3
The Portuguese visitor arrived on Easter Sunday. His name was Sunday as well—Domingo Nunes—and he was as handsome as the daylight, his eyes the green of the grass at dawn, his hair the red of the sun as it set, and he had a speech impediment that only made him more charming to the people of the new city, because it allowed him to avoid the arrogance of white men when confronted with darker skins. His business was horses, but in truth that was just a pretext, because his real love was travel. He had seen the world from Alpha to Omega, from up to down, from give to take, from win to lose, and he had learned that wherever he went the world was illusion, and that that was beautiful. He had been in floods and fires and other hairbreadth escapes, and had seen deserts, quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touched heaven. Or so he said. He had been sold into slavery, and afterward redeemed, and after that he had gone on journeying, telling the stories of his travels to all who would listen, and those tales were not of the humdrum quotidian variety, not accounts of the everydayness of the world, but of its wonders; or, rather, they were stories that insisted that human life was not banal, but extraordinary. And when he arrived in the new city he understood immediately that it was one of the greatest of miracles, a marvel to be compared to the Egyptian Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or the Colossus of Rhodes. Accordingly, after he had sold the string of horses he had brought from the port of Goa to the head groom at the army cantonment, he went immediately to observe the golden city wall with disbelieving eyes—as he afterward wrote in the journal of his visit, sections of which were quoted by Pampa Kampana in her book. The wall was rising from the ground as he watched, higher every hour, smoothly dressed stones appearing out of nowhere and placing themselves alongside and on top of one another in immaculate alignment without any visible sign of stonemasons or other workers; which was possible only if some great occultist was nearby, conjuring the fortifications into being with a wave of his imperious wand.
“Foreigner! Come here!” Domingo Nunes had learned enough of the local language to understand that he was being addressed, peremptorily, with little attempt at courtesy. In the shadow of the barbican gate that stood between the city and the cantonment, its twin towers rising higher and higher into the sky as he watched, a small man was leaning out between the curtains of a lordly palanquin. “You! Foreigner! Here!”
The man was either a rude buffoon, or a prince, or both, thought Domingo Nunes. He decided to be on the safe side, and answer discourtesy with courtesy. “At your sir sir service sir,” he declared with a deep bow, which impressed Crown Prince Bukka, who was still getting used to being a person before whom strangers bowed deeply.
“Are you the horse guy?” Bukka asked, no less rudely. “I was told a horse-trader who couldn’t talk properly was in town.”
Domingo Nunes gave an intriguing reply. “I pay my way with whore whore horses,” he said, “but in seek secret I am one of those whose tata task it is to travel the whir whir world and tell its tales, so that others may no no know what it’s like.”
“I don’t know how you tell stories,” Bukka said, “when you have such trouble finishing sentences. But this is interesting. Come sit beside me. My brother the king and I myself would like to hear these tales.”
“Before that,” Domingo Nunes dared to say, “I muss muss must know the secret of this magic war war wall, the greatest won wonder I have ever seen. Who is the mum magician who is doodoo doing this? I must shay shay shake his hand.”
“Get in,” Bukka said, moving over to make room for the foreigner in the palanquin. The men tasked with carrying the palanquin tried not to show their feelings about the increased load. “I’ll present you to her. The city whisperer and the giver of seeds. Hers is a story that should be told far and wide. You’ll see that she is a storyteller too.”
It was a small room, unlike any other room in the palace, not in the least ornate, with plain whitewashed walls, and unfurnished except for a bare wooden plinth. A small high window allowed a single ray of sunlight to descend at a steep angle toward the young woman below, like a shaft of angelic grace. In this austere setting, struck by that thunderbolt of startling light, sitting cross-legged, with her eyes closed, her arms outstretched and resting on her knees, her hands with the thumbs and index fingers joined at their tips, her lips slightly parted, there she was: Pampa Kampana, lost in the ecstasy of the act of creation. She was silent, but it seemed to Domingo Nunes, as he was ushered into her presence by Bukka Sangama, that a great throng of whispered words was flowing from her, from her parted lips, down her chin and neck, along her arms and out across the floor, escaping from her as a river escapes from its source, and heading out into the world. The whispers were so soft that they were barely audible, and for a moment Domingo Nunes told himself he was imagining them, that he was telling himself some sort of occult tale to make sense of the impossible things he was seeing.
Then Bukka Sangama whispered in his ear. “You hear it, yes?”
Domingo Nunes nodded.
“This is how she is for twenty hours a day,” Bukka said. “Then she opens her eyes and eats a little and drinks something also. Then she closes her eyes and lies down for three hours to rest. Then she sits up and starts again.”
“But wha wha what is she ack ack actually doing?” Domingo Nunes asked.
“You can ask her,” said Bukka softly. “This is the hour when her eyes open.”
Pampa Kampana opened her eyes and saw the beautiful young man staring at her with the glow of adoration on his face and at that moment the question of her proposed marriage to Hukka Raya I, and perhaps to Crown Prince Bukka after his death (depending on who survived whom), developed new complications. He didn’t have to ask her anything. “Yes,” she said in reply to his unspoken question, “I’ll tell you everything.”
She had finally opened the door to the locked room that contained the memory of her mother and her early childhood, and it had all flooded out and filled her with strength. She told Domingo Nunes about Radha Kampana the potter, who taught her that women could be as good at pottery as men were, as good at everything as men were, and about her mother’s departure, which had left a void in her that she was now trying to fill. She described the fire and the goddess who spoke through her mouth. She told him about the seeds that built the city on the site of her personal calamity. Any new place where people decide to live takes time to feel real, she said, it can take a generation or more. The first people arrive with pictures of the world in their luggage, with things from elsewhere filling their heads, but the new place feels strange, it’s hard for them to believe in it, even though they have nowhere else to go, and nobody else to be. They make the best of it, and then they begin forgetting, they tell the next generation some of it, they forget the rest, and the children forget more and change things in their heads, but they were born here, that’s the difference, they are of the place, they are the place and the place is them, and their spreading roots give the place the nourishment it needs, it flowers, it blossoms, it lives, so that by the time the first people depart they can leave happy in the knowledge that they began something that will continue.
Little Bukka was astonished by her volubility. “She never talks like this,” he said, perplexed. “When she was younger, she didn’t talk at all for nine years. Pampa Kampana, why are you all of a sudden talking so much?”
“We have a guest,” she said, gazing into Domingo Nunes’s green eyes, “and we must make him feel at home.”
Everyone came from a seed, she told him. Men planted seeds in women and so forth. But this was different. A whole city, people of all kinds and ages, blooming from the earth on the same day, such flowers have no souls, they don’t know who they are, because the truth is they are nothing. But such truth is unacceptable. It was necessary, she said, to do something to cure the multitude of its unreality. Her solution was fiction. She was making up their lives, their castes, their faiths, how many brothers and sisters they had, and what childhood games they had played, and sending the stories whispering through the streets into the ears that needed to hear them, writing the grand narrative of the city, creating its story now that she had created its life. Some of her stories came from her memories of lost Kampili, the slaughtered fathers and the burned mothers, she was trying to bring that place back to life in this place, bringing back the old dead in the newly living; but memory wasn’t enough, there were too many lives to enliven, and so imagination had to take over from the point at which memory failed.
“My mother abandoned me,” she said, “but I will be the mother of them all.”
Domingo Nunes didn’t understand much of what he was being told. Then all of a sudden he heard a whisper, heard it not through his ears but somehow through his brain, a whisper winding itself around his throat, untying the knots inside him, clearing what was tangled, and setting his tongue free. It was simultaneously exhilarating and terrifying, and he found himself clutching at his throat and crying out. Stop. Go on. Stop.
“The whispers know what you need,” said Pampa Kampana. “The new people need stories to tell them what kind of people they are, honest, dishonest, or something in between. Soon the whole city will have stories, memories, friendships, rivalries. We can’t wait a generation for the city to become a real place. We have to do it now, so that there can be a new empire; so that the city of victory can rule the land, and make sure the slaughter never happens again, and, above all, that no more women ever have to walk into walls of flame, and that all women are treated better than orphans at men’s mercy in the dark. But you,” she added, making it sound like an afterthought although in fact it was what she really wanted to say, “you had other needs.”
“Today is the day of the resurrection,” Domingo Nunes said without faltering. “Ele ressuscitou, we say in my language. He is risen. But I see that the one you are trying to resurrect is someone else, someone you loved who walked into a fire. You are using your sorcery to bring a whole city to life in the hope that she will return.”
“Your speech impediment,” Bukka Sangama said. “Where did that go?”
“She whispered in my ear,” Domingo Nunes said.
“Welcome to Vijayanagar,” Pampa Kampana said. She pronounced the v almost like a b, which was a thing that sometimes happened.
“Bizana…?” repeated Domingo Nunes. “I’m sorry. What did you call it?”
“First say vij-aya, victory,” Pampa Kampana said. “Then say nagar, city. It’s not so difficult. Nag-gar. Vijayanagar: Victory City.”
“My tongue can’t make those sounds,” Domingo Nunes confessed. “Not because of any speech impediment. It just won’t come out of my mouth the way you say it.”
“What does your tongue want to call it?” Pampa Kampana asked.
“Bij…Biz…so, in the first place, Bis…and in the second place…nagá,” said Domingo Nunes. “Adding up—and here I make my best effort—to Bisnaga.”
Pampa Kampana and Crown Prince Bukka both laughed. Pampa clapped her hands, and Bukka, looking hard at her, saw that she had fallen in love.
“Then Bisnaga it is,” she said, clapping her hands. “You have given us our name.”
“What are you saying?” Bukka cried. “Are you going to let this foreigner label our city with the noises of his twisted tongue?”
“Yes,” she said. “This is not an ancient city with an ancient name. The city just arrived and so has he. They are the same. I accept his name. From now on this is and will be Bisnaga.”
“The day will come,” Bukka said mutinously, “when we will no longer allow foreigners to tell us who we are.”
(Thanks to Pampa Kampana’s amused delight in Domingo Nunes and his garbled mispronunciation, she chose to refer to both the city and the empire as “Bisnaga” throughout her epic poem, intending, perhaps, to remind us that while her work is based on real events, there is an inevitable distance between the imagined world and the actual. “Bisnaga” belongs not to history but to her. After all, a poem is not an essay or a news report. The reality of poetry and the imagination follows its own rules. We have elected to follow Pampa Kampana’s lead, so it is her dream-city of “Bisnaga” that is so named and portrayed here. To do otherwise would be to betray the artist and her work.)
Even though Pampa Kampana was still deep in her whispering trance for twenty hours a day, her evident new feelings for the foreigner—her eyes searching for him during the one hour in which they were open—were the cause of much royal displeasure. News of Pampa’s infatuation reached King Hukka Raya I’s ears before Nunes was presented to him for the first time, and caused much irritation. The Portuguese, who hadn’t been informed of this, introduced himself to the king with ornate courtesy, and mentioned his gift for traveler’s tales. “If you permit,” he said, “I could entertain you with a few?”
Hukka grunted noncommittally. “It may be,” he said, “that the traveler is of greater interest to us than the tales.”
Domingo Nunes didn’t know what to make of this, so in some confusion he began to speak of his journeyings among the cannibals—the Anthropophagi—and men whose heads grew beneath their shoulders. Hukka raised a hand to stop him. “Tell us instead,” he said, “of the unnaturally pale-faced peoples, the white Europeans, the pink English, of their unreliability and treacheries.” Nunes was unnerved. “Sire,” he said, “among Europeans, the savagery of the French is exceeded only by the cruelty of the Dutch. The English are at present a backward race, but it is my guess, though many of my countrymen would disagree with me, that they may end up being the worst of the whole bunch, and the map of half the world may be colored pink. We Portuguese, however, are reliable and honorable. Genoese merchants and Arab traders alike will speak to you of our fairness. But we are dreamers too. We imagine, for example, that the world is round, and we dream of circumnavigating it. We think of the cape of Africa and we suspect the existence of unknown continents to the west of the Ocean Sea. We are the earth’s prime adventurers, but unlike lesser tribes, we hold to our contracts, and we pay our bills on time.”
Like his newborn subjects, Hukka Raya I was still getting used to his new incarnation. He had already experienced several metamorphoses in his eventful life. The slow easy ways of the cowherd had given way to the regimented discipline of the soldier, and then as a captured soldier there had been the forced change of religion and therefore also of name, and after that escape, the shedding of the false skin of his conversion, and of the garb and habits of soldiering as well, and the transition back into something like his original cowherd self, or at least into a peasant in search of some new destiny. As a child his one wish had been that the world would never change, that he would always be nine years old and his mother and father would always be moving toward him with loving arms outstretched, but life had taught him its great lesson, which was mutability. Now, given a throne to sit upon, he found that the childhood dream of changelessness had returned. He wanted this scene, the throne room, the guardian women, the lavish furnishings, to be removed from the mutable world and become eternal, but before that happened he needed to marry his queen, he needed Pampa Kampana to accept him and sit garlanded by his side while the citizenry applauded their nuptials, and once that great day was over, then time could stop, Hukka himself might be able to stop it by raising his royal scepter, and Pampa Kampana could very probably stop it, because if she could bring a world into being with nothing more than a bunch of seeds and a few days of whispering then she could probably encircle it with a magic garland that was more powerful than the calendar, and then they would live happily ever after.
From this dream the arrival of the foreigner and the news of Pampa Kampana’s interest in him had rudely awakened the new king. Hukka began to imagine the foreigner’s head detached from his shoulders and stuffed with straw, and the only thing that deterred him from decapitating the newcomer at once was the probability that Pampa Kampana would strongly disapprove of such a course of action. However, he continued to look at Domingo Nunes’s elegant long neck with a kind of lethal desire.
“We are lucky then,” he said, with heavy sarcasm, “that it is a sophisticated and handsome Portuguese gentleman, a silver-tongued charmer, who comes to us today, and not a representative of the barbarian French or Dutch, or the primitive, rosy English.” And before Domingo Nunes could say another word, the king waved him away, and he was led by two armed women out of the monarch’s sight. As he left the throne room, Domingo Nunes guessed that his life might be in danger, understood that it probably had something to do with his encounter with the whispering woman, and immediately began to think about his escape. However, as things turned out, he would stay for twenty years.
When Pampa Kampana finally emerged from her nine long days and nights of magic she wasn’t sure if the red-haired, green-eyed young god she had seen truly existed, or if he had just been some sort of vision. When nobody in the palace would answer her questions her puzzlement grew. However, it was necessary to put aside her confusion for a moment to deliver the message for which Hukka and Bukka had been waiting since the moment they came down from the mountain into the city of empty-eyed people. She found the two princes trying to forget their boredom by playing chess, a game neither of them had fully mastered, so that they overestimated the importance of knights and castles and, being men, severely underestimated the queen.
“It’s done,” Pampa Kampana said, interrupting their amateurish moves without standing on ceremony. “Everyone has been told their story. The city is fully alive.”
Outside in the great market street it was easy to see the proof of her assertion. Women were greeting one another like old friends, lovers were buying one another their favorite sweetmeats, blacksmiths were shoeing horses for riders they believed they had served for years, grandmothers were telling grandchildren their family stories, stories which went back three generations at least, and men with old quarrels were coming to blows over long-remembered slights. The character of this new city was shaped, in important ways, by Pampa Kampana’s memories—no longer suppressed—of what her mother had taught her. All over the city women were doing what, elsewhere in the country, was thought of as work unsuitable for them. Here was a lawyer’s office staffed by women advocates and women clerks, there you could see strong women laborers unloading goods from barges tethered at the dock on the riverbank. There were women policing the streets, and working as scribes, and pulling teeth, and beating mridangam drums while men danced to the rhythm in a square. None of this struck anyone as odd. The city thrived in the richness of its fictions, the tales whispered in their ears by Pampa Kampana, stories whose fictionality was drowned out and forever lost beneath the clamorous rhythm of the new day, and the walls around the citizens had risen to their final, impregnable height, and above the arch of the great barbican gate, engraved in stone, was the city’s name, which all its inhabitants knew for certain, and would insist on the knowledge if you had asked them, to be a name from the remote past, handed down through the centuries from the time of legend, when the Monkey God Hanuman was alive and living in Kishkindha nearby:
Bisnaga.
News of a nine-day festival of celebration arrived and ran rapidly through the city. Gods would be worshipped in the temples and there would be dancing in the streets. Domingo Nunes, who had found lodgings in the hayloft of the family of the head groom to whom he had sold his horses, heard about the party, and had the idea that would keep him safe from the vengeance of a jealous monarch and his brother too. As he was preparing to go to the palace gates and request an audience, the head groom’s wife called up to him to tell him he had a visitor. He clambered down his wooden ladder and there was Pampa Kampana, who had given the whole city dreams to believe in and now wanted to see if she could believe in her own dream. When she saw Domingo Nunes she clapped her hands in delight.
“Good,” she said.
Once their eyes had met and what could not be spoken had been said without words, Domingo understood that he had better move quickly to get onto safer ground. “On my travels in the kingdom of Cathay,” he said, perspiring a little, “I learned the secret of what their alchemists originally called the devil’s distillate.”
“Your first words to me today are about the devil,” she said. “Those are not appropriate terms of endearment.”
“It’s not really anything to do with the devil,” he said. “The alchemists discovered it by accident and got scared. They were trying to make gold, unsuccessfully of course, but they ended up making something more powerful. It’s just saltpeter, sulfur, and charcoal, powdered and mixed up. You add a spark to it, and boom! It’s something to see.”
“In spite of all your travels,” she replied, “you haven’t learned how to talk to a woman.”
“What I’m trying to tell you,” he said, “is that, in the first place, this can make the city’s celebrations more exciting. We can make what are called ‘fireworks.’ Wheels that spin with fire, rockets that zoom into the sky.”
“What you mean to tell me,” she said, “is that your heart is spinning like a wheel on fire, and your love is like a rocket flying up to the gods.”
“Also, in the second place,” he said, perspiring more freely, “they learned in Cathay that this substance could be used in weapons. They stopped calling it by the devil’s name, and they invented new words for new things. They invented the word ‘bomb’ for a thing that could blow up a house, or knock down a fortress wall. They began to call the distillate ‘gunpowder.’ That was after they invented the word ‘gun.’ ”
“What’s a gun?” Pampa Kampana asked.
“It’s a weapon that will change the world,” Domingo Nunes said. “And I can build it for you if you want.”
“They make love differently in Portugal,” said Pampa Kampana. “I see that now.”
That night, when the city was full of music and crowds, Pampa Kampana brought Hukka and Bukka to a small square in which Domingo Nunes was waiting for them, surrounded by a series of bottles with sticks protruding from their necks. Hukka was extremely annoyed by the sight of his Portuguese rival, and Bukka, who was next in line for the throne and, he believed, for Pampa Kampana’s hand, had his own irritations as well.
“Why have you brought us before this man?” Hukka demanded.
“Watch,” Pampa told him. “Watch and learn.”
Domingo Nunes sent his fireworks soaring into the sky. The Sangama brothers, open-mouthed, watched them fly, and understood that the future was being born, and that Domingo Nunes would be its midwife.
“Teach us,” said Hukka Raya I.