Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana

by Edited by Anil Menon

  Vaidehi shoves her toothpaste and brush into her backpack, the last vestiges of a luxury she left behind for her ideal in the badlands of Dandakaranya. The tree watches her pack sling the satchel over her shoulder, tuck her thick braid into the belt at her slim waist; her translucent skin is camouflaged with grease and grime, her eyes, kohl lined, are large and doe like, her figure curves as a tree-ling swaying in the breeze.

  “Still following your ideal, Vaidehi?”

  Vaidehi hears a whisper rustle through the leaves of the tree under which she stands. She looks around, senses alert.

  “You won’t see me, Vaidehi.”

  A sliver of fear runs erratically along her spine but her hands rise, trained, to the rifle peeping over her shoulder.

  “How can you kill yourself?”

  “Who is it?”

  “I am you.”

  Vaidehi’s arched eyebrows come together in a scowl above her nose.

  “Why do you hide from me?”

  “It is you who cannot see.”

  Vaidehi looks at the leafy branches above her and shivers with a warm, unknown pleasure.

  “Is this your ideal?”

  “What?”

  “This forest life.”

  She traces the thick bark with her long, tapering fingers, feels its roughness; a leaf falls on her arm, whispers:

  “I chased my ideal at the cost of my life Vaidehi; are you willing to do the same?”

  Vaidehi caresses the leaf.

  “Who are you?”

  “Sita.”

  She brushes off the leaf from her hand and gets up. This forest is no place for daydreams. Only nightmares and the demons of her soul. She hears their arrival every night when she waits and watches, afraid of the moment they will pounce on her, hold to ransom her integrity.

  “Are you disowning me?”

  “This may be Dandakaranya, but Ramayana is a foregone myth.”

  “Ramayana may be a myth. But I exist. Don’t you feel me in your soul? Look around! Don’t you see me everywhere?”

  “No.”

  “Don’t you know Sita?”

  “Queen of Rama’s heart?”

  “Indeed! Queen of a heart spent. From Janaka’s court to Dashrath’s palace, from Rama’s hut to Ravana’s Lanka… my soul scattered everywhere.”

  “So whose burnished body was it that came out of the flaming pyre by Lanka’s sea? What was that?”

  “My remnants, Vaidehi. The remnants of my love.”

  “Are you this tree?”

  “If that’s the way you want to find me.”

  “I don’t want to find you. And this is no place for feminist rant. Who wants to know of your sorrow here? There are far more important issues waiting to be resolved.”

  “And you will resolve them.”

  “I could.”

  “Like the vanaras in Rama’s sena. Who is your Rama, Vaidehi?”

  “My belief.”

  A few leaves drop on her shoulders and back, arms and hair. She is irritated and takes out her canteen for a sip of water.

  “You will do all this with warfare? Like Rama?”

  “Didn’t he win you back?”

  “He won me only the first time, when he broke Shiva’s bow. Every other time, he lost me.”

  “So why did he fight Ravana?”

  “Didn’t he tell us all after the war? To redeem family honour, not for my love. Violence only brought us shame, Vaidehi. We lost everything to it. Don’t you remember?”

  “Why do you drag me into this?”

  “You are I. Born of my sap.”

  “So you are a tree Sita and I a human?”

  She walks away feeling dazed and ruffled. She’d actually argued with a tree!

  Boom!

  She ducks into the bushes, instantly; smoke plumes curl, collect and disappear behind the trees. Her battle’s started again. She runs to her camouflaged hut and checks out the radio. Crackling. Her commands are clear. The convoy is yet to pass. This is but a warning. On her insistence. She wanted them to escape if they could. Mindless violence is not her forte. She is here to help create schools and health centres, wealth sharing and rights, not graveyards. After their land loss and water loss and pride loss, the villagers want restoration. And she? She wants to be a part of this struggle, but in her own way, non-violent, constructive. “So why this violence?”

  The voice envelops her.

  “What can you do for them, Vaidehi?”

  The whisper is distinct, all around her. She looks around, irritated, unwilling to let her attention wander. No more arguing with trees and phantoms.

  “Ask yourself. What can you do for them, with them?”

  “Oh, leave me alone!”

  She is not supposed to speak. Voices carry far in this wilderness.

  “Rama killed one Ravana. Not all.”

  Quiet.

  “You know, perhaps there is a midway between Ravana and Rama. Can you find that ideal Vaidehi?”

  “Go away!”

  Her urgent whisper echoes around her and spreads out, beyond the hut, the tree, Dandakaranya. A volley of bullets drowns out all other sounds. Does it kill the voice? Where is it?

  “Here. I am here.”

  The disembodied voice is all around.

  “You are chasing an ideal, Vaidehi. What will this violence beget? More violence? Don’t the men and women fighting you have families? Can you take what is theirs?”

  “Oh, get lost! Why did you not think all this when you refused Hanuman’s help? Couldn’t you have avoided the bloodshed too?”

  “I was blind, Vaidehi. Blind with anger, passion, pride. And the arrogance of being the wife of Rama, the one who could do no wrong.”

  “Like Ravana.”

  “Dashashana? He loved me enough to want me close by. Died for me.”

  “That’s your vanity. Your desired reality.”

  Vaidehi knows her war is endless. Land and water was never any one person’s. Yet, in the darkness of Dandakaranya, she realises completely its potential for conflict. Away from family and the luxuries of her once-opulent life, reality is different. Is this what she yearned for when Orko talked of responsibility and domesticity? With him, she was a woman with a woman’s duties and acquired sensitivities. She didn’t want those Here she was a human being first.

  “Really?”

  How does the voice respond to her thoughts? The eeriness of the faceless voice makes her shudder, yet, there is something soothing about its insistence.

  “Of course!”

  “Then why do you dress like a man here? Why do you worry for your womanly fragility when enemies come rushing at you? Didn’t you say you would die instead of face rape and violation?”

  “Who would want that?”

  “No woman would at least. And you are a woman too. Can you escape the fact?”

  “So?”

  “You were thinking of reality some time back.”

  “It’s different here.”

  “When Dashashana gave me Rama’s head on a platter that was reality too. His desired reality.”

  “What does that have to do with the issue of tribals and their rights to their land?”

  “These are compartments created by you Vaidehi.”

  “Why are you telling me this?”

  “Ideals don’t last; what you do with them live after you.”

  “That’s what I’m doing, living my ideal.”

  “With every demon Rama killed, a hundred rose in its place. He had to kill Ravana to destroy demon-hood.”

  Sita watches Vaidehi. She’s on the move again. Another night, an other mission, silent as the moonlight that traces her path through fields and trees. She has her comrades with her tonight but Sita’s soft voice accompanies Vaidehi. There is no escape. It has to, if Vaidehi is to live. And live with dignity.
What’s dignity in death? Her golden statue where she should have been? King Rama was content with the idea. She, his forsaken and humiliated wife, was content with the idea of being missed after death. Vaidehi lives a distorted reality. Ideals! Sita knows all about them. She should. She paid the price for every ideal the poet could conjure. He should have made her live with her sons to become queen mother when they ascended the throne. But he was writing Rama’s story. She was dispensable, a memory in the paintings that lined Rama’s palace walls.

  Vaidehi thinks of the time she set foot in Dandakaranya’s darkness. Not like this moonlit night, but a Neanderthal darkness intermittently lit up by fireflies. It was revolutionary ideology and its need in these parts that had drawn her. The need to change the way things worked against the less privileged, the forest dweller, women …, mainly people whose land was at risk from the government, mining companies, corporate houses, insensitive urban greed. Her family of course thought her romantic.

  “I will fight for the dispossessed and disadvantaged, for tribals and their rights.”

  “Do it through the system.”

  “That’s what needs the revolution.”

  She knew it then. She did not trust any system but was aware that she had to belong to one in order to carry out her work. She could not escape belonging. And so when a bow and arrow was thrust into her moist palms, she did not hesitate. She had to prove herself. Her test by fire could only come through these primitive but deadly weapons of self protection, that’s what they were meant for. What would the people here do without these? How would they fight their battles, prevent the daily loot and rape? Didn’t she see the plight of women left alone in their homes, their men away in cities, jails, or fighting with the comrades? They walked miles to get water or lodge a complaint but often ended up brutalised and humiliated, just as they were dispossessed and deprived of what was theirs.

  Had she been equally confident the day her hands felt the muzzle of a gun? Cold. It was the only feeling she remembers from those times.

  Ideology was a cold muzzle in her hands.

  “Writing reams and lecturing in village classrooms will not get any body their rights Vaidehi. We have to fight for it.”

  “Why with these things?”

  “How else? Will your lectures on sustainable living help when the cops come shooting?”

  “They come when we challenge them. Let’s do things differently then. Instead of firearms, let us dig wells, grow trees.”

  “That’s idealistic. That alone has not helped.”

  “We could try again.”

  “Prove yourself Vaidehi. Are you with us in this revolution against an exploitative system?”

  “We are exploiters too. We are teaching them to resort to violence as the first means of protest. This is not sustainable. What will we get from killing cops who are only serving a system? Won’t it justify their killing of our people too? Where’s the end comrade?”

  “Lanka was not conquered by Rama’s goodness. It started right here, in Dandakaranya. The demons understood the language of violence alone, of retribution.”

  “Who are the demons here today, comrade?”

  “Vaidehi! Prove your loyalty or face the consequences.”

  Wasn’t her presence in their midst proof enough?

  “No!”

  She proved herself. Again and again, vassal to a system after all. She felt hysterical.

  Tonight, it is mission time again. She looks forward to the warm welcome the villagers might have in store for them. If they are sympathisers. If not, they will have to fight their way through. If they are sympathisers, she will have cooked food at last. She can almost inhale the aroma of boiling rice and roasting fish caught from the village ponds If the ponds exist.

  It is a long trudge tonight through beautiful woods, across shimmering rivers, by hills that look romantic in the moonshine. She thinks of Sita and her idyll with Rama in these efflorescent acres. And then she comes upon sudden barrenness.

  They keep walking, single file.

  The village huts are visible against the brightening skyline. Something looks out of joint. She looks closely at the brightness. In the semi glow from that distant horizon, her comrades’ faces look alert and drawn. She dares not stop and stare, yet. The flames leap up right then, the sky an inferno.

  “What?”

  “Ambush.”

  Her whispered question and her comrade’s whispered answer.

  “Whose?”

  “A battalion.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Was planned.”

  The ground seems to cave in under her feet; she feels the chasm opening up, sucking her into it. She wants to run but discipline winds itself around her ankles now.

  She walks, single file.

  The mud road and its surroundings are aglow. Jeeps burn, suffusing the air with their devastation. She looks closely at the limbs scattered around her. Something moves. A hand claws the air. She goes to it swiftly. The mangled face looks at her and opens its maw. She pours water into it from her canteen, a few drops at a time till a hand snatches it away.

  “He’s our enemy.”

  “I’m only giving him water.”

  “To the enemy?”

  “He’s a dying man, comrade.”

  “A dying enemy is still an enemy, Vaidehi. Get away.” She clutches at his sleeve.

  “Why? And why wasn’t I told about this ambush? What are we doing here now?”

  “No questions! Pick up the arms and ammunition they were carrying and move on. Take the radios. Don’t leave them behind!”

  She doesn’t move.

  Vaidehi is in Sita’s embrace.

  Hiding under her leaves, she feels the forest permeate her senses, verdant and cool. The leaves caress her naked body, lull it into restfulness. She inhales rapidly twice and holds her breath.

  “What happened there?”

  The voice! Sita!

  “Are you afraid?”

  “No.”

  “What happened?”

  “I quit.”

  “That’s easy. Vaidehi always quits”

  “You play devil’s advocate.”

  “What’s that?”

  “Never mind.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “Go home. Teach.”

  “Teach? That’s interesting! What will you teach?”

  “How not to scuttle a revolution.”

  Sita smiles. Vaidehi smiles.

  “It’s never easy to return. How will you prove yourself?”

  “Prove! Prove! Why should I? It’s all because of you, Sita. You set the trend.”

  “You talk like a woman!”

  “No. Well, yes. Why should I prove myself? They wanted me to use weapons, follow their cult of violence. ‘Prove yourself,’ they said. I did. I fed water to a dying man. ‘Prove you are not on the enemy’s side,’ they said. I ran away.”

  “How far will you run?”

  “I don’t know. If they catch up with me, I have a cyanide capsule ready for the bite.”

  “To prove your fear. You can’t escape it Vaidehi. Can you reverse the trend I set? Running away, dying. They are forms of escape. Can you do it differently this time?”

  Vaidehi yearns for the coolness of the leaves on her body but throws them off to stand up unclothed, stark and beautiful. Sita watches the radiance of her contours.

  Vaidehi thinks of the distance she has to traverse. She stands mute as Sita envelops her once again, enters her spirit and clothes her in her leaves and flowers. She sets forth-earth woman, with nothing of the world on her and Sita’s words ringing in her ears.

  “The abyss is not ours this time. Fight for what is yours. Whatever it may be.”

  The dense forest covers her on all sides. These tracts are imbued with violence and factional rivalry. Each abducting the
other’s agenda. Systems, groups, armed militia, insurgents, villagers. Identities overlapped in these parts. Could she escape? She walks away from water bodies and villages.

  Dawn breaks out of the hills.

  A group of women emerge from its shadows in the distance dangling a carcass across a stake, their hips swaying to their songs, a lilting break in the monotony. She recognises the signs. They are returning from their annual hunt. She quickens her pace. Among them, she will be inconspicuous.

  They sing of their hunt, they laugh, stop to dance; she feels happy; she feels safe. They reach the village by noon. A village of women.

  “Where are the men?”

  “Taken or gone.”

  Vaidehi braces herself for the familiar tales.

  My man’s in jail…

  My son’s a comrade now …

  My grandson’s hunting comrades …

  My man is in the city …

  My man was taken away by…the police…the lal salaam people…their opponents…government babus…by death…

  Rama had to kill Ravana to destroy demon-hood. How many more demons now? How many more Ravanas? Where are the Ramas? She stretches out on a mat in the hut of a family caught between rival groups. The family is history now; their hut unused and bare. The mud floor is cool and she feels sleepy. She has to walk through the night again.

  There is no wind, yet the door rattles on its hinges. She opens it. Outside, in the blinding daylight stand two men with guns.

  “Chalo!”

  “Who are you?”

  “Who were with you in the ambush?”

  “What ambush?”

  “Don’t pretend.” They shove at her and try to enter the hut. She stands in the way.

  “Where are your comrades?”

  How did they know of her? Or was this a routine check? They weren’t men in uniform.

  “I’m not a comrade.”

  “Ya. We’ve heard that before. Come!”

  They pull her by her wrist. Women come out of their huts as they drag Vaidehi to a jeep standing under the Banyan. The women bar their way. The two men hit out with their guns.

  “Wait! Where are you taking me?”

  “Quiet!”

  “I want to know. And why?”

  “Why? Why were you with your comrades at the ambush?”