7
On the first day of his reign Bukka sent for his old drinking buddy. Haleya Kote, whose life had been spent in army camps and cheap hostelries, was thrown off balance by the grandeur of the royal palace. He was escorted by expressionless women warriors past ornamental pools and splendid baths, past stone reliefs of marching soldiers and saddled elephants, past stone girls with flared skirts dancing in stone unison beside musicians drumming on stone drums and playing sweet melodies on flutes of stone. Above these friezes the walls were lined with silken cloths onto which pearls and rubies had been sewn, and there were golden lions standing in the corners. Haleya Kote felt overawed in spite of all his secret radicalism, and also afraid. What did the new king want with him? Maybe he wanted to erase the memory of his boozy past, in which case Haleya Kote feared for his neck. He was brought by the women warriors into the Hall of Private Audience and told to wait.
After an hour alone in the presence of shimmering silk and stone magnificence Haleya Kote’s nervousness was much increased, and when at last the king entered, accompanied by a full retinue of guards, butlers, and handmaidens, Haleya became convinced that his last hour was at hand. Bukka Raya I was no longer little round Bukka of the Cashew. He was splendid—dressed in gold brocade, with a cap on his head to match. He seemed to have grown. Haleya Kote knew he could not actually have increased in size, that that was just an illusion created by majesty, but even that illusion was enough to heighten the grizzled old soldier’s discomfiture. Then Bukka spoke, and Haleya Kote thought, I’m a dead man.
“I know everything,” Bukka said.
So this wasn’t about the drinking. Now Haleya Kote was even more convinced that his last day had come.
“You are not who you seem to be,” Bukka said. “Or so my spies inform me.” This was the new king’s first admission that throughout his brother’s reign he had maintained his own personal security and intelligence unit, whose officers would now replace the Hukka team, whose members would be encouraged to retire to small countryside villages and never return to Bisnaga City.
“My spies,” Bukka added, “are very reliable.”
“Who do they say I am?” Haleya Kote asked, although he already knew the answer. He was a condemned man asking to hear the sentence of death pronounced.
“You remonstrate, is that the word?” Bukka said very gently. “And indeed it is my information that you may be someone my late brother deemed a person of great interest, the actual author of the Five Remonstrances, and not simply a disciple of the cult. What’s more, to conceal your authorship, you do not behave like the religious conservative the author would appear to be. Either that, or your declarations do not align with your true character, and are made to acquire for you a following you don’t deserve.”
“I will not insult your intelligence team by denying what you know,” Haleya Kote said, standing very upright, as a soldier should at a court-martial.
“Now, regarding the Five Remonstrances,” Bukka said. “I’m in complete agreement with the first. The world of faith should be separated from the temporal power, and from this day forward, that will be the case. As for the Second Remonstrance, I agree that these ceremonies of mass worship are alien to us, and they too will be discontinued. After that things get a little stickier. The link between asceticism and sodomy is not proven, nor is the link between celibacy and that practice. Furthermore, it is a form of pleasure enjoyed by many in Bisnaga, and it is not for me to prescribe what kinds of pleasure are acceptable and which illegal. Then you require that we refrain from all military adventures. I understand that like many seasoned soldiers you have a hatred of war, but you in your turn must acknowledge that when the interests of the empire require it, then into battle we will go. And finally, your Fifth Remonstrance against art is the work of a true philistine. In my court there will be poetry and music and I will build great buildings too. The arts are not frivolities, as the gods well know. They are essential to a society’s health and well-being. In the Natya-Shastra Indra himself declared the theater a sacred space.”
“Your Majesty,” Haleya Kote began, using the formal appellation of his former drinking partner, “if you would give me time to explain, and also beg for clemency.”
“There is no need to beg,” Bukka said. “Two out of five is not so bad.”
Haleya Kote, experiencing a powerful mixture of relief and puzzlement, scratched the back of his neck, shook his head, and shuddered a little, giving the impression of being flea-infested, which, in fact, was very probably true. Finally he asked, “Why did you summon me to court, Your Majesty?”
“Earlier this morning,” Bukka told him, “I entertained our great and wise sage, Vidyasagar, the Ocean of Knowledge, and I suggested to him that his masterwork-in-progress, his inquiry into the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy, was reportedly of a brilliance so extraordinary that it would be a tragedy if it ended up incomplete, unfinished, because of the distractions of his work at court. I also took the liberty to mention that astrology was not my personal cup of tea, so that the daily morning horoscope readings demanded by my brother would no longer be required. I must say that on the whole he took it very well. He is a man of infinite grace, and when he let out a single wordless ejaculation—a ‘ha!’ so loud that it frightened the horses in the stables—I understood this to be a part of his transcendent spiritual practice, a controlled exhalation from his body in which he expelled all that was now redundant. A letting-go. After that he took his leave and I believe he has retreated into his original cave of so long ago, near the perimeter of the Mandana complex, to begin a ninety-one-day program of meditation and soul-renewal. I know that we will all be grateful for the fruits of this disciplined activity and for the rebirth of his spirit in an even more bountiful incarnation. He is the greatest of us all.”
“You fired him,” Haleya Kote dared to summarize.
“It is true I have a vacancy at court,” Bukka replied. “I can’t replace Vidyasagar with a single adviser, because he is a man worth more than any other single living person. So I would like to offer you two-fifths of his responsibilities, namely, to advise on political issues. I’ll find somebody else to be in charge of another two-fifths, which is to say, social life and art, the stuff you’re too ignorant and bigoted to deal with. As for war, as and when that necessity arises, I’ll take charge of that myself.”
“I will try to become less bigoted and ignorant,” Haleya Kote said.
“Good,” said Bukka Raya I. “See that you do.”
In Pampa Kampana’s mighty rediscovered book, the Jayaparajaya, which looks with equal clarity and skepticism upon both Victory and Defeat, the name of the adviser chosen by Bukka to deal with social and artistic matters is given as “Gangadevi,” who is described as a poet and the “wife of Bukka’s son, Kumara Kampana,” and who was the author of the epic poem Madurai Vijayam, “The Conquest of Madurai.” The humble author of this present (and wholly derivative) text ventures to suggest that what we see here is a small subterfuge on the part of immortal Pampa—near-immortal in her physical incarnation, forever immortal in her words. We know already that “Gangadevi” is the name used by Vidyasagar to address the mute child who came to him in the aftermath of fiery tragedy; and “Kampana” of course is a name forever associated with Pampa herself. As for the “wife of Bukka’s son,” well! That would be a physical and moral impossibility, since Pampa Kampana would soon be the mother of Bukka’s three sons—yes! This time around it was all boys!—and these sons would therefore have been unborn at the time of the Madurai expedition; and if they had been born, then to marry one of them would have been unthinkable and offensive to all. We must therefore conclude that “Kumara Kampana” never existed, that “Gangadevi” and Pampa Kampana are one and the same, that Pampa herself was the author of the Madurai Vijayam, and that it was her great modesty, her unwillingness to demand approval for herself, that was the reason for this flimsy veil of fiction, which is so easily torn away. However, we may further speculate that the very flimsiness of the veil suggests that Pampa Kampana actually wanted her future reader to rip it to shreds; which would mean that she wished to give the impression of modesty while secretly wanting the credit she pretended to be giving to another. We cannot know the truth. We can only surmise.
And so to resume: Pampa Kampana achieved the unusual feat of being queen of Bisnaga in two successive reigns, the consort of consecutive kings, who were also brothers; and Bukka gave her responsibility for overseeing the progress of the empire’s architecture, poetry, painting, music, and sexual matters as well.
The poetry written during the reign of Bukka Raya I is rivaled only by the work done a hundred years later during the glory days of Krishnadevaraya. (This we know because Pampa Kampana included many examples of the work of both periods in her buried book, and those long-forgotten poets are only now beginning to gain the recognition they deserve.) Of the paintings made in the royal atelier, none survive, because during the apocalypse of Bisnaga its destroyers paid particular attention to the obliteration of representational art. Also, regarding the enormous quantity of erotic sculptures and friezes, we only have her word that they existed.
In spite of everything Bukka wanted to stay on good terms with the philosopher-priest Vidyasagar, because of the immense influence he still wielded over many Bisnagan hearts and minds. To keep himself in Vidyasagar’s good books even after dismissing him from the palace, Bukka agreed to allow the holy man to levy his own taxes for the maintenance of the growing Mandana temple complex, in return for an assurance that the mutt would not involve itself in worldly matters.
As for Pampa Kampana: she paid Vidyasagar a visit in the cave to which he had retreated, the cave in which his weaknesses had been revealed and inflicted repeatedly upon her body. She came without any retinue of guards or handmaidens, and wearing only the mendicant’s two strips of fabric, apparently turning herself once again into the ascetic young woman who had slept on the cave floor for so many years, and borne in silence everything he had done. She accepted his offer of a cup of water, and, after a few ritual compliments, outlined her plan.
As a central part of her program as culture minister, she told the great man, she proposed to build a spectacular new temple within the city walls, dedicated to a deity of Vidyasagar’s choice, whose staff of priests and devadasis, temple dancers, would be for the high priest to appoint. For her part, she told Vidyasagar with straight-faced solemnity and no hint of a suggestion that she knew that her words would horrify him, she would personally select the most gifted masons and stone carvers in Bisnaga to create a magnificent edifice and cover the rising temple’s walls, inside and outside, and also its monumental tower, its gopuram, with erotic bas-relief portraits featuring the beautiful devadasis and selected male counterparts in many positions of sexual ecstasy including, but not limited to, those spoken of in the Tantric tradition, or recommended in ancient times in the Kamasutra of the philosopher Vatsyayana of Pataliputra, of whom, she added, great Vidyasagar must surely be an admirer. These carvings, she proposed to the sage, should include sculptures of both the maithuna and mithuna types.
“As we are taught in the Brhadaranyaka Upanishad,” she said, knowing perfectly well that to invoke not one but two sacred texts in the presence of the revered Vidyasagar was insolent behavior, to say the least, “erotic figures of the maithuna type are symbols of moksha, the transcendent condition which, when attained by human beings, releases them from the cycle of rebirth. ‘A man closely embraced by a woman knows nothing more of a without or a within,’ ” she quoted the Upanishad. “ ‘So also a man embraced by the spirit no longer separates the within and the without. His desire is satisfied, and his spirit. He has no desire anymore, nor pain.’ As for mithuna sculptures,” she went on, “these represent the reunion of the Essence. In the very beginning, the Upanishad tells us, the Essence, the Purusha, desired a second entity, and divided itself into two. Thus began man and wife, and so, when these are reunited, the Essence is once again whole and complete. And as is known it was by the union of the two parts that the whole universe itself came into being.”
Vidyasagar in his mid-fifties, with a white beard so long that he could wind it around his body, was no longer the skinny twenty-five-year-old with wildly curly hair who had defiled little Pampa in this cave. Life in the palace had thickened his waist and denuded his scalp. Other qualities, too, had fallen away from him, modesty, for example, and generosity toward the ideas and opinions of others. He heard Pampa Kampana out and then replied in his loftiest and most patronizing tones.
“I fear, little Gangadevi, that you must have been listening to people from the north. Your attempt to justify obscenity by calling upon the ancient wisdoms is ingenious, if tortuous, but, to say the least, misguided. It is well-known to us here in the south that those pornographic sculptures in such faraway places as Konarak are little more than attempts to portray the lives of the devadasis, who, in the north, are little better than prostitutes, and are willing to contort themselves into many filthy postures in return for a few coins. I will allow no such display upon the pristine sites of our Bisnaga.”
Pampa Kampana’s voice was like ice. “In the first place, great master,” she said, “I am not your little Gangadevi anymore. I have escaped that accursed life and am now Bisnaga’s beloved Twice-Queen. In the second place, while my lips have remained sealed concerning your behavior in this cave all those years ago, I am prepared to unseal them at any moment, should you try to stand in my way. In the third place, this has nothing to do with north or south, but a willingness to admire the sacred human form and its movement in both monogamous and polygamous unions. And in the fourth place, I have just this moment decided that it will not be necessary to build a new temple after all. I will have these carvings added to the temples that already exist, the New Temple as well as the Monkey Temple, so that you can look at them every day for the rest of your life, and ponder on the difference between willing and joyous lovemaking and forcing oneself brutally upon another, smaller, defenseless human being. And I have a further idea which it is not necessary to share with you.”
“Your power has grown greater than mine,” Vidyasagar told her. “For the moment, anyway. I can’t stop you. Do as you please. And as I can see from the continuation of your impossible youth, the goddess’s gift of longevity is real and impressive. Please know that I will pray to the gods to grant me an equally long life, so that you will have me standing against your decadent ways for as long as we both shall live.”
And so Pampa Kampana and Vidyasagar became, in a word, enemies.
This was Pampa Kampana’s “further idea”: to take erotic art away from the religious settings in which it had exclusively been seen up to that point, to set aside the need to justify it by calling upon the ancient texts, whether from the traditions of the Tantra or the Kamasutra or the Upanishads, whether Hindu or Buddhist or Jain, to separate it from high philosophical and mystical concepts, and to transform it into a celebration of everyday life. Bukka, a king who believed in the pleasure principle, gave her his full support, and in the months and years that followed carvings of devadasis and their male companions began to be seen on the walls of residential quarters, above the bars of the Cashew and other such hostelries, the exteriors and interiors of shopping establishments in the bazaar, and, in short, everywhere.
She found and trained a new generation of women woodcarvers as well as women stonemasons, because most secular buildings in Bisnaga, even large sections of the palace complex, were made of wood, and because women had more complex and interesting ideas about the erotic than men did. In those years when her sons were being born and she and Bukka were enjoying each other—she had never enjoyed being with Hukka in the same way—she set out to transform Bisnaga from the puritanical world envisaged by Vidyasagar, who had managed to persuade Hukka of its desirability, into a place of laughter, happiness, and frequent and variegated sexual delight. The project was a way of extending her own newfound happiness—which had permitted her to consign Domingo Nunes to the realm of memory rather than that of pain—and offering it to the general populace as a gift. It is likely, too, that the project was also, less innocently, a kind of revenge, undertaken precisely because the great priest wouldn’t like it—the now-revered priest who had once been a monk who had not behaved, in the cave at Mandana, as monastically as he had encouraged everyone to believe.
It was Haleya Kote who came to Bukka to warn him that the plan might be backfiring.
“The thing about creating a life of delight,” the old soldier told the king as they walked through the private leaf-tunnels of the palace gardens, “is that it doesn’t really work from the top down. People don’t want to have fun because the queen tells them to, or when, or where, or in the manner she prefers.”
“But she isn’t really telling them what to do,” Bukka protested. “She’s just creating an encouraging environment. She wants to be an inspiration.”
“There are grannies,” Haleya mentioned, “who don’t like having wooden threesomes set into the walls above their beds. There are wives who are finding it difficult that their husbands look so long and carefully at the new sculptures, and husbands who wonder if their wives are being turned on by the wooden men, or, alternatively, the wooden women in these reliefs and friezes. There are parents who are finding it difficult to explain to their children exactly what’s going on in the carvings. There are sad sacks and lonelyhearts made sadder-sackier and lonely-heartier by all the portraits of other people’s joy. Even Chandrashekhar”—this was the barman at the Cashew—“says that looking at all that perfection of beauty and performance all the time, every day, is making him personally feel inadequate, because what ordinary guy could rise to such gymnastic heights. So you see. It’s complicated.”
“Chandra says that?”
“He does.”
“How ungrateful people are,” Bukka mused, “to find complication in a simple offering of public beauty, art, and joy.”
“One person’s art is another’s dirty picture,” Haleya Kote said. “There are still a lot of people in Bisnaga who follow Vidyasagar, and you know what he says about the carvings that are now crawling around the temples and infesting the public streets.”
“ ‘Crawling’! ‘Infesting’! Are we talking about cockroaches?”
“Yes,” said Haleya Kote. “That’s exactly the word he uses. He’s encouraging people to stamp out the invasion of filthy roaches fucking in wood and stone. Several of the new sculptures have already been defaced.”
“I see,” Bukka said. “And so? What is your advice?”
“This isn’t my portfolio,” Haleya Kote said, backing away from a possible confrontation with Pampa Kampana. “It is something you should discuss with Her Majesty the queen. But…” And here he stopped.
“But?” Bukka insisted.
“But, possibly it would be a good idea for the empire to follow policies that do not divide us, but unite.”
“I’ll think about it,” said the king.
“I understand,” he said to Pampa Kampana in the royal bedchamber that night, “that for you the act of physical love is the expression of spiritual perfection. But apparently not everybody sees it that way.”
“This is disgraceful,” she replied. “Are you taking the side of that old bald fat fraud against me? Because he’s the one poisoning people’s minds, not I.”
“It may just be,” the king gently said, “that your ideas are too progressive for the fourteenth century. You’re just a little ahead of your time.”
“A mighty empire such as ours,” she replied, “is precisely the entity that should set out to lead the people toward the future. Let it be the fourteenth century everywhere else. It’s going to be the fifteenth century here.”