Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  “…mortals,” repeated Basra, allowing herself a little smile which managed convey a sense of amazement alongside a dose of judicious scepticism. “So…why today? Why now? Has something changed?”

  Mandy blinked and flexed her shoulders. “I am want to set record straight. For instance: my husband is not have ten heads. Why is mortals believe such kind of nonsense? Five is maximum. And it is must be odd number only: one main head and then one or two on sides. Ten heads is means five this side, five that side and nothing in middle! It is total-foolish. But to get back to wedding night…”

  “We’ll do that, Mandy, we’ll do that,” said Basra, “but first our viewers need to know what brought you here, to the mortal dimension—”

  “I is tell you that already. It is too boring for me,” said the divine. “Wedding night is much more thrill. For example, I am want to show how nonsense it is, this claim that my husband is lose interest in me because of Other Woman. He cannot! It is all lies of their side. In fact, there is not ever any Other Woman—”

  “Who?” interjected Basra.

  “You know it is who,” said Mandy, her forehead starting to bunch together in a frown. “I am not insult my mouth by speak her rubbish name.” Throwing her head back, she howled in a high falsetto, “Oh she whose perfumed face rivals the full-moon! She who makes the stars tremble with desire!” For an instant, there was a disturbing flicker in the region of the guest’s throat, as of a second mouth gaping open with a curved and toothy beak poking out. “After all, you tell me: why is I am here? And not she?”

  Basra’s tawny eyes glittered. “Yes, Mandy, tell our viewers what that reason is…”

  “Because,” said Mandodari, “because for all this time, I am sitting in background of this so-called big story, feeling this hurt, this pain, this axe in my heart. The whole world is say, Look! Look! Your husband is running after that woman! Look! Look— he is catch her! He is bring her to your house, he is feed her honey and dolphin cream! And all this time, all this many, many years, where am I in the picture? Where do I hide my head? Huh! NOWHERE!”

  The huge, ugly-beautiful face reared up, seeming to grow livid with the stored memory of her ancient, deathless rage. “I tell you, it is ALL LIES!! Everything. First lie is, why is they come to forest? To steal, of course! It is our forest. Second lie is, how is my sister-in-law lose her nose? Because that man and his brother—I will not say they’s name—they is see her take bath, they is grow hot, then they is chase-chase-chase, until she is fall. Her nose is break, but still they is have fun with her. Third lie is, who is win the war? My husband of course. He is bring army to avenge his sister, and they is chase this man and his brother away. The end! That is whole story. There is no wife and she is not come to forest. At all. She is total imaginary. That is why in final end, she is not even stay with so-called hubby-bubby, but vanish into earth. Hahaha! Big joke. She is imaginary from start to finish.”

  Basra could see, around the edges of her field of vision that a slow-motion pandemonium was in progress. One of the light boys had fainted. The sound recordist had whipped off his headphones. To her right, someone was gesturing. Through it all, she nodded, arranging her features in a sympathetic expression and ignored all distraction. “All right, Mandy,” she said. “All right. The problem is, we here in the mortal dimension have for centuries been given a completely different version of events—”

  “I am know,” cut in Mandy. “That is why I am come. To explain. To show the truth. This is age when a womans is free to speak out her heart. This is my heart.”

  “Yes, yes,” said Basra, “but being free to speak isn’t the same as being free to lie—”

  “I am not lie,” said Mandy, starting to look angry.

  “And,” continued Basra, “in our dimension it isn’t enough to just state a fact. In order to believe it, we have to see evidence—”

  “Wrong!” cut in the divine at once. “The court is show no evidence of birthplace!”

  A note of triumph had entered her voice.

  “And the reason for that is…?” prompted Basra.

  “Because they cannot. They is stupid. They is rubbish—”

  Basra leaned forward in her seat. “Of course, of course—”

  “Is not surprise they can show nothing. We is divine, after all.” She shrugged as if her meaning were obvious, “We is immortal.”

  “Yes, but Mandy,” said Basra, “please remember that I and my viewers are poor, limited beings with heavy physical bodies and short, transitory lives! Why, we are hardly more than May flies compared to you. We really don’t understand the implications of what you just said. Do you think you could explain it more clearly?”

  The demoness drew herself up in her seat, her eyebrows arched in contempt. “We is immortal,” she repeated more slowly. “It is mean we is live forever. We is live outside of Time. We is have no end and no beginning. We is neither die nor is we born…”

  Back in her bedroom, Mandodari, the wife of the ten-headed demon king settled into her saffron-scented mattress. For all the time she had been away, there had been a hum of unrest and uncertainty. Rumours were flying around of changes and restructuring, of new currents in the flux of reality. And then, just as suddenly as it had begun, the disturbance or irregularity or discontinuity, or whatever it was, began to subside.

  She returned with her swans as if nothing had happened. She told no-one of where she had been and returned to her quarters with no comments to anyone. Her eyes began to close once more. Her time in the mortal dimension was already fading from consciousness.

  Back on earth, no records had been kept of the unprecedented broad cast that had been aired with such fanfare by ENDO-TV. A few protests were raised. Then a story was put out that it had all been an extraordinary scam. Then the whole affair subsided with no further questions asked. All references to the televised interview were erased. Gradually the entire episode passed into the collective unmemory as the issue of a hero king’s birthplace subsided and was instantly replaced by fresh riots, new scandals, gristly outrages.

  But not all change is for the worse.

  And even the most transitory incidents leave traces.

  On a parapet wall of a vast iron palace, for instance.

  A black peacock is dancing.

  Forever.

  This, Other World

  Lavie Tidhar

  1. Lord of Neon Light

  “I want to kill that Ravana,” Rama says, dancing on his feet. Neon light bathes his face orange. “I want to kill that rakasha if it kills me.”

  We’re in Bangkok, and Rama is ghost-boxing in the air. We’re in Bangkok, following a trail that had gone cold some time before.

  “To kill Ravana you have to find him first,” I say. Rama looks at me, eyes yabaa-bright. The Thais love their yabaa, potent mix of amphetamine and caffeine, all crunched up into potent little pills. Madness drug, is the literal translation. Rama ghost-boxes, his eyes seeing further than mine. I am Lakshmana, but people call me Lak.

  “Are you sure this is the right place?”

  As if it could be any other. “Relax,” I say. “It’s early.”

  We’re in Nana, where else. Whores of all three sexes throng the street. The smell is equal parts dope, fish sauce and pheromone sprays. At least no clove cigarettes. We looked for Ravana in Indonesia and Malaysia but the trace was cold even then. I hated the smell of cloves. We’re outside the Eightfold Path. The contact owns it.

  Lord of Neon Light, they call him.

  Mara.

  You must surely understand that this story is mixed, that the ratio of signal to noise grows exponentially. Buddhism, Hinduism, Christianity, Islam—they are stories interwoven into each other, here, controlled as always by the nagas alone, the snake-deities that are the true guardians of the continent. And naga, Rama would argue, is just another word for Other.

  I shrug and say, “I am told to hear
the opposite of whatever Mara has to say.”

  Rama stops boxing and stands very still. He slides mirrorshades over his eyes. He scratches his neck where discreet plugs are filled with an assortment of purchased spikes: tourist shit; whether it’s drugs or weapons or new philosophies I have no way of knowing.

  I am a follower of Ogko, it who may have been an alien or a great spirit or a spirited con. Ogko who said, Life is like a river, you are bound to fall off into the water eventually, and Try to stay out of trouble and I find nothing to be everything. Not a very helpful guy, Ogko.

  Neither is the universe, Ogko had written.

  The lights of the Eighfold Path come on—they’re blinding— harsh neon illuminates silver doors like the entrance to a Christian heaven -muang thai kathoey materialise outside, red boxer shorts and red boxer gloves and nipples red like blood-berries.

  “He is expecting you.”

  They show Rama the respect that is his due, bowing low as the doors swing open and we enter. Inside it is cool and quiet, the air-con working overtime, dispelling humidity. Black walls, no windows—the doors of a Christian heaven leading to a very Christian hell.

  Chinese hell is a colourful place, I am told. There are eighteen levels, a whole range of tortures available—it is hot and humid and crowded, not unlike the streets outside. It is like a modern day mega-mall, with elevators and vast underground parking lots where the lost souls of the dead roam eternally.

  A waitress materialises by our side. She is very lovely. Her bathrobe is translucent. A dancer, our height, not the obscene size of those farangs who come here. “A drink?” she says.

  Rama shakes his head. His mirrored eyes examine her slowly. “No,” he says, then giggles. “Take me to your leader.”

  We follow her. Almost naked, her skin is gold, her hair alive and moving strangely, clumped into tentacles. Her hair makes a grab at Rama but he slaps it away.

  She leads us past a long, curved wooden bar. Automatons serve drink. A few patrons at this hour, fat men and lovely girls and tall farangs, a group of Melanesians to one side, Malays in suit speaking in hushed tones at an opposite corner.

  “Through here,” the girl says. We follow exposed skin and wild hair, through doors that close behind us, sealing sound. This is the tomb of Mara.

  “Step into my office.”

  The place is all dark wood dark leather pure-white cushions—a desk, two chairs for guests. The girl goes around the desk and sits down, gesturing for us to do the same. “How may I help you?”

  Rama grins at my expression. “Mara,” he says. “It is an honour.”

  “The honour’s mine.”

  The girl stares at us coolly, then smiles. Her voice speaks an ancient tongue, an ancient mind behind it.

  “We seek Ravana.”

  “You will not find him here.”

  The Lord of Neon Light looks at us through his pretty girl’s eyes. The Lord of Neon Light, the lord of lies, illusion, distributed denial of service attacks, black codes, black ice, master of the body-surfing shops, the tentacle-junkie farms, king of the Louis Wu emporiums, the sex-change factories, the slums and temples.

  I bow. The Lord of Neon Light’s nipples are small and sharp.

  An Other, body-surfing. An Other, playing human games, machine mine spawned inside the Breeding Grounds. Unknowable. Unknown.

  “I am told you know everything, great Mara,” I say. The girl’s sweet eyes turn on me and I move back in my chair. She nods, gracefully. “No one knows everything,” her lips whisper. “Not even Ogko, of whom you are a follower.”

  “Ogko never claimed—” I say, then subside. Beside me, Rama’s shades reflect no more, become translucent.

  “We seek Ravana!”

  “You will not find him here.”

  It is a matter, then, of payment. I nod to Rama. He nods back. The girl smiles, sits back, crosses her legs, one over the other. “You gentlemen do understand, then.”

  “Name your price, merchant of data,” Rama says.

  “Your family,” the girl says, her voice matter-of-fact, “controls the Breeding Grounds of Clan Ayodhya.”

  “That is not so. That is -”

  “You mock me?”

  “We have the contract for the maintenance of primary hardware,” Rama says, unfazed. “You of all Others should know that UN resolutions

  The Breeding Grounds—those vast and mythical machine spaces where Others form, evolving out of untold billions of rapidly mutating code, merging and splitting over billions of evolutionary cycles. Clan Ayodhya’s riches come from their association with the Others. Security concerns are the Others’ primary requirement. Like ancient relatives, the more they live the more they fear. The universe terminates all pro grams, eventually. Clan Ayodhya provides maintenance of the hardware and security at the level of a small country’s army.

  It is what Ravana, too, wants. It is why he had kidnapped Rama’s wife.

  It is a war of Others we are in—the knowledge hits me like a beam of light. I blink. My eyes are tearful.

  “I am an exile,” Rama says. “I haven’t the control, the access—”

  “But you shall have it,” Mara says. And it is true.

  “It is my price, for giving you your enemy.”

  I look at Rama. Here, inside this room, our secure communication channels are no doubt open to the Lord of Neon Light’s—amused?

  Benevolent? Malevolent? It is impossible to say—scrutiny. I may as well speak aloud.

  “No,” I say.

  Both heads turn, simultaneously. Rama and Mara, human and Other both watch me.

  “It is a price you cannot pay, not for Sita, not for anyone or anything.”

  At the mention of her name Rama’s face closes. Sita, of Clan Janaka, sister-cousin to Boss Gui of the Kunming Toads. Chinese and Thai and Indian, her genes are the best the Kunming Labs could produce. A meta-human, interfaced with cross-hatched Other, she is the queen to rule the houses of both Janaka and Ayodhya.

  “I will meet your price,” Rama says. My hands close on the armrests of the chair, but I say nothing more. “Give me Ravana.”

  2. The Thousand Prison Islands of Nam Ngum

  We cross into Laos with the arrogance of princes. Our pachyderms are African bull, gene-spliced with extinct mammuthus. Our mahouts are gene-tweaked Chiu Chow, frozen forever in ten-year- old bodies, the way the English do their jockeys, brother-products of the Kunming Labs.

  We amble across pasture land and crossed-off areas of old Yankee UXOs, and we get to Vientiane during Pimai.

  Water, water everywhere, this Lao new year’s eve. The air sizzles with heat and the streets are crowded with dancing boys and dancing girls and dancing grandmas, water guns and water grenades, Beerlao by the crate—on the Mekong the candles float and fireworks shoot in the air-But we’re not there. Exchanging pachyderms for off-road buggies, we storm along the single road towards the mountains, two hours out of town we turn and follow the sign to Nam Ngum.

  Twentieth Century folly, in the calendar of the farang (falang, the word is in the tongue of Laos, farang is Thai)—a giant dam, a river diverted—flooding a valley and its hills, driving its people elsewhere—a giant human-made lake, a time before the Others had evolved, long time ago, in St. Cohen’s breeding grounds in that far-off falang holy place Jerusalem.

  A giant lake—the hills had become islands.

  Now on the shore houses squat on stilts and smoke rises from cooking fires. We breakfast on cold fish and hot tea and fresh bread heated over coals, the sound of papaya salad being crushed in giant mortars. The chilies are small, red, and make our eyes water. A haze lies on the surface of the lake. A giant concrete shape hovers in the distance.

  Nam Ngum.

  The island prisons.

  The old communist party bosses, the pathet lao, took over soon after the dam was completed, the valley flooded. On those pe
aks of new-born islands the undesirables were put-away, reeducation camps out of sight and out of mind.

  Now Ravana’s lair is here, the place we’ve come to find. For years we’ve searched, Ravana as a ghost, digits breaking and reforming, lines of code fleeing across the networked world. But even ghosts need shells, a source of energy, processing power, backups, storage. A place in meat-space.

  As night falls we wade into the water. We are naked but for our guns. Our gills open—a gift from Mara and the clinics of Bangkok. Noiselessly we sink into the warm water, the moon illuminating our skin. We are shadow-dolphins in the water, though dolphins only wish that they could breathe as we do.

  Deeper and deeper into the lake. Fish like silver bullets dart beside us. Deeper into the darkness where the zombie trees grow, flooded centuries past, rotting, a home to hungry parasites and fungal ghosts. Beware the waters of Nam Ngum, the Lord of Neon Light had told us. Beware the water-sprites, the hungry nagas and the servants of the lord.

  Vietnamese dolls swimming towards us. Human-shaped, battle-ready, factory-produced by their hundreds of thousands. Black-ops dolls, coming for us.

  “Fuck it,” Rama says. “Let’s blast them.”

  He had been driven mad by Sita. Sita’s scent, her sight, her touch -evolved the way a perfect watch evolves, from tiny fragments, circuits, gears, mutating, joining, merging, splitting— countless generations of proto-watches forming one perfect, never designed, naturally-evolving watch.

  A trap for Rama. The future queen of all the Clans. A meta-human, Other-bonded, goddess-queen and mystery.

  Rama blasts away at the dolls. We are back to back, blades opening from our hands, our eyes enclosed behind protective mirrors. The guns we have are courtesy of Burmese weapons-smiths, each shot a miniature rocket, disintegrating dolls one at a time.

  They fall apart in silence. A cloud of plastic in the water, it’s hard to see. From down below a giant tree spreads out ghostly limbs, flapping mutant jellyfish rising up in a pale milky cloud.

  Rama’s body shudders in ecstasy, his fingers shoot flames through water, he is a magician-warrior, a scientist-prince, the avenger of Clan Ayodhya against all its enemies.