Breaking the Bow: Speculative Fiction Inspired by the Ramayana (10 page)

The floods had vanished.

A woman was walking up and down the furrows. The scalloped edge of her blue sari, embroidered in gold thread, swept the wet soil as
she moved. A translucent veil in the same blue as her sari covered her hair; her face was turned away from Aruna. Her shoulders tilted back and forth and her slender arms parted the air as if she were dancing.

Aruna was breathless at the sight of the woman. He wanted to call out to her, but he was afraid the sound of his voice would drive her away.

Sita?
he wondered.

In the wake of the
woman’s sweeping skirt, the wet earth was covered with an intricate pattern left by the prints of her bare feet.

Aruna jerked awake.

Sore from sleeping cross-legged, he stumbled to his feet and ran to the doorway of his hut.

It was morning. There was the field, soaked with rain and covered with the footprints of a woman, just as he had dreamed.

Aruna thought of the woman’s
blue sari. He groaned and pulled at his hair.

“Jalanili!” he shouted over and over to the empty field.

When Aruna’s voice had grown hoarse, he went back into his hut and sat down cross-legged on the floor again. The effort sent arrows of pain up through his legs and back.

“Asura,” Aruna said.

The crow’s scraping whisper inside his mind sounded as if it had been waiting for him.

I
am here, little brother.

“You tricked me.”

Did I?
The asura’s voice was amused.

“You made me fall asleep.”

It was your first time meditating. That was hardly my fault.

“The woman in blue was Jalanili,” Aruna said. “Not Sita. Why didn’t you let me see her face before I woke up?”

Jalanili appeared to you as she wanted to appear to you.

This stung Aruna. He said, “What do you
mean? Why didn’t she look at me?”

She believes she is too ugly.

Aruna thought of woman’s graceful arms rising above her veil as she danced. He looked down at the footprints in the wet soil. “I don’t understand, asura. She was so beautiful that I thought she was Sita.”

Inside his mind Aruna could hear the voice smile. I
will tell her that, little brother. She will be heartbroken to hear
it. But I will make sure she knows what you said.

“Why?” Aruna cried.

She has been difficult about all of this. I think it will settle her mind.

“Asura!”

As he shouted, Aruna felt that he was alone once again.

He wanted to crawl out of his aching, heavy human body and fly after Jalanili and the asura on butterfly wings. It had been a mistake to trust the asura. Aruna cursed himself
for letting Jalanili believe the crow’s promise.

But obstinate rage pinned Aruna to the floor of the hut. He wasn’t yet sure what meditation did, but he wasn’t ready to give it up either. And he had no wings.

Aruna was a man now, and nothing more.

His hands curled into fists on his knees.

He thought about Rama and Sita and Lakshmana and the
sadness in Jalanili’s voice when she learned
how short her own life was. More than anything, Aruna thought about Jalanili.

In the evening Aruna stood up from the floor of his hut and lurched toward the door. He was exhausted and hungry. The pain in his body had been replaced with emptiness.

Next to the blue-glazed water jar was a cloth sack he had not noticed before. Curious, Aruna opened it.

The sack was filled with mangoes.

He lifted one out and stared at it, its heavy flesh resting in his palm shaking with hunger. When he raised the mango to his nose, the fruit’s perfume made him dizzy.

Aruna ate mangoes and drank water as the sun set. He tossed the mango peels out through the hut’s door, but he gnawed every white core clean and put them back into the cloth sack. Then he washed his hands with a ladle of water
from the jar and lay down on the hut’s bare floor to sleep.

In the morning Aruna emptied the sack. He split the cores of the mangoes open and pulled out the seeds with his fingers. When he had filled the sack again with mango seeds, he raised it to his shoulders and went out into the field. After a day, the earth was still wet. He could see the patterns of Jalanili’s heels and toes in the dirt.

Aruna knelt under the hot sun and planted mango seeds in Jalanili’s footprints.

Then he went back inside the hut. After his work in the field, the hut’s shade was a blessing. Aruna’s legs no longer complained when he sat cross-legged. It was a relief to rest instead of planting furrow after furrow.

Aruna said, “Asura.”

He heard no answer.

He thought of rain, and Jalanili, and was
asleep in a moment.

That night Aruna dreamed that the field was filled with crows. The brown furrows were covered with the fluttering of wings until the whole field seemed to have transformed into a single, iridescent, black-feathered creature. Caws from thousands of throats tore into Aruna’s ears.

He could see each crow digging its beak into the footprints left by Jalanili where
he had planted the mango seeds. Small black heads tilted back and beaks jerked open as the seeds were gulped down, one by one, by the birds.

Aruna watched himself race out of the hut and into the field to scare the crows away. No matter how he yelled or kicked or flung his arms, he could never frighten more than a few at a time. They would alight above Aruna in the air and beat at his head
with their wings or lunge at his face with their outstretched claws.

Time passed in a moment, as it does in dreams.

The field was empty and silent. The earth was pockmarked with the tracks of birds. Aruna’s dream-self fell to his knees between two furrows. He watched his shoulders heave with sobs as he buried his face in his hands.

At the edge of the field, a woman in a blue sari and
veil crouched on the ground. She was pressing her fingers down into the earth. Her slender hands smoothed the dirt before she moved a step to the side and continued planting.

Aruna’s conscious self watched the woman from the hut’s door.
Look up, you fool!
he wanted to shout to his dream-self out in the field.
It’s her! It’s Jalanili!
The shout dissolved into a faint hiss of breath in his throat.
He wanted to run, but he was frozen to the spot.

Jalanili lifted a muddy hand and pushed aside her veil to wipe sweat from her brow as she looked down. The back of her hand left a velvet brown streak across her forehead. She seemed not to hear or see Aruna’s dream-self weeping in the field.

The beauty of her face, in profile, was a slender arrow that
pierced the heart of the conscious Aruna.
He stared, unable to breathe at the sight.

Jalanili’s head turned. She found herself in his gaze. Her eyes widened.

Aruna was awakened by his own shout.

He leaped to his feet. As he ran to the door, he wondered if he would be fast enough to catch Jalanili still in the field.

The field was empty. But the sight of the furrows stopped Aruna from taking another step.

Every inch
of the soil bore the handprints of a woman.

Aruna looked up at the sky.

“Asura!” he yelled.

Now you shout at me, little brother?

The voice was no longer a whisper, but a caw. It sounded harried and frantic.

“That was Jalanili!”

Indeed. And she recognized you.

“Why are you playing with us like this?”

This is no game.

“Why doesn’t she want to come to me when I’m awake?”

After a pause, Aruna heard inside his mind:
Because she is a devil. She refuses to recognize her own true nature. She thinks she can defy the gods themselves. If I let her be with you, she would make you even more miserable than she is making me.

“Does she want to be a butterfly again?”

The asura was silent.

“Please,” Aruna said softly. “Whatever she wants. I no longer care what I am.
Please release her.”

No.

Rage filled Aruna. “No?” he repeated.

I’m giving you both one last chance. You must choose rightly
this time. Both of you. Or I’ll force you to live apart, forever-and you’ll never be able to forget each other.

“Asura, how do I choose?” Aruna asked. “What is Jalanili’s true nature?”

He was alone.

Aruna sat in his hut that evening and meditated
on the sight of Jalanili’s face beneath the blue veil. Every time he found himself thinking,
How beautiful she is,
he would remember the asura’s words about her heart being broken.

He slept.

There were no dreams that night.

Gentle rains came and watered the field outside Aruna’s hut. The drops of rain washed away Jalanili’s handprints. One morning Aruna woke to find the furrows lined
with pale green sprouts. The mango trees were beginning to grow.

When a month passed without a sign or dream of Jalanili, Aruna sat cross-legged on the floor of his hut in the evening and closed his eyes.

“Asura,” he said.

His mind was quiet. The sun, setting in the clear western skies, gave its last red light to the mango trees lifting their new leaves above the earth.

In
the humid summer air grew a grove of mango trees, their trunks as slender as the waists of young women. The first light of morning stole across the grassy avenues among the rows. Though it was early, the rising heat had made even the butterflies languid. Only a few floated among the glossy green leaves, seeking a cool sanctuary in which to hide from the coming afternoon’s fiery breath.

A man
with streaks of gray in his black hair stood beneath one of the mango trees. He contemplated the branches bent like
archer’s bows under the weight of ripe fruit. The green skins of the mangoes were blushing red among the leaves.

Aruna ran his fingers through his hair. With a rueful smile he sighed. His mango grove had grown green but barren for years. Then, early that spring, the trees had
exploded with pink blossoms all at once. The fruit came, and ripened-all at once. Now he had more than five hundred trees, with no more than his own two hands to harvest the crop. It was the closest he had come to a natural disaster since his first planting.

Not that he had lost hope in natural disasters. During that first season, in spite of Aruna’s meditations in the evenings, the young mango
plants had defied all of his wishes and grown as if the gods themselves were tending them. Not a plant was lost as the sprouts became saplings, then mature trees. Even as he took pride in the grove, Aruna had been so desperate to see Jalanili again that he had considered setting his trees on fire. The thought of the beautiful woman in the blue sari running through the grove, the trees around
her in flame, had stopped him even as he lowered the torch to the pile of dry firewood.

Aruna reached and picked one of the mangoes. He carefully cut the fruit from its stem so as not to spill the tree’s caustic sap on his skin. He peeled the mango and took a bite of its yellow flesh. With the back of his hand he wiped the juice from his chin.

“Asura,” Aruna said.

With a resigned smile,
he waited for an answer inside his mind from an old, whispering voice like a sandal dragging across gravel.

None came.

When Aruna opened his eyes, a woman was standing in front of him.

Her face was covered with a veil. She stood half-hidden in the shade under the mango tree.

He yelped in surprise as he jumped backwards. Aruna’s mango
grove was so far from the closest village that
he rarely saw other people. He managed to stop himself before he flung the knife in his hand at the woman out of shock.

“You…” he said. Then Aruna whispered, “Jalanili?”

The young woman raised her embroidered veil.

She smiled at him.

She was beautiful, with a row of white teeth like the seeds inside a mango’s core.

But she was not Jalanili.

Aruna bowed his head and mumbled a
greeting as he listened to her speak. The young woman’s voice was so pleasantly distracting that Aruna quickly forgot everything she said, as if it flowed out of his mind like water. The sound of his own heart pounding filled his ears.

He risked another glance at her face. The woman didn’t resemble Jalanili.

She was, however, lovely.

Through his shock and the woman’s patient explanations,
Aruna grasped that she was looking for work. Yes, she said. She would be happy to help with the mango harvest.

Aruna brought a basket and showed the woman how to pick the man goes from their stems without being burned by the sap. She lifted the edge of her sari and climbed with ease into the tree’s branches, where she sang a happy, wordless little song as she worked.

Aruna had no more turned
around when he found two more young women standing in front of him. They called with birdlike voices to the woman seated in the tree. She beamed down at them.

Aruna ran to find more baskets and knives. By the time he returned to the mango tree, a small group of young women in multicolored saris had gathered in the shade and were laughing and talking together. It looked like a wedding party.

He stopped and stared at the women.

When Aruna had convinced himself that Jalanili was not among them-a difficult task, as their number seemed to increase even before his eyes-he greeted them, more warmly this time, and asked if they wanted to help. There was a chorus of delighted responses.

And so it went throughout the morning.

By afternoon the heat had grown so intense that Aruna
felt light headed. He walked the avenues among the trees in the mango grove, calling to the hundreds of young women-in the trees, on the ground, walking with baskets of ripe fruit balanced on one shoulder or on their heads-to ask if they needed water or food. All laughed and said no, that the work was not work at all and that they were not in the least thirsty or hungry.

In the heat, several
of the women had taken off their veils and let them fall to the ground. The grass beneath the trees was covered with a rainbow of rich fabrics, as if a silk rug had been spread in the shade throughout the whole grove. Aruna tried not to step on the discarded veils as he walked.