8
The three daughters of Pampa Kampana and Domingo Nunes, who were officially considered to be the offspring of Hukka Raya I, were Yotshna, “the light of the moon,” a name chosen by Pampa to refer back to the Sangama brothers’ claim of being descended from the Moon God; Zerelda, “the brave warrior woman”; and Yuktasri, “the brilliant, naughty girl.” By the middle of Bukka’s reign, when they were grown women in their late twenties, it was evident that Pampa’s prophetic gifts had allowed her to foretell their characters perfectly. Yotshna had been a serene child and had grown into a calm beauty, as radiant as the full moon over the river, as alluring and romantic as the newborn crescent rising in the East. She was born with a stammer but before anyone could notice it Pampa Kampana whispered the cure into her ear to make sure that no wicked gossip could even think of uttering the words “just like Domingo Nunes.” The middle girl, Zerelda, had been a tomboyish child, and occasionally perhaps a little too violent when playing with the daughters of courtiers, who dared not punch her back because of her superior rank and so were obliged to take their beatings without protest; and now, as an adult, she shocked the court by cutting her hair short and wearing men’s clothes. Yuktasri, the youngest, had been the brightest girl in the royal schoolhouse, and her teachers told Pampa Kampana that if she hadn’t been a princess she might have found a future in mathematics or philosophy, but her habit of playing practical jokes on classmates and teachers alike ought, perhaps, to be curbed. At sixteen, she was still the intellectual of the family, and shared one striking characteristic with her sisters: which was, that none of the three had shown any interest in finding a spouse.
Pampa Kampana did not try to force them to marry. She had always let her girls run free and grow into themselves in their own way. And now that they were women, not children, she proposed to Bukka her latest radical idea. When the goddess had spoken through her mouth she had urged Pampa to fight for a world in which men would start considering women in new ways, and this would be the most powerful novelty of all. Women, she said, should have the same rights of succession to the throne as men, and that if he agreed and the appropriate proclamation could be devised and approved by the royal council, it would then be necessary for a decision to be made as to whether the bloodline of Hukka or Bukka should determine the future of the dynasty. If she knew that this proposal would divide her family, setting her boys against her girls, she gave no sign of it, saying only that she was in favor of equality, and hoped that everyone she loved would feel the same way.
“In the Bisnaga Empire,” she said in her address to the council, “women are not treated as second-class. We are neither veiled nor hidden. Many of our ladies are persons of high education and culture. Consider the marvelous poet Tallapalka T. Consider the exceptional poet Ramabhadramba. Also, women take part in every action of the state. Consider our beloved friend the noblewoman Lady Akkadevi, who administers a province on our southern border and has even led our armed forces into battle during more than one siege of an enemy fort.
“You see around you the formidable women of the palace guard. And you must know that we have women medicos, women accountants, women judges, and women bailiffs too. We believe in our women. In Bisnaga City there are twenty-four schools for boys and thirteen schools for girls, which is not equality, or not yet, but it is better than you will find anywhere beyond the borders of the empire. Why then should we not allow a woman to rule over us? To deny this possibility is an untenable position. It must be rethought.”
At the time of the equality proposition the three sons of Pampa Kampana and Bukka Raya I were just eight, seven, and six years old. Their names, which Bukka himself had insisted on choosing, were Erapalli, Bhagwat, and Gundappa. According to Vidyasagar’s astrological charts, Gundappa meant the child would be generous and high-minded; while Bhagwat meant he would be a dedicated servant of God; and Erapalli suggested an idealistic dreamer with much imagination. Bukka conceded to Pampa Kampana in private that the boys’ actual characters largely disproved the value of the astrologer’s predictions, for Erapalli possessed no imagination whatsoever and was in fact the most literal of young fellows, and Gundappa showed not the slightest interest in the higher things, and was, if the truth be told, more than a little mean-spirited as a child, and, later, as an adult as well. Bhagwat, it was true, was a deeply religious infant, bordering, Bukka admitted sadly, on fanaticism, so that was one correct astrological prediction out of three, which was not a good score, a lower percentage, even, than Haleya Kote’s two out of five.
Motherhood never came easily to Pampa Kampana. She tried not to blame her mother Radha for that, but there was always a bubble of anger that welled up whenever the image of Radha’s self-immolation swam before her eyes. Her mother hadn’t cared enough about her to live. Pampa’s was the opposite problem. She would outlive everyone. Whatever kind of mother she might be, she would still have to watch her children die.
Pampa Kampana did the best she could with her sons, in whom she was, to tell the truth, considerably disappointed. She brought them up to have perfect manners and to wear charming smiles on their faces. But these likable attributes only served to conceal their true natures, which were, to be frank, brattish. And when word got out that the king and his council were giving serious consideration to the queen’s proposition, those natures—arrogant, entitled, perhaps even bullying—asserted themselves.
The three brothers—just eight, seven, and six years old!—stormed into the council chamber to make their feelings known, pursued by hand-flapping tutors and governesses, who were trying to calm them down.
“If a woman wears a crown,” Bhagwat cried, “the gods will call us their bad children, and punish us.”
Erapalli added, shaking his head, “When I’m a man, must I stay home and cook? And wear women’s clothes, and learn to sew, and have babies? It’s…stupid.”
Finally little Gundappa made what he clearly believed was a conclusive, clinching argument. “I won’t stand for it,” he stated, stamping his foot. “I won’t, I won’t, I won’t. We are the princes. Princesses are just girls.”
Pampa Kampana was seated on the dais next to her husband. Her sons’ behavior appalled her, and it was at this point that she made the shocking choice that would alter the history of Bisnaga and dramatically change the course of her own life as well.
“I do not recognize my own blood in these noisy little barbarians,” she stated. “Therefore, with a heavy heart, I disown them, now and forever, and I ask the king and council to strip them of their royal titles. The three of them should be exiled from Bisnaga City and placed under armed guard in a remote corner of the empire. They can take their governesses and tutors with them. Obviously. In time a good education may improve their bad natures.”
Bukka was shocked. “But they are little children only,” he blurted out. “How can their mother speak of them in such a way?”
“They are monsters,” Pampa Kampana said. “They are no children of mine. They should not be yours, either.”
All hell broke loose. The first circle of hell was right there in the council chamber, where Bukka Raya I was plunged into the inferno of impossible choices—to support his wife and outlaw his children, or to protect the little princes and alienate Pampa Kampana, maybe permanently—while all around him were the members of the council, looking in his direction, trying to decide which way they would jump after he had made his own unhappy leap. If he exiled the boys it could destabilize the empire and perhaps even lead to civil war; if he refused Pampa Kampana’s demand then who knew what occult devastation she might rain down upon Bisnaga? As she had created it, might she not also be its destroyer?
“We need time,” he said. “This requires much consideration. Until we deliver our opinion, the princes will remain here under the protection of the palace guard.”
No decision was the worst decision. The next day, as the news spread, fights broke out in the city streets, and there were many violent assaults on women by those who opposed the queen’s position, and these crimes dragged Bisnaga into the second circle of hell. On the third day the stores in the bazaar were looted by criminal gangs seeking to profit from public disorder, and on the fourth there was even a brazen attempt to rob the city’s treasury with its huge vaults of gold. By the fifth day the whole city was full of rage, this faction against that one, and on the sixth day each faction was accusing the other of heretical thinking, and on the seventh day the violence was out of control. For this entire week Bukka Raya I sat alone in his private chambers, almost immobile, barely eating or sleeping, pondering, seeing nobody, not even the queen. At last Pampa Kampana forced her way into his presence and slapped him across the face to snap him out of his reverie. “If you don’t act now,” she told him, “then everything will collapse.”
To quote Pampa Kampana’s own words at this important moment in the narrative (because my own might not be trusted when such discord must be described): “When Bukka Raya awoke from his confused slumber, he was as powerfully decisive as he had been indecisive before.” In quick succession he accepted and agreed with Pampa’s requests, insisted on and received the royal council’s assent, sent his three little boys into exile, and dispatched the women warriors of the palace guard, as well as a substantial body of soldiers from the military cantonment, into the city streets to restore order.
(It is very striking that Pampa Kampana, describing these crucial and painful events in her book, writes about them without a trace of emotion, giving no hint of what must surely have been the case, that she must have felt anguished and conflicted at her sudden and absolute rejection of her sons; that Bukka too was deeply torn between his love of his wife and his paternal feelings for his children; and that to choose his wife over his sons was—to say the very least—an unusual and unexpected move for a man of his position, and his time. She simply records the facts. Off into exile went the arrogant little boys, and the princesses ruled the court. We begin to see that Pampa Kampana possessed a startling—an almost frightening—streak of ruthlessness.)
It didn’t take long for the city to calm down. Bisnaga was no primitive civilization. In her early creative whispers Pampa Kampana had imbued its newborn citizens with a strong belief in the rule of law, and taught them to value the freedoms they would enjoy under the law’s umbrella. The umbrella became the most important fashion accessory in the city, a sign of status, and a symbol of patriotic reverence for justice and order. In the streets of the city every day the umbrellas paraded in all the colors of the rainbow, with golden tassels dangling from the spokes, some brilliantly patterned in paisley swirls or abstract zigzags, some with tiger motifs or with birds flying all over them. The umbrellas of the wealthy were set with semi-precious stones and made of silk, but even the poor had simple umbrellas over their heads, and the variety of the designs spoke of the diversity of cultures, faiths, and races to be found in those streets, not only Hindu, Muslim, and Jain but also the Portuguese and Arab horse-traders, and Romans who came with great jugs of wine to sell and spices to buy; and the Chinese were there too. Bukka Raya I had sent an ambassador to Zhu Yuanzhang, known as the Hongwu Emperor, in the first Ming dynasty capital of Nanjing; and some years later, after a family coup led to the shifting of the capital to Beijing, meaning “Northern Capital,” the new emperor’s great general (and eunuch) Cheng Ho, who liked to travel, came to visit Bisnaga in return. He, too, had an umbrella, and the design of his golden Chinese parasol spawned many local imitations. The umbrellas revealed the cosmopolitan open-mindedness of the city, and it was that open-mindedness that led, after some days of discontent, to the people accepting Bukka’s decree, so that Bisnaga became the first and only region in all the land where people could contemplate the idea of a woman sitting alone upon the throne.
But the trouble rumbled on. Bukka sent his spies into the city to find out what was bubbling down below the apparently peaceful surface. The news they brought back was troubling. The reality that had emerged during the troubles—the factions, the criminals, the rage simmering down there and the threat of further violence fed by that rage—was not an illusion. The people might be more divided than had been believed, and support for the exiled little princes might be greater than expected. The equality judgment might, in the future, be seen as destabilizing, the decision of an out-of-touch elite. When Bukka told Pampa Kampana about the spies’ report, however, she was unimpressed.
“I suspect most of these doubters belong to the first, Created Generation and not to the Newborn,” she said. “I was always concerned that Whispering was an imperfect tool, and that some, at least, of the Created would later suffer from unpredictable forms of existential difficulty, psychological problems caused by their uncertainty about their own natures and worthiness, and that these problems would lead them to be prejudiced against others who, in their misguided opinion, were being treated as worthier than themselves. Get me a list of these doubters,” she told Bukka imperiously, “and I’ll go whisper to them some more.”
During the second half of Bukka’s reign, Pampa Kampana took on this task of whispered reeducation. As we will see, it did not succeed. In this way Pampa learned the lesson every creator must learn, even God himself. Once you had created your characters, you had to be bound by their choices. You were no longer free to remake them according to your own desires. They were what they were and they would do what they would do.
This was “free will.” She could not change them if they did not want to be changed.
Bukka Raya I had played second fiddle to his brother for two decades, but once he became king he took to it as to the manner born. If we look ahead in Pampa Kampana’s great book, we find that in the years to come he would be considered the best and most successful king of the Sangama dynasty, the first of the three ruling houses of Bisnaga. Nobody now remembers the Shambhuvaraya kingdom of Arcot, and the power of the Reddis of Kondavidu dwindled into nothing long ago. Yet these were among the substantial kingdoms and consequential rulers who fell under Bukka’s aegis. Goa was his, and even a part of Odisha or Orya. The Zamorin of Calicut was his vassal, and the Jaffna kingdom of Sarandib or Ceylon paid him tribute. And it was to Jaffna that Bukka sent the exiled no-longer-princes, Erapalli, Bhagwat, and Gundappa Sangama, to live out their days under house arrest, closely guarded by soldiers of the Jaffna king, as a favor to the emperor of Bisnaga.
This was both Bukka’s most painful decision and also his greatest miscalculation. No king likes paying tribute to a more powerful monarch, or acknowledging the other as his suzerain. So as the boys from Bisnaga grew toward manhood, the king of Jaffna covertly joined forces with them and helped them to set up a system of communication—by boat across the strait separating Ceylon from the mainland and then on horseback—with their three uncles, Chukka, Pukka, and Dev, all of whom had poorly disguised royal ambitions too. The nightriders, dressed all in black, galloped regularly to Nellore, Mulbagal, Chandragutti, and back again, and so the six Sangamas, the three angry teenage nephews and their three ex-bandit uncles, all of them filled with flaming, murderous ambitions, were able to make their plans.
The failure of Bukka’s intelligence service to notice the brewing conspiracy could be ascribed to one single distraction: Zafarabad. The rise of the Zafarabad sultanate to the north of Bisnaga, on the far side of the river Krishna, was a genuine threat to the empire. The shadowy figure of Zafar the first sultan was so rarely seen in public that people began to speak of him as the Ghost Sultan, and to fear that in Zafarabad the phantom army of the dead had been reborn and therefore could not be killed again. There were rumors that the three-eyed mount of the Ghost Sultan, the phantom stallion Ashqar, had been seen strutting in the streets of Zafarabad like a prince. It was plain to Bukka that Sultan Zafar was modeling his new kingdom on Bisnaga. Just as the Sangamas claimed to be the children of the Moon God Soma, so Zafar and his clan announced they were descended from the legendary Persian figure Vohu Manah, the incarnation of the Good Mind, and they went so far as to identify Bisnaga with Aka Manah, the Evil Mind that was the enemy of the Good. This sounded like nothing less than a declaration of war, and so did the choice of the name of “Zafarabad,” which meant “City of Victory,” just as “Bisnaga” did, in its uncorrupted form. To give the new sultanate the same name as the empire was a clear announcement of intent. The Ghost Sultan meant to erase Bisnaga and take its place. Even the three-eyed magic horse was a part of the challenge. If indeed it did exist, it was a rival to the celestial white horse upon which the Moon God rode, and whose descendants Hukka and Bukka had always claimed—without providing any proof—were their own sacred battle steeds.
Bukka was a well-loved king, so when he chose to march upon Zafarabad the decision was popular. Cheering crowds lined the streets as the king rode through the great gate to where his army was waiting, its one million men, its one hundred thousand elephants, its two hundred thousand Arab horses, its air of utter invincibility against which not even ghosts would stand a chance. Only Pampa Kampana was filled with foreboding, and Bukka’s last words to her felt like a warning, or an omen. “This is where you get your wish,” he told her. “In my absence, you will be the queen regent. You alone will rule.”
After he left at the head of his army, Pampa Kampana, alone in her private rooms in the zenana, the women’s wing, asked to see Nachana, the court poet. “Sing me a happy song,” she told him, which should have been an easy request to fulfill since almost all of Nachana’s work was a celebration of the empire and its rulers—their wisdom, their prowess in battle, their cultured elegance, their popularity, their looks. But when Nachana opened his mouth only mournful verses poured out of it. He closed his mouth, shook his head in puzzlement, opened his mouth again to apologize for his mistake, then tried again. Even sadder stanzas fell from his lips. Again he shook his head, frowning. It was as if some dark spirit were controlling his tongue. It was a second omen, Pampa realized. “Never mind,” she told the discomfited poet. “Even genius sometimes takes the day off. Maybe you’ll do better tomorrow.”
As the humbled poet was leaving Pampa’s presence, her three daughters came in. Yotshna, Zerelda, and Yuktasri were a trio of mature beauties as formidable as their mother. Nachana bowed to them as he left, and delivered this parting shot: “Your Majesty, your daughters have now become your sisters.” And with this final failed attempt at flattery he was gone.
The line struck Pampa Kampana’s heart like an arrow. “Yes,” she thought, “it’s happening again.” People were growing old all around her while she remained unchanged. Her beloved Bukka was sixty-six now, with bad knees, and he was often short of breath; he was really in no condition to ride to war. Meanwhile, if she paused to work it out, she herself was approaching her fiftieth birthday, but she still looked like a young woman of perhaps twenty-one or twenty-two. So, yes, the girls looked like her older sisters, not her children—maybe even her aunts, for by now they were spinster ladies in their thirties. She had a vision of a day in the future when they would be in their mid-sixties or older and she would still, to all appearances, be a young woman of perhaps twenty-seven. She would probably be looking under thirty when they died of old age. She feared that she might once again have to harden her heart, as she had with Domingo Nunes. Was she going to have to learn how to stop loving them, so that she could let them go while she lived on? What would it do to her, to bury her children one by one? Would she weep or remain dry-eyed? Would she have learned the spiritual technique of detachment from the world, which would ward off grief, or would she be annihilated by their departure and long for her own death, which obstinately refused to come? Or maybe they would be lucky and all die young together, in a battle or an accident. Or maybe they would all be murdered in their beds.
Her daughters wouldn’t let her sit alone with that thundercloud over her head. “Come with us,” Zerelda cried. “We’re going to swordsmanship class.”
Pampa Kampana had wanted them to learn pottery, as she had, and her mother Radha too, but the three sisters were uninterested in the potter’s wheel, which continued to be Pampa Kampana’s solitary hobby. She had raised her daughters to be better than men, better-educated than any man and more outspoken, and they could also ride horses better than men and argue better and fight harder and more effectively than any male warrior in the army. When Bukka sent his ambassador to China, Pampa Kampana told him, “They have extraordinary combat skills in that country, I hear. Youngsters learn about bare-hand fights and swords and spears too, long knives and short daggers also, and blowpipes with poisoned darts, I think. Bring me back the best martial arts instructor you can find.” The ambassador had done as she commanded, and now Grandmaster Li Ye-He was installed as chief instructor of Wudang Sword at the Green Destiny kwoon—which was to say, “school”—of Bisnaga, and all four royal women were his star students.
“Yes,” Pampa Kampana agreed, shrugging off her sadness. “Let’s go and fight.”
The kwoon was a wooden building made by Bisnagan craftsmen (and craftswomen) in the prescribed Chinese fashion, under the direction of Grandmaster Li. There was a central quadrangle, open to the sky, and this was where the fighting mat was rolled out every day. Around the quadrangle the building rose up for three stories, with balconies overlooking the fighting square, and there were rooms for study and meditation as well. Pampa Kampana found very beautiful the presence of this alien building near the heart of Bisnaga, one world penetrating another for the benefit of both. “Grandmaster Li,” she said, bowing, as she entered the kwoon with her daughters, “I bring my girls to you. You should know that they all tell me they intend to find you a Bisnagan wife.”
All four women tried every day to make this kind of remark in the hope of coaxing a reaction, a smile, perhaps even a blush, out of the instructor. But his face remained impassive. “Learn from him,” Pampa Kampana advised her daughters. “Such magnificent self-control, such awe-inspiring stillness, is a power we should all try to acquire.”
As she watched her daughters working out on the fighting mat in the kwoon, dueling in pairs, Pampa Kampana noticed, not for the first time, that they were developing supernatural skills. In the midst of a bout they could run up walls as if they were floors, they could leap gravity-defying distances from balcony to balcony on the upper levels of the school, they could spin so fast that they created little tornadoes around themselves, which bore them vertically into the air, and they could use an aerial somersault technique—somersaulting, so to speak, up an invisible staircase in the air—which Grandmaster Li avowed he had never seen before. Their sword skills were so extraordinary that Pampa Kampana understood they could defend themselves against a small army. She hoped she would never need to put that belief to the test.
She worked with Grandmaster Li as well, but in solitude, preferring to be simply a proud mother while her daughters had their lessons, and to attend to her own education by herself. In her private sessions with Li it quickly became clear that they were equals. “I have nothing to teach you,” said Li Ye-He. “But to fight with you sharpens my own skills, so it would be more truthful to say that you are teaching me.” In this way, Pampa Kampana learned that the goddess had granted her even more than she had previously suspected.
In the solitude of her regency, seeing omens everywhere, Pampa Kampana had begun to be full of foreboding. Since she shared everything with her daughters, she told them about her worries. “I may have overreached myself when I insisted on the equality thing,” she said. “We may all pay the price of my idealism.”
“What are you afraid of?” Yotshna asked. “Or should I say, whom?”
“It’s just a feeling,” Pampa Kampana said. “But I worry about your three half-brothers, and I worry about your three uncles, and there’s someone I worry about even more than I worry about the six of them.”
“Who’s that?” Yuktasri pressed her.
“Vidyasagar,” Pampa Kampana said. “He’s the danger man.”
“Don’t worry about anything,” Zerelda comforted her mother. She was the best fighter of the three daughters, and was confident of her mastery. “We’ll protect you against anyone and everyone. And,” she added, calling out to her teacher, “you’ll protect the queen too, won’t you, Grandmaster?”
Grandmaster Li approached and bowed. “With my life,” he agreed.
“Don’t make promises like that,” Pampa Kampana said.
“The world appears to be many,” the sage Vidyasagar liked to say, “but in truth many does not exist, and there is only one.” After he lost his prime ministerial appointment and completed his cave retreat, he had left Bisnaga for many years, traveling all the way to Kashi to meditate by the holy river and deepen his knowledge. Now he was back. Seated once again in his place of honor under the spreading banyan tree at the heart of the Mandana temple complex with his long white beard wound like a belt around his waist and with a devadasi behind him holding a simple umbrella over his bald head to protect it from the sun, he adopted the padmasana or lotus posture and remained still, with his eyes closed, for long hours every day. Crowds gathered around the returned holy man, hoping he would speak, which often he did not. The longer his silences lasted, the larger the crowds grew. Thus he increased his army of disciples without appearing to seek any kind of following at all, and his influence spread through the city and beyond it, even though he made no apparent attempt to influence anyone. When he spoke it was in riddles. “There is nothing,” he said. “Nothing exists. All is illusion.” A daring disciple tried to elicit from him a comment that could be interpreted as, well, political. “Does the banyan tree not exist? Or Mandana? Or Bisnaga itself? The whole empire?” Vidyasagar did not answer for a week. Then he said again, “There is nothing. There are only two things, which are the same thing.” This was unclear, and the disciple asked again, “What are the two things? And how can two things be one thing?” This time Vidyasagar did not answer for a month, during which time the crowd around him became immense. When he spoke he used a soft voice, so that his answer had to be repeated many times, the words rippling out across the multitude like waves on the surface of the sea. “There is Brahman,” he said, “who is the ultimate and only reality, who is both cause and effect, who does not change but in whom all change is contained. And there is atman, which is in everything that lives, which is the only true thing in everything that lives, which is in fact the only thing that lives, and which is one hundred and one percent the same as Brahman. Identical. Same to same. Everything else is illusion: space, time, power, love, place, home, music, beauty, prayer. Illusion. There are only the two, which are one.”
By the time these whispers had rippled through the crowd, being subtly altered by repetition as they moved, they sounded like a call to arms. What Vidyasagar was saying, the crowd understood, was that there were Two, and there should only be One. Only One could survive and the other must be—what?—absorbed? Or overthrown?
Bukka Raya I had insisted throughout his reign on the separation of the temple from the state, and Vidyasagar had not crossed that line. “If we did so,” he told his disciples, “a fire would rise up along the line and consume us.” Everyone understood this to be a reference to the magic protective line or rekha drawn by Lakshman the brother of Ram to defend Ram’s wife Sita while the brothers were away, a line that would erupt in flames if any demon tried to cross it. Thus people also understood, first, that Vidyasagar was staying within the realm of religion by using a Ramayana metaphor, and second, that he spoke in a spirit of modesty and even extreme self-deprecation by comparing himself and his followers to demons, rakshasas, which clearly, in reality—in that reality which was an illusion—he was not, and nor were they. But at another level his followers also understood that by this dictum he had created an us who were not them, an us who wanted to cross that line and secretly supported the intrusion of religion into every corner of life, political as well as spiritual, and a them who opposed such demonic ideas. So gradually two camps grew up in Bisnaga, the Vidyaites and the Bukkaists, although these camps were never named as such, and everyone went along, at least on the surface, with the idea that they were all One. But beneath the surface the illusion dissipated and it was clear that they were Two, and that the Two were getting harder and harder to reconcile. If the Vidyaites noticed that these developments went against the grain of Vidyasagar’s nondualism, his preaching of the identity of Brahman and atman, they did not mention it, focusing instead on the idea that the empire was a kind of illusion, and believing that the truth, which was religious faith, meaning their own true faith to the exclusion of all other false beliefs in hollow gods, would soon arise to take charge of everything that Was.
Meanwhile, in another corner of Bisnaga, Haleya Kote’s Remonstrance had undergone a remarkable change. In its pamphlets and wall graffiti it had abandoned its opposition to sodomy, war, and art, espousing, instead, free love, conquest, and creativity of all kinds; and as a result it had begun to gain followers, many of whom said that the leaders of the movement need no longer conceal themselves, but should come out and stand for the Bukkaist values which so many in Bisnaga supported—to take up their role, in fact, as leaders of the Bukkaist tendency against the Vidyaites. (Although, we repeat, the divisive words “Bukkaist” and “Vidyaite” were never openly used.) Haleya Kote heard these voices, but remained silent.
When one has been in the shadows for an eternity, the sunlight feels too bright to bear.
Bukka had told Pampa Kampana about Haleya Kote’s secret life, of course. She did not argue with his decision to keep the Remonstrance underground. “Ask your friends to work on escape routes,” she told him. “If things go badly in the future—the near future, I fear—then an underground network may be something we all need.”
Messengers arrived from the front. The expedition against Zafarabad was not going well. Haleya Kote came to give the queen regent the news. After the first skirmishes Bukka had to retreat south of the river Bhima and concede the northern shore to the sultan. Next, the sultan annexed Warangal, which had been a part of the Bisnaga Empire, and killed its ruler. Pampa Kampana was surprised and even distressed to learn that Bukka had sent envoys to the court of the Delhi sultan asking for that prince to help Bisnaga against his own co-religionists, which looked like a desperate move, and was unsurprisingly rejected. Then things had improved. Bukka had surged back toward the north and captured Mudgal. The messengers’ report described Bukka’s savage massacre of the people of Mudgal, which horrified Pampa Kampana. “That isn’t the man I know,” she said to Haleya Kote. “If that’s how he’s behaving now, it means his project is in danger, and so are we.”
She was correct. The next messengers described an assault by the army of the Zafarabad sultan upon Bukka Raya I’s forces at Mudgal. The weight of this assault panicked many members of the Bisnaga army, and whispers of the Ghost Sultanate, rumors that its phantom warriors were at the head of the Zafarabad vanguard, spread rapidly through the ranks, instilling terror and panic. When an army is afraid, it can’t fight, even if it outnumbers its opponents. Bukka had fled his camp, the messengers said. His army had retreated in haste, and the advancing sultan had murdered ninety thousand people who had been left behind. Another even worse military defeat followed. “The king is coming home, but the enemy is in pursuit,” the messengers said. “We must prepare for an attack, or at the very least a siege.”
The Bukka who came home from the wars was, indeed, unlike the one who had departed. The way a man dealt with victory revealed one kind of truth about him: was he a magnanimous victor or a vindictive one? Would he remain humble, or develop an inflated opinion of himself? Would he become a victory addict, greedy for repetitions of his triumph, or would he be content with what he had achieved? Defeat asked even more profound questions. How deep were his inner resources? Would the moment be the unmaking of him, or reveal a previously unseen resilience and resourcefulness—qualities unknown even to himself? The king entering his palace in the bloodied leather and metal garments of the battlefield was a man surrounded by question marks, as if by a cloud of mosquitoes. Even Pampa Kampana did not know how he would answer.
He didn’t speak to her, but only shook his head, and the cloud of interrogatory mosquitoes shook with him. He went into his private rooms and gave orders that nobody should enter. He remained there for week after week and it was left to Pampa Kampana to arrange the city’s siege defenses with the help of Haleya Kote and her three daughters. Vidyasagar came to see her on the ramparts, where she was busy from dawn until dark, and told her that Bisnaga’s defeat was a consequence of the king’s abandonment of “intimacy with the gods in general and Shiva in particular.” If that intimacy could be renewed then the advance of Zafarabad would fail; and military success would follow. “Many people in Bisnaga—most of our people, may I suggest—are in agreement with this analysis,” he told her. “There are moments when a king should be instructed and guided by the people, and not the other way around.”
“Thank you,” she told him. “I will make sure the king knows this wise advice.” Then she got on with her work and didn’t give Vidyasagar’s wise words another thought, because she was making sure the battlements were well stocked with cauldrons of oil to be heated and poured over anyone who tried to assault the walls, and that the soldiers manning the ramparts were well armed and also well rested, sleeping in shifts and taking up their posts in strict rotation. The army of Zafarabad was very close. Within days the attack—if it was to be an attack—or at least the siege would begin.
Pampa Kampana had begun to despair, but then one Friday morning when the earth was trembling because of the weight of marching feet, both human and animal, and when the dust cloud enveloping the army of Zafarabad was visible in the near distance, Bukka pulled himself together, marched out of his private quarters in full, clean battle array, and cried out, “Let’s give that Ghost Sultanate a welcome that will make them scurry back to Ghost World.” Though he had never been a large man, he rode through the streets of the city like an angry colossus and then at the head of his troops he led the charge into the sultan’s army screaming a scream so terrifying that even that regiment of ghost soldiers, if that was what they were, could think of nothing except to flee as fast as possible and in complete disarray.
In the conflict with Zafarabad, Bukka had been the aggressor, seeing the danger of his northern neighbor’s growing strength, and opting for a preemptive strike, which did not succeed. The river Krishna remained the boundary between the two realms. Not one guntha of land was gained or lost—not one cent—not so much as a single ankanam. Both sides held their territory, and an uneasy truce was made.
But after his last triumphant charge, Bukka became unwell. His condition worsened slowly but steadily and he fell into a deep sleep. As the news of his failing health spread beyond the palace walls people began to speculate on the cause. The idea that the king had been poisoned by a ghost dart took hold. “He is fighting the poison, but it is winning,” the taxidermist said. “A ghost kills you slowly, because the move from our world into that world requires time,” wailed the vendor of sweets. “He stands on the bank of the Sarayu river like Lord Ram,” cried the painter of signs, “and soon, like Lord Ram, he will step into its waters and be lost.”
Pampa Kampana spent every day and night at Bukka’s bedside, applying cold compresses to his brow, and trying to squeeze water drop by drop into his mouth. He was asleep and did not awake. She understood that he was dying, that he would be the next person she had loved to leave her alive and mourning. On the third day of Bukka’s illness Haleya Kote asked to be admitted to the king and queen’s presence. Pampa Kampana knew at once, from the expression on his face, that things were going badly outside the king’s bedchamber as well as inside it.
“We have been blind,” Haleya Kote said. “Or rather we were only looking at the danger from the north, so we did not see the growing problems in the east, west, and south.”
Chukka, Pukka, and Dev Sangama, accompanied by Shakti, Adi, and Gauri, the Sisters of the Mountains, and their personal armies, were converging on Bisnaga from their strongholds in Nellore, Mulbagal, and Chandragutti, Haleya told Pampa Kampana. “They have evidently persuaded those ferocious Sisters, their wives, that their oath to safeguard Bukka’s position on the throne expires when he passes away, and that, after that, their loyalties must lie with their husbands.” Additionally, he went on, the three deposed princes, now arrogant, entitled young men instead of arrogant, entitled little boys, and even angrier than they had been as children, had been allowed to leave Jaffna, accompanied by a sizable Ceylonese force of men, and they, too, were headed for Bisnaga to stake their claims to the throne. “I am sorry to tell you,” he concluded, “that even though Bukka Raya decreed it and the council approved his decree, support for your eldest daughter’s right to rule is not extensive, neither in the army cantonment nor on the city streets. ‘Queen Yotshna’ is still a step too far for most people.”
“Six claimants to a throne that has not yet been vacated,” Pampa Kampana said. “And who will choose between them?” Haleya inclined his head. It was a question to which they both already knew the answer. The answer was sitting under a banyan tree at Mandana with his eyes closed, apparently removed from these events, not a co-conspirator at all, not even remotely to be thought of as an individual who had corresponded and conspired with all six claimants, but merely a saint under a tree.
“Whoever it is, and whoever takes the prize,” Haleya Kote told Pampa Kampana, “the danger to you and your daughters is very real. Especially as the question of their true parentage is still present in many wicked minds.”
“We will not run,” Pampa Kampana said. “I will sit by my husband’s bedside, and if he leaves us I will make sure he does so with all the honors of the state. This is my city, which I built from seeds and whispers. Its people, whose stories are my stories, whose being-in-the-world comes from me, will not chase me out.”
“It’s not the common people I’m worried about,” Haleya Kote said. “But let it be as you wish. I will remain by your side, with all the defenders I can find.”
With the death of Bukka Raya I, two of the three founders of Bisnaga were gone and only Pampa Kampana remained. The day after Bukka died peacefully without waking up from his last sleep, the last rites, antyeshti, were performed at the burning ghat which would afterward become the site of his memorial. In the absence of a male child—the male children being still in transit, at the head of an army—the role of chief mourner was undertaken by Haleya Kote, who bathed himself thoroughly, then in fresh clothes circumambulated the body on the pyre, sang a brief hymn, put some sesame seeds in the dead king’s mouth to serve as a symbol of the magic seeds with which he had created the city, sprinkled the pyre with clarified butter, made the correct linear gestures toward the gods of death and time, performed the act of breaking the water pot, and lit the fire. After that he, Pampa Kampana, and her three daughters walked around the flames several times, and finally Haleya Kote picked up a bamboo stave and pierced Bukka’s skull to release his spirit.
All this was done with the proper solemnity, but after the mourners left the burning ghat a detachment of soldiers separated Haleya Kote from the four royal women, who were taken back to the palace and sequestered in the zenana, the women’s wing, under twenty-four-hour armed guard. It was not clear who had given the order for this to happen, and the guards refused to answer Pampa Kampana when she asked them. The priest Vidyasagar was some distance away under his banyan tree, lost in meditation, and had not spoken a word. Yet somehow everyone knew who was in charge.
That night Pampa Kampana, enraged by her sequestration and filled with disbelief that Bisnaga would treat her in this way, was unable to think clearly. She commanded the woman warrior guarding the entrance to her rooms, “Go and get me Ulupi, right now.” Ulupi, you will recall, was the gigantic, hissing captain of the guard, the one with the hooded eyes and flickering tongue. But the warrior at the door merely shrugged. “Not available,” she said, making it clear that she who had been queen until a day earlier was considered to be nobody now; that Bisnaga had turned away from its matriarch in contempt.
Pampa Kampana’s face reddened. Her daughters, seeing this, came up and led her off. “We need to talk,” Zerelda told her mother.
Pampa Kampana took seven very deep breaths. “Very well,” she said, “talk.”
The three women gathered around their mother, coming in close, so that they could whisper. It occurred to Pampa Kampana that after having whispered all the histories of Bisnaga’s citizens into their ears she was now having her own story whispered to her by her offspring. Karma, she thought.
“In the first place,” whispered Yotshna, “nobody around here will fight for our rights, or even our safety. Agreed?”
“Yes,” said Pampa Kampana, sadly.
“In the second place,” Yuktasri continued, “maybe you haven’t heard the rumors about the royal council. A headless council, now that there is no king. Have you noticed that nobody came to you from the council confirming your reappointment as queen regent until the question of the succession is settled?”
“Yes,” said Pampa Kampana.
“One rumor,” Zerelda told her, “is that they wanted to force us to enter the fire at the king’s funeral pyre. That didn’t happen, but it was a close thing.”
“I didn’t know,” said Pampa Kampana.
“Nobody on the council can decide who should rule,” Yotshna said. “So when all are assembled, Vidyasagar will be the kingmaker.”
“I see,” said Pampa Kampana.
“The most important thing now,” Yotshna said, “is for us to get you to a safe place until we understand what the new world will be like.”
“And if there’s any place for us in that new world,” Zerelda added.
“So a safe place for all of us,” said Yuktasri.
“And where is that,” Pampa Kampana asked, “and how will we get there?”
“As to how we will get away,” Yotshna said, “we have a plan.”
“As to where we’ll go,” Zerelda continued, “we hoped you might have some ideas about that.”
Pampa Kampana thought for a moment. “Okay,” she said. “Get us out of here.”
“You have ten minutes to pack,” Yotshna said.
Grandmaster Li Ye-He was our savior,
rolling over the zenana like the thunder
on Mount Kailash,
his blades as powerful as thunderbolts,
flashing in the night like the light
of freedom.
I give here my poor translation of Pampa Kampana’s imperishable verses. I cannot come close to her poetic genius (I have not attempted to match her in meter or rhyme) but I offer it to suggest to the present reader the intrusion into the narrative of a moment belonging to a universe of marvels; for not only did Grandmaster Li arrive flying over the rooftops like a giant supernatural bat and then drop into the zenana’s inner courtyard like a panther who devoured whatever crossed its path, not only did he cut a path of death all the way to the four ladies; but then the princesses, as agile as he, two of them holding their mother by her hands, followed him as he ran up walls and along the heights of the city, bounding as if on winged feet from temple to tree to battlement, until at last the five of them dropped silently to the ground beyond the defenses of the city at the place where Haleya Kote was waiting, all in black, with six black horses saddled and ready to ride.
Where shall we go, our Mother,
Away from those who mean us harm?
My darlings, my beloveds, my dears,
Let us go to the Enchanted Forests
As they did in the ancient stories
And be safe.