9
The jungle stands at the heart of the great ancient tales. In the Mahabharata of Vyasa, Queen Draupadi and her five husbands, the Pandava brothers, spent thirteen years in exile. Much of that time was spent in forests. In Valmiki’s Ramayana, the lady Sita and the brothers Ram and Lakshman are exiled, mostly in forests, for fourteen years. In Pampa Kampana’s Jayaparajaya, she tells us that her time in exile, which is to say vanvaas, plus her time in hiding in disguise, which is agyatvaas, added up to a total of one hundred and thirty-two years. By the time she reemerged in triumph, everyone she had ever loved was dead. Or almost everyone.
In the jungle the past is swallowed up, and only the present moment exists; but sometimes the future arrives there ahead of time and reveals its nature before the outside world knows anything about it.
As they galloped away from Bisnaga it was Pampa Kampana who took the lead. “So many forests,” she said. “The Dandaka forest where Lord Ram took refuge, and Lord Krishna’s Vrindavan. Also, elephant-Ganesh’s sugarcane forest, Ikshuvana, and Kadalivana, monkey-lord Hanuman’s banana forest. In addition, there’s Imlivana, the tamarind forest of Devi. But we will go to the most powerfully enchanted forest of them all, the Forest of Women.”
She does not say in her book how long they rode, how many nights and days, or in what direction. So we cannot say for sure where the Forest of Women was located, or if some part of it stands there still. All we know is: they rode hard and they rode long, through coarse hilly terrain and green river valleys, barren land and lush, until at last the forest stood before them, a green rampart concealing great mysteries.
At the edge of the forest Pampa Kampana had a warning for Haleya Kote and Grandmaster Li. “In this forest, which exists under the protection of the forest goddess Aranyani,” she said, “men can have a serious problem. It is said that any man who enters here will be transformed into a woman at once. Only men who have achieved complete self-knowledge and mastery over their senses can survive here in male form. So we must thank you and warn you, it would be safer to say goodbye.”
The men considered this unexpected obstacle for some time.
Then Grandmaster Li said, “I swore an oath to protect you with my life. That promise does not expire until the day I die. I will go with you into the Forest of Aranyani, come what may.” He dismounted from his horse and took up his sword and his other possessions. “Go well, horse,” he said, and patted it on the rump. Off it went. Zerelda, his star pupil, looked at him admiringly and, Pampa Kampana noted, even a little fondly. “If anyone has self-knowledge and mastery over his senses,” Zerelda told him, “you do. The forest will not harm you in any way.”
(At this point in her narrative Pampa Kampana introduces a digression about the loyalty of horses, how they did not betray people who truly cared for them, and how she had spoken to them to ask them to cover their tracks on their return journey, walking through streams and across stony ground to make sure the runaways’ destination could not be learned. We have chosen not to include this perhaps overlong passage.)
Haleya Kote shifted in his saddle uncomfortably. “I’m not a guy like our pal Ye-He here,” he said. “I don’t meditate, or attend to the purification of the self. I’m not a wise man like Vidyasagar, studying the Sixteen Systems of Philosophy. I’m just somebody who accidentally became a friend of our dear departed king, a fellow who likes a drink from time to time, and who used to be okay in a fight. I’ve never been a woman. I don’t know if I’d take to it very well.”
Pampa Kampana rode up beside him and said softly, “But you are also a man who does not deceive himself. You are not a fake. You know exactly who and what you are.”
“Yeah, probably,” Haleya Kote replied. “I’m nobody special, but I’m me.”
“In that case I believe you may be fine.”
Haleya Kote thought for a moment.
“Okay,” he said at last. “Fuck it. I’ll stay.”
They set the rest of the horses free and stood for a moment gazing at their verdant destiny. Then into the trees they went, and the rules of the outside world fell away.
The wood closed around them, and was full of noises. There was much birdsong, as if a chorus had flown up to greet them: the yellow-throated bulbul, the jungle babbler, and the rufous tree pie could be heard; and tailorbirds, wood swallows, and larks; the barbet, the coucal, the forest owlet, the parrot, and the jungle crow were here; and many more to which they could not give names, birds of dreams, they thought, not of the real world. For here it was the real world that was unreal, its laws had been blown away like dust, and if there were other laws here, they did not know what those laws might be. They had arrived in arajakta, the place without kings. A crown, here, was no more than an unnecessary hat. Here justice was not handed down from above, and only nature ruled.
Haleya Kote was the first to speak. “Ladies, if you’ll excuse the vulgarity, I have checked myself, and it feels like I am not changed.”
“Oh, wonderful,” Yotshna, the eldest princess, cried, and for a second time Pampa Kampana noted just a little too much emotion in one of her daughters’ voices. “That’s such good news for us all.”
“Grandmaster?” Zerelda asked. “And you?”
“I am happy to say,” replied Li Ye-He, “that I too appear to be intact.”
“Our first victories,” Zerelda declared. “These are good omens. They show that we will overcome whatever challenges the forest may send in our direction.”
“Are there wild beasts here?” Yuktasri, the youngest, asked, trying not to let her fears show in her voice. Her mother nodded. “Yes. There are tigers as big as a house, and predator birds larger than the rukh of Sinbad, and giant snakes capable of swallowing a goat, and maybe dragons too. But I have magic that will keep us safe.”
(We must ask ourselves how great her powers could actually have been, and if the forest truly did contain wild beasts that never bothered them because of her witchcraft—as her story suggests—or if it was mercifully free of such dangers, and she was just making a sort of joke. Was it true that the goddess who gave her the gift of long life, and the power to give seeds the power to grow a city, and the power that enabled her to whisper men’s lives into their ears, also endowed her with the ability to enchant the enchanted forest? Or was this poetry, a fable like so many others? We must reply: either it’s all true, or none of it is, and we prefer to believe in the truth of the well-told tale.)
Now they heard music. There were tabla drums playing rapidly somewhere up above them, speaking in their private language. And someone was dancing, invisible feet mirroring the speech of the drums. They could hear the dancer’s anklet bells jingling. Someone was dancing in the trees, up on the high branches, or perhaps in the air between the trees.
“Is that Aranyani?” Yuktasri asked, unable to keep the note of awe out of her words.
“The goddess is never seen,” Pampa Kampana replied, “but if we have her blessing in this place, we will often hear her dancing near us. If she refuses us, then the dangers grow. Get used to the jingling bells. They are a part of what will protect us.”
“If I may intrude,” Haleya Kote intruded, “this is all very interesting, but we need to answer the questions of where we will stay, and also what we will drink, and eat.”
“Yes!” said Yotshna, smiling too wide a smile. “Very good point.”
Now that we know the full story of Bisnaga, that wooden hut, that palace in the forest where Pampa Kampana was queen in exile, and where she plotted her return in triumph, has become legendary. “Aranyani is not the only Being in this forest,” Pampa Kampana told her companions at the beginning of their work. “Every grove of trees, every stream has its own familiar spirits. We must ask permission to cut and build before we start. Otherwise whatever we do will be undone immediately, and if the spirits grow angry with us it will not be possible to remain.” So they made their appeals and when they had finished a light rain began to fall. The thick forest prevented the water from soaking them, but little rivulets ran down off the leaves and branches all around. “It’s fine,” Pampa Kampana said. “The rain is the blessing we need.”
After the rain, the four women and two men built their new home in a little glade where the trees retreated to allow the sun to shine down after the rain. They asked permission of the goddess and also of the lesser deities of tree and leaf, they used their fighting skills with swords and axes, and the trained strength of their bare hands which could chop their way through trees as if they were made of cotton. We see them in our mind’s eyes whirling through this grove, surrounded by giant trees without names, trees of myth and legend, weaving their new home into being in a dizzying display of athleticism and grace, lifting themselves off the ground to tear off higher branches, and spreading over their sylvan shelter a broad canopy of leaves. The drummer in the air and the invisible dancer both paused for a moment to watch the extraordinary sight, then resumed, and the house came into being to the music of the hidden gods.
The old soldier, Haleya Kote, proved to be the one who had thought ahead about practical matters. From the bulging bags he had loaded onto his horse and which, after the horses had left, he had carried without complaint, slung across his back, he now produced two cookpots, and also enough wooden cups and bowls for them all to eat and drink from, and flints to light a fire. “Force of habit,” he said, shrugging with embarrassed pleasure when the queen and princesses thanked him. “It’s not what you ladies are used to, but it will have to serve.”
As to their first meal, Pampa Kampana tells us that it was the forest itself that provided for them. A shower of nuts fell around them from above, and banana trees like those in the forest of Hanuman gave up their plenty. There were fruits they had never seen before hanging from unknown trees, and bushes of berries so delicious that they made one weep. They found a fast-flowing stream of cold sweet water close by and by its banks grew anne soppu, which was water spinach, and Indian pennywort, which could be used medicinally, to ease their anxiety, and even improve their memory. They found air potatoes and clove beans, black licorice–flavored sunberries and wild red okra and delicious ash gourds.
“So we will not starve,” Pampa Kampana said. “I also have brought seeds, which we will plant, and more varieties of food will grow. But let us talk about fish and meat.”
Grandmaster Li spoke first. He had been a vegetarian all his life, he said, and would be more than content with what the forest had granted them. Haleya Kote cleared his throat. “In my military years,” he said, “there was only one rule. Eat what you can get, whatever and wherever it is, and eat as much as you need to keep you going. So I have eaten bunnies as well as cauliflowers, billy goats as well as cucumbers, and little baa-lambs as well as plain boiled rice. I have tried to avoid cows, many of which are poorly nourished, and the meat not so good. It’s chewy—apart from any other reasons for eschewing it. I also avoid eggplant but that’s only because I can’t stand the stuff. If there are deer in the forest, spotted chital, hog, blackbuck, or other types of food that moves about under its own steam, I’m ready to hunt it down.”
Pampa Kampana’s daughters told Pampa Kampana what she already knew. “Vegetables only,” said Zerelda, smiling conspiratorially at Grandmaster Li. “Anything and everything,” said Yotshna, stepping a little closer to Haleya Kote. As for Yuktasri, she hitched up her garments, walked into the stream, and stood there up to her knees in the rushing water, with her eyes closed and her arms outstretched. “Rohu carp, katla carp, pulasa fish, now come near,” she said in a soft voice. “Pink Rani fish, walking catfish, snakehead fish, can you hear.” According to Pampa Kampana, after a few moments a fish of a species they had never seen before leaped up out of the water into Yuktasri’s arms. She brought it back to the group. “I like fish,” she said. Her mother Pampa Kampana, who had long abhorred the meat of animals, surprised herself by thinking that maybe fish would not be so bad, would not evoke the dreadful memory of her mother’s burning flesh. They had indeed entered a new world.
That first meal around the fire built by Haleya Kote, when they were all exhausted and hungry, felt like a banquet to all six vagabonds. The fact that they had abandoned their homes and fled, that the future was alarmingly uncertain, that being queens, princesses, grandmasters, or former soldiers, drunks, and underground radicals turned royal advisers meant nothing anymore, and that the forest was full of unexplained strangeness and no doubt other dangers of its own—at that warm and well-fed moment seemed not to matter. Pampa Kampana leaned against a tree, closed her eyes, and was lost in her thoughts, while the other five laughed and joked.
“I don’t care how long we have to stay here if we can all be together like this,” said Zerelda Sangama, leaning her head toward Grandmaster Li until it almost—but not quite—rested on his shoulder.
“Agreed,” her sister Yotshna said. (She was sitting a little too close to Haleya Kote.)
Young Yuktasri said, “Good fish.”
“Time to sleep,” Pampa Kampana said, getting up. “Tomorrow it will be time to find out exactly what’s going on in Bisnaga, and what we can do about it.”
During the night the forest bats flew over them, around and around, like a protective army of the air.
It was a part of the enchanted quality of the forest that Pampa Kampana and the others were immediately able to understand and converse with all the living things within it. Of course this made the newcomers feel less alien in their new surroundings, but it was also, very often, oppressive, because the forest was full of conversation, the endless gossip of the birds, the sinuous whispers of the snakes, the high distant calls of the wolves, the loud bullying voices of the tigers. After a time the six of them would find a way of adjusting their minds and shutting out the nonstop cacophony, but in the beginning the princesses constantly had to put their hands over their ears and even thought about filling those shapely organs with mud to silence the din.
Pampa Kampana had no such difficulty, and immediately began to join in many of the conversations with evident pleasure, and even issued commands and offered instructions. She might no longer be a queen in Bisnaga but here in the forest her aura of magical power, conferred upon her by divine authority long ago, was impossible to argue with. Aranyani the goddess of the forest had accepted her as a sister and so that was how all the forest creatures thought of her. On their second night, a female panther dropped down from a tree and addressed them in a language they did not know but found that they could understand. “Don’t worry about us,” she said. “You have a mighty protector in this place.” The next morning, even before the dawn chorus began its chit-chat, Pampa Kampana awoke and went out of their new home to talk to the birds. She dismissed some of the woodland species as being insufficiently serious for her needs, and concentrated on the parrots and the crows. “You,” she told the parrots, “will fly to the city and hear what people say and come back and repeat it all to me, word for word. And you crafty creatures,” she told the crows, “will go with them to understand what it means, the words beneath the words, and then you can be my wise advisers.”
Seven parrots and seven crows obediently flew away in the direction of the great city. They were on relatively friendly terms, the crows and parrots, because both species were disapproved of by many of the other birds. In the forest world the crows were rank outsiders, considered to be treacherous and self-serving, and were distrusted. Even their voices were ugly when compared to the bulbuls and the larks; they did not sing, but cawed, hoarsely. If the forest birds were an orchestra, then the crows were always out of tune. Also, nobody had forgotten the war, two hundred years earlier, between the owlets and the crows, a war in which the crows were widely believed to have behaved dishonorably. Pampa Kampana knew about this anti-crow sentiment, and found it despicable. For hundreds of years before the war the crows had been obliged to act as servants—as serfs—to the more aristocratic birds, the owlets above all, and in her opinion the war had been a battle for liberation. By the end of the war many of the owlets were dead and the crows no longer answered to anyone, and, frankly, in Pampa Kampana’s opinion, the more beautiful birds with more mellifluous voices needed to reassess their prejudices. Yes, there had been many casualties, but this had been a war of independence and should be understood as such. “It’s too bad,” she lectured the gallery of dawn birds, “that you beautiful winged creatures can be as bigoted as flightless human beings.”
As for the parrots, they weren’t songbirds either, which made them, so to speak, lower-caste; and there were so many of them that the other birds resented them for taking up too much space. Pampa Kampana had deliberately chosen the two outsider species to be her eyes and ears. After all, now she and her companions were banished outsiders also.
The delegation of parrots and crows returned three weeks later. They brought much news. When the six claimants to the throne arrived in Bisnaga (they told Pampa Kampana), it was Vidyasagar who ordered all of them to leave their troops outside the city gates, and to enter with no more than a personal security entourage. “There will be no bloodshed in our streets,” he decreed. “Everything will be resolved without resorting to murder.” By this time (the birds reported) Vidyasagar was well over seventy years old, and if the gods had indeed granted him a longevity equal to that granted to Pampa Kampana by the goddess whose name she bore, they had unfortunately not given the sage the gift of immunity from aging. So he was alive, but, it must be said, more than somewhat decrepit. His hands were bony claws; he had lost a good deal of weight and now looked, to be frank, scrawny. For courtesy’s sake the birds did not dwell on the condition of his teeth.
“I don’t care how he looks,” Pampa Kampana told them. “Tell me what was said and done.”
“Appearances had a lot to do with it,” said the head parrot, whose name, approximately, was To-oh-ah-ta. “Vidyasagar took one look at the white-haired Sangama uncles, Chukka, Bukka, and Dev, and told them they were too old for the job—which was rich, coming from him!—and said that the empire needed young blood, a ruler who would stabilize matters by ruling for a long time.”
“Meaning,” the head crow, whose name, approximately, was Ka-ah-eh-va, clarified, “that he, Vidyasagar, would be the real boss, and the young king would do what he was told.”
“The three brothers of Hukka and Bukka the Firsts left Bisnaga City without argument,” the head parrot reported. “People say that they were relieved not to have to kill anyone or be killed, not to have to murder their wives or be slain by them, and that they could live out their days in comfort in their distant fortresses, with their formidable women. So, this was a happy ending for them.”
“Weaklings,” said the head crow. “They never had the guts or will or strength to gain the crown, and everybody knew it. We don’t need to concern ourselves with them anymore. They always were bit-part players, and they don’t have any more lines.”
“What about my sons,” Pampa Kampana asked. “What of Erapalli, Bhagwat, and Gundappa, whom I disowned, but who, it seems, have now triumphed over me?”
“Interestingly,” said To-oh-ah-ta, “Vidyasagar has anointed the middle son, Bhagwat.”
“Meaning,” commented Ka-ah-eh-va, “that Bisnaga will now be ruled by a religious fanatic, who will be advised by another extremist.”
“I must also report,” the parrot said, “that, in the first place, Erapalli and Gundappa Sangama have acquiesced in Vidyasagar’s decision, so there will be no bloodshed, not for the moment, at least.”
“But neither of them is happy,” the crow added. “So look out for blood down the line.”
“And in the second place,” continued the parrot, ruffling its feathers in irritation at the crow’s interruption, “Bhagwat Sangama has chosen, as his regnal name, the name of his uncle, a decision which has been widely interpreted as a slap in the face of the dead father who rejected him. So he will be Hukka Raya the Second. Hukka Raya Eradu. People are already calling him ‘Eradu’ for short. Or, in the rougher parts of town, less politely, ‘Number Two.’ ”
“Does he say anything about me?” Pampa Kampana asked.
“I don’t think he misses his mother,” said the crow, a little cruelly. “We heard his coronation speech.”
“From now on,” the parrot parroted, “Bisnaga will be ruled by faith, not magic. Magic has been queen here for too long. This city was not grown from magic seeds! You are not plants, to come from such vegetal origins! You all have memories, you know your life stories and the stories of those who came before you, your ancestors, who built the city before you were born. Those memories are genuine and were not implanted in your brain by any whispering sorceress. This is a place with a history. It is not the invention of a witch. We will rewrite the history of Bisnaga to write the witch out of it, and her witch-daughters too. This is a city like any other, only more glorious, the most glorious in all the land. It isn’t a conjuring trick. Today we declare Bisnaga to be free of witchcraft, and decree further that witchcraft will be punishable by death. Henceforth our narrative, and our narrative only, will prevail, for it is the only true narrative. All false narratives will be suppressed. The narrative of Pampa Kampana is such a narrative, and it is full of wrong-headed ideas. It will be allowed no place in the history of the empire. Let us be clear. A woman’s place is not on the throne. It is, and will henceforth be, in the home.”
“You see,” said the crow.
“Yes,” said Pampa Kampana. “I see very clearly. That backstreet name, ‘Number Two,’ suits him very well.”
For the first time in a very long time, Pampa Kampana was thinking about defeat. It was not possible even to think of a return to Bisnaga. Worse than that, it seemed as though Number Two’s polemic had widespread support among the people—or at least among a substantial group of them. This was her failure. The ideas she had implanted had not taken root, or, if they had, then the roots were not deep, and were easily uprooted. Bisnaga was becoming alien to the world she had created when she whispered it into life. And she was in the jungle, which was not a prison, but which would begin to feel like one soon enough.
“I must start planning for the long term,” she thought. “Who knows how long it will be before the wind changes. My daughters will grow old. What I need is granddaughters.”
Two very different lines of descent had emanated from Pampa Kampana. Her sons with Bukka Raya I were men who exuded a harsh perfume of embitterment that was her fault, because of her rejection of them; and one of them was now king. King “Number Two.” He was Vidyasagar’s creature, and so his reign would be a puritanical, oppressive time, and the free-spirited women of Bisnaga would suffer greatly. She closed her eyes and looked into the future and saw that after Number Two things would get even worse. The dynasty would descend into squabbling, growing religious intolerance, and even fanaticism. Such was the line of her sons. Pampa Kampana’s daughters, however, had grown up to be forward-thinking, brilliant, scholars and warriors too; the most original children a mother could wish for. They had also inherited most of her magical abilities, whereas in the lowbrow literalism of the male Sangamas no trace of the wonderful could be found. Even their religious belief was ploddingly simple-minded and banal. The higher mysticisms eluded them entirely and religion became, for them, no more than a tool for the maintenance of social control.
“What I need around me,” Pampa Kampana decided, “is a lot more girls.”
It was a hard time to raise the subject of procreation. Her three daughters were having trouble dealing with the idea that their forest exile might not be brief, and might even last for the rest of their lives. The last things they wanted to discuss, as they neared their fortieth birthdays, were babies. They were shaken and uprooted, like trees in a hurricane. They were full of disbelief that their half-brother the new king would endanger them in this way, but at the same time they were old enough to know that when a king died the royal family’s most dangerous enemies were within the family circle. They were strong-minded women, with deep reserves of character, so they set their jaws and worked with great determination to make their new lives the best that they could be. “If we have to be junglees from now on,” Yotshna Sangama told her mother, “then we will be the most fearsome junglees anyone ever saw. That’s the jungle law, right? Either you’re on the top or you’re on the bottom. Eat or be eaten. I intend to be the hunter, not the prey.”
“We’re not at war here,” her mother reproved her gently. “We are accepted. We need only learn to coexist.”
Yes, there must be granddaughters, she thought; maybe even great-granddaughters. For obvious reasons this was something she had to keep to herself. She turned over in her mind the idea that some of her granddaughters might have Chinese blood, which would make possible a grand alliance with the Ming. She also feared that the old soldier to whom Yotshna was attracted might be too old for fatherhood. And Yuktasri, what of her?
As if to answer her question, her youngest daughter asked her as they sat around their campfire at night, “Are there other women in the forest? Sometimes at night I imagine I’m hearing laughter, songs, and shrieks. Are they human, or rakshasa demons?”
“There are almost certainly other women somewhere,” her mother replied. “Refugees like ourselves from one cruel kingdom or another, or just wild women of the wood, who have chosen to live their lives away from the coarse presumptuousness of men, or women who were abandoned by their mothers as babies at the forest’s edge and have known nothing else but the forest, having been suckled by wolves.”
“Good,” Yuktasri said emphatically. And oh, her mother thought. Oh.