for a second to expand his own. He connected up with the first Lanka and then the current one. He put them in touch. Since he, Ravana, had flow out of all of them and made off to a parallel universe, they were all up to date. “Exchange all your data,” he barked.
“Yes, Your Majesty.”
“I mean everything. Find a way to connect the computers via some kind of wormhole bridge information exchange…it doesn’t exist does it?”
“Your Majesty we’ve barely figured this one out. And we have a problem. We were waiting for you to return to discuss it.”
All ten sets of eyebrows furrowed over Ravana’s foreheads.
“Tell me!” he roared.
“The world’s are entirely symmetrical when they exist independently but when you move in and out of them there is an asymmetry because you are moving into one and out of another. We don’t know what the consequences are. Presumably there will be a similar paradox with information exchange of any kind. If you weren’t using some form of magic then Mathematics tells us this is impossible.”
Ravana scratched his head.
“Your Majesty, I suggest you leave this question for when you are back,” his Chief of Staff suggested.
“Sita,” Ravana called, snapping her out of her state of suspension.
“If all parallel worlds are equal and there is no difference between them right now then why do I retain an attachment to the original one from which I came? Why not just go back to my country in this one?”
“I don’t know, Sir, but I am sure my husband can discuss this with you when he comes back.”
Ravana ordered his staff to find a parallel universe in a different moment of time, back in the day of the original Ramayana. A world hanging in a moment of cosmological time just before the end of the battle. Revising a future Ramayana was too easy. Better to go back, relive the past differently and change it for all time to come. His staff found two worlds stuck in the right time period, they beamed Ravana and Sita to the one that was closer. He proceeded there to defeat Rama and kill him, after which Ravana adopted his form and went to Ayodhya. No one knew that Rama was an imposter. On the throne of Ayodhya he idly reminisced with Sita on the battle and the glory. He asked her about her time spent in Lanka.
“Surely the man with ten heads must have had some charm. I heard he is the most intelligent person who ever lived. It is a shame he had to die,” he baited her.
“Not all the intelligence and wit in the world, not all the beauty and charm, not anything at all can compare to you.”
“I think you might have had an affair with him,” he continued.
“Why would I when I know you?” Sita asked flirtatiously. She gave herself to him. The sweetness of having her without having to change her, simply by changing himself was unparalleled. Ravana reveled in it. They made love for seven days and seven nights. They made love for seven afternoons. Evenings.
Sita didn’t suspect he was not her husband. After a while, this irked him. The absolutely best moments with Sita, out of all realities, were in one where he couldn’t reveal himself. Not that he didn’t think of it. But his own Lanka was destroyed. He hade destroyed it to be with this woman. He woke up one morning feeling sick.
He used the laundryman as an excuse. He accused Sita of sleeping with himself then, there though really she was sleeping with him here, now.
She left.
Sad, sorry, upset, Ravana vowed to bring the prosperity and wellness he had brought to Lanka to Ayodhya. He was Just. Good. Wise. He was erudite.
Things were going well but then the boys were found and they looked like splitting images of their father. One glance and Ravana could see that they had not a fragment of daitya DNA. They were Rama’s. When had the two of them done it? In Lanka? Just before the war ended? Had Rama met her secretly?
Ravana was furious. Speaking in Rama’s gentle tones, which he had perfected, he taunted Sita. He insinuated dirty things. He besmirched her. The demon in him started to rage.
Upset, shaking, equally furious, Sita took up his challenge. She was pure and chaste and she was going to go back to the earth. Inside it. The tectonic plates shifted, the land cleaved. Sita was swallowed.
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.
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.”
Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana Page 7