12
When the king’s adviser Sayana finally died Pampa Kampana decided it was time to act. There was no sign of Vidyasagar anywhere by then. If he was indeed still alive he was probably lying on a cot somewhere like an ancient baby, helpless, clinging to life out of sheer spite, but unable to do any living. His time was over. The ruling officers of the DAS were similarly toothless and wizened. It was as if cadavers were in charge of things, the dead ruling the living, and the living were tired of it.
From her alcove behind the almirah she began to whisper into the king’s ears. In the depths of his palace Deva Raya clutched at his head, not knowing where these extraordinary new thoughts were coming from all at once—not understanding how it was possible that he was having such inspirations, never having been the inspirational type before—and finally beginning to give himself the credit for arriving at a condition of true genius. The voice in his head told him so. It flattered him by saying that it, the voice, was the manifestation of that genius. He had to listen to, and be guided by, what it—what he himself!—was telling him to do.
The voice in his head told him to forget war and bigotry.
—You are Deva, godly, yes you are, but why be simply a god of Death? Aren’t you sick of coming home from battle spattered with blood and gore? Don’t you want to be a god of Life instead? Instead of armies, you could send diplomats, and make peace.
—Yes, yes, he thought, I’ll do exactly as I’m now suggesting to myself, I’ll send diplomats and make peace with them all, why not? Even with Zafarabad as well.
—And bigotry, the whisper reminded him. Forget bigotry, too.
—Yes, yes, he thought. I’ll prove how tolerant I’ve become! I’ll marry a Jain! Bhima Devi, she’s nice, I’ll marry her, and I’ll pray at her favorite temples too. And I’ll take a Muslim second wife. I’ll have to find one of those, but I’m sure I can come up with one. I’ve heard there’s a Muslim goldsmith in Mudgal whose daughter is very beautiful. I’ll look into it. And what else, my brilliant brain, what else?
—Water, Pampa Kampana whispered.
—Water?
—The city has grown so large, there isn’t enough water for everyone to drink. Build a dam! Build it below the confluence of the Tunga and the Bhadra, where they become the ample and fast-running Pampa, and then build a great aqueduct to bring the fresh river water into the city, and place pumps in all the squares so that the thirsty may drink and the dirty may bathe and wash their clothes, and then people will love you. Water creates love more easily than victory.
—Yes, yes! A dam! An aqueduct! Pumps! Water is love. I will be the God-King of Loving Dams. I’ll make love flow everywhere in the city and I will become the People’s Darling, their Best-Beloved. Anything else?
—You must be a patron of the arts! Bring poets to the court, Kumara Vyasa for the Kannada language, Gunda Dimdima for Sanskrit, and the king of poets, Srinatha, for the Telugu tongue! And you know what? I bet you can write excellent poetry yourself!
—Yes, yes, poetry, poets. And romances! I can write those, and I will!
—Bring mathematicians also. Our people love mathematics! And bring shipbuilders, not just for warships, but for trading vessels, and royal barges in which you can visit the three hundred ports in the empire! And make sure that plenty of these new people, painters, poets, calculators, designers, are women, who deserve it no less than men!
—Yes, yes! All this and more I will do. My thoughts are more brilliant than myself, but from now on I will be as magnificent as my thoughts.
—Oh, and one more thing. Get rid of those mummified old priests surrounding you and hissing their old-fashioned notions in your ear, and bring back the old royal council. You can put everyone in there, the poets, the mathematicians, the architects of the aqueduct and the dam, the diplomats, and their brilliance will reflect extra radiance upon your own.
—Good idea! I’m glad that came to me all of a sudden. I’ll do that right away.
And now, Pampa Kampana thought, my murderer of a grandson is a puppet on my strings.
In those days the people of Bisnaga had a complicated relationship with memories. Perhaps they distrusted them unconsciously, without even knowing or believing that at the beginning of time Pampa Kampana had planted fictional histories in their ancestors, and created the whole city out of her fertile imagination. At any rate they were people who had little regard for yesterdays. They chose—like the denizens of Aranyani’s forest!—to live wholly in the present, without much interest in what came before, and if they needed to think about any day other than today, then that day was tomorrow. This made Bisnaga a dynamic place, capable of immense forward-looking energy, but also a place that suffered from the problem of all amnesiacs, which was that to turn away from history was to make possible a cyclical repetition of its crimes.
Ninety years had passed since Hukka and Bukka Sangama had scattered the magic seeds, and by now most people thought of that story as a fairy tale, and were sure that “Pampa Kampana” was the name of a good fairy, not a real person, but somebody in a story. Even Deva Raya, her grandson, thought so. He knew the story of how his father Bhagwat Sangama, the rejected child of the sorceress, became Hukka Raya II and vowed revenge on Pampa, his unloving mother, Deva Raya’s grandmother, and on Pampa Kampana’s favorites, her daughters, as well. Even if half of it was true, Deva Raya thought, that story was over. If his grandmother was alive, she would be around one hundred and ten years old, which was absurd, of course. And all that nonsense about her powers of sorcery, that was absurd too. She had probably been a mean old woman, but no sorceress, and now she was gone, and that old world could disappear along with her. All he wanted was to listen to the voice of his own genius in his head, pointing the way toward the future. Now it was time for aqueducts, mathematicians, ships, ambassadors, and poetry. Yes, yes!
As for Vidyasagar: Pampa Kampana’s enemy was entering his last days, having failed in his scheme to live as long as her and thwart her plans. She didn’t need to fear him anymore.
There were battles in the streets after Deva Raya made his sudden, radical change of direction. The thugs of the discarded power structure didn’t give up easily. From the cots of their antiquity the dismissed old guard guided their stormtroopers and tried to establish control over the streets. They were not used to being thwarted. They were accustomed to having their way, to being feared and therefore obeyed. But they faced unexpected opposition. The years of whispering bore unexpected fruit. From everywhere in Bisnaga, from backstreets and grand thoroughfares, from the quiet retreats of the elderly and the loud gathering places of the young, people poured out of doorways and resisted. The flag of the Remonstrance, a hand with the index finger raised, as if to remonstrate, was seen on every avenue, and that symbol was daubed on many walls. The transformation wrought by Pampa Kampana stood revealed in all its marvelous force. This was the birth of the New Remonstrance, as it came to be known: no longer anti-art, against women, or hostile toward sexual diversity, but embracing poetry, liberty, women, and joy, and retaining from the original manifesto only the First Remonstrance against the involvement of the religious world with that of government, the Second Remonstrance opposing mass religious gatherings, and the Fourth, which favored peace over war. The goon squads of the ancien régime retreated in disarray. That regime had seemed all-powerful, invincible, but in the end its whole apparatus crumbled in days and blew away like dust, revealing that it had rotted from the inside, so that when it was pushed, it was too weak to go on standing.
The king in his palace, bewildered by the speed of these events, heard the voice, which he thought of as the voice of his own genius, whispering in his ears.
—You have done it.
—Yes, yes, he assured himself. Yes, I have.
A new day dawned in Bisnaga. Pampa Kampana abandoned her alcove and emerged into the daylight. Her disguise, her agyatvaas, turned out to be her own appearance. In the second-golden-age years that followed the great Change, and the rise of members of the Remonstrance to prominent places in the government of the state, Pampa Kampana was unrecognizable, seen by one and all as a woman in her middle twenties, known only by a small inner circle to be the great founder of the city who was approaching one hundred and ten years of age. The astrologer Madhuri Devi, her closest confidante and now one of the high leaders of the Remonstrance, was appointed to the royal council, and recommended her friend to the king as a woman of unusual qualities, whom it would be well to employ in the service of the state.
“What’s your name?” Deva Raya asked, when Pampa Kampana was brought into his presence.
“Pampa Kampana,” Pampa Kampana replied.
Deva Raya roared with laughter. “That’s a good one,” he cried, wiping his eyes. “Yes, yes, young lady! You’re my grandmother, of course you are, and you’re lucky—I don’t bear my father’s grudges, and we need a matriarch of your wisdom on my team.”
“No, thank you, Your Majesty,” replied Pampa Kampana haughtily. “In the first place, if you don’t believe me now, when I am nobody, then you will not trust me then, when I am a counselor at your side. And in the second place, as my friend Madhuri Devi the astrologer has told me, this is not my time, which is still many decades in the future, when I will marry a different king. I could not marry you anyway, because that would be incest.”
Deva Raya laughed his booming laugh again. “Madhuri Devi,” he cried, “your friend is a great humorist. Maybe she would agree to join us as a court jester? I haven’t laughed like this in years.”
“If you’ll excuse me, Your Majesty,” Pampa Kampana said, trying not to sound affronted, “I will take my leave.”
Deva Raya’s reign was a time of great success for Pampa Kampana, and she might easily have taken much justifiable pride in it. But in her verses describing those days, she was harshly self-critical.
“I begin to feel,” she wrote, “as if I am more than one person, and not all those persons are admirable. I am the mother of the city—even though few people believe I am she—but I am away from my own daughters and during this separation I do not feel like their mother at all. The years pass and I have not so much as ascertained if they are alive or dead. What elderly women they will have become if they still live, green-eyed ladies unknown to me and who do not know me either, even though I still remain superficially who I was a lifetime ago. That person, the person I see reflected in water or glass, I do not know who she is either. My daughter Yotshna asked me that question—‘Who are you?’—and I cannot answer it.
“This eternal youth is a kind of damnation. This power to affect the thoughts of others and to alter history is another curse. The witchcraft, the sorcery of magic seeds and metamorphosis, whose limits even I do not know, is a third. I am a ghost in a body that refuses to age. Vidyasagar and I are not so different after all. We are both specters of ourselves, lost within ourselves. What I know is that I am a bad mother, and my sons and daughters would all agree with that statement. Sometimes I feel I am not a person of any kind, that I no longer exist, that there is no longer an ‘I’ that I can identify with myself. Maybe I should go by a new name, or many new names in the interminable future that stretches ahead. When I say what my name is I am not believed because I am, of course, impossible.
“I am a shadow, or a dream. One night when darkness falls I might simply become a part of that darkness and disappear. I feel, often, that that would be no bad thing.”
On the day Vidyasagar died and the city was plunged into mourning and prayer, Pampa Kampana in the grip of a different melancholy made her first visit to the drinking place called the Cashew and ordered a jug of the powerful feni liquor that Haleya Kote used to drink long ago in the company of a man who would be king. She had emptied half the jug when a man approached her, a foreign-seeming fellow with green eyes and red hair.
“A beautiful lady like yourself should not be sitting here with a jug full of solitary sadness,” the man said, speaking with a heavy accent. “I would like to lighten your burden, if you will permit.”
She scrutinized him closely. “It’s not possible,” she said. “You’re long dead. I’m the only one who doesn’t die.”
“I assure you that I am alive,” the stranger replied.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Your name is Domingo Nunes, as I should know because we were lovers for many years, and this is an apparition caused by the alcohol, because you certainly no longer exist.”
And it was on the tip of her tongue to say, but she did not say it, “Also, by the way, you are the father of my three daughters.”
“I have heard the name of Nunes,” the stranger replied, marveling. “He was one of the pioneers who paved the way for my business here. But he is someone from a long time ago, too long ago for you, surely. I am also Portuguese. My name is Fernão Paes.”
Pampa Kampana examined him even more intently. “Fernão Paes,” she repeated.
“At your service,” he declared.
“It’s crazy,” she said. “You really do all look alike.”
“May I sit with you?” he asked.
“I’m too old for you,” she said. “But I’m a sort of foreigner here too. Nobody recognizes me. I built this city and I’m a stranger in it. So we are both strangers. We are both just passing through. We have things in common. Sit down.”
“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Fernão Paes confessed, “but I’d like to find out.”
“I’m one hundred and eight years old,” Pampa Kampana said.
Fernão Paes smiled his most ingratiating smile. “I like older women,” he declared.
He had become wealthy selling horses to the king and his nobles and cavalry, so he built a stone mansion in the Portuguese style, with large shuttered windows facing outward to the city, a green garden watered by one of the first canals to be built to bring water from the enormous reservoir created by the new river dam. He had a field of sugarcane also, and even a small piece of woodland. Pampa Kampana moved out of the astrologer’s house and into the foreigner’s residence. “I’m a homeless person now,” she understood. “I have to rely on the generosity of others.”
Fernão Paes was a man of emotional substance and complexity, who could love Pampa Kampana even though he didn’t believe the stories she told him about her life. When a man traveled across continents and oceans he heard life stories in which no sane person could possibly believe. He met an impoverished sailor in the port of Aden who swore that in happier times he had discovered the secret of transmuting base metals into gold, but the formula had been stolen from him when he was captured by corsairs in the Mediterranean Sea, and now, owing to a blow on the head, he could not remember it, et cetera. And he had met a dwarf who said that she had formerly been a giant, until a sorcerer’s magic spell had shrunk her, et cetera, et cetera; and a young boy in Brindisi who had the sharpest eyesight of anyone Paes had ever met, who claimed he had been born as a hawk until a sorcerer’s magic spell brought him down to earth transformed into a hawk-eyed child, et cetera et cetera et cetera.
There were people everywhere in the world telling stories of how they were not what they seemed to be, how they had been better before, or worse, but certainly different, different in a hundred ways. Paes had even met a hundred-year-old woman begging for alms by the shore of the Red Sea, who told him that when she was twenty-one years old an angel had fallen in love with her and carried her off to heaven, but when living human beings arrived in heaven it did not go well for them, they aged very rapidly and died within hours, so I begged the angel to bring me back to earth, she said, and when I landed I looked like this, sir, and this was only two years ago, sir, and you must believe that two years later I am still only twenty-three years old. Because Fernão Paes had listened to that old woman pretending to be young it wasn’t so unusual for him to hear a young woman pretending to be old, so he went along with what Pampa Kampana told him, and did not judge her. The whole world was mad. That was his deepest belief. He was the only person who was sane.
Pampa Kampana in Paes’s house at first thought herself to have fallen in love but then realized that what she was experiencing was relief. Ever since her return from the forest she had felt upset, even offended, at the disbelief with which she had been greeted by everyone except Madhuri Devi, a skepticism which had culminated in the discourteous laughter of the king, but now her feelings of being insulted had been replaced by a sensation of pleasure in her new anonymity. For the first time since she was nine years old she could be excused from being Pampa Kampana, or rather she could be “this” Pampa Kampana, the nobody with the famous old name, instead of the “real” Pampa, who, in the opinion of almost everyone, no longer existed except in memory. She was being given a second chance at life, and had been granted the possibility of having an ordinary place in the world instead of a relentlessly extraordinary one. This man, Paes, was lively and adventurous, appeared to be sincere in his feelings for her, and, best of all, was absent for long stretches of time, traveling back and forth between Bisnaga and the lands of Persia and Araby in search of fine horses to sell. “Truly, this is the best of all possible men,” she told herself. “He’s loyal and loving and has put a good roof over my head and food in my belly, and most of the time he isn’t even here.”
In this way Pampa Kampana entered the second phase of her exile, during which she was physically present in Bisnaga but agreed with the general opinion that she was not the person she knew she was, but simply a different, unimportant person with the same name. Her one continuing anguish, compounded by Fernão Paes’s astonishing resemblance to Domingo Nunes, had to do with her daughters, who did not require mothering, that was true, they were elderly ladies by now, but not to know how they were, well or unwell, happy or unhappy, alive or dead, that was difficult. Zerelda had chosen a path in life that suited her, a traveling life not unlike Domingo Nunes’s, so she inherited that from him, Pampa Kampana thought, and Yuktasri was at home with the wild forest women and had even become one of them, Pampa Kampana reassured herself often, so that was two out of three. Yotshna was the problem. Yotshna was the one with a grievance, the one who would not forgive her mother. It was Yotshna’s accusatory eyes that haunted Pampa Kampana in her dreams.
Fernão told her he was puzzled by the king. “When I first came to Bisnaga, everyone was murdering everyone,” he said one morning at breakfast. (He ate breakfast like a savage: quantities of leavened bread, chunks of cheese made from cows’ milk, and coffee drowned in cows’ milk too, which he called galão—things that no right-minded person would eat at the beginning of the day.) “And I wrote in my journal,” he went on, “that Deva Raya and his murderous brothers only cared about getting drunk and fucking. I should have added, and killing one another.”
Ah, my male line of descent, Pampa Kampana thought. Worthless scum, all of them. The fathers who were my sons and their sons as well.
“Then Deva Raya fell under the influence of Vidyasagar, Sayana, and the DAS, and he sobered up and even became puritanical,” Paes continued. “Then all of a sudden he changed again, rejected the priests, and everyone celebrated his new open-mindedness, and now there are festivals and parties, and people say he’s a great king and this is a golden age. It’s my opinion that the fellow has no mind of his own, he needs someone to tell him how to behave and what to do, but it beats me who has drawn him away from the theocrats. There’s some secret individual or individuals somewhere, whispering in his ear.”
Yes, my dear, Pampa Kampana thought, but when I told you, you didn’t believe me.
“Maybe it’s Madhuri Devi,” she said. “The New Remonstrance seems to have become the ruling party, the group the king uses to run things.”
Pampa Kampana’s friendship with Madhuri Devi had continued, and the old astrologer, now a royal counselor, often talked to her about goings-on in the palace. Even though Madhuri now had quarters in the palace complex she had hung onto her old home, and she and Pampa met there privately, to drink tea and gossip. “The fact is, Deva Raya has lost all interest in the business of being king,” Madhuri said. “He leaves everything to us and has gone back to his carousing youthful ways, except that he really isn’t capable of very much wildness anymore.”
“Drinking and fucking,” Pampa Kampana mused. “Especially fucking, apparently. Everybody in the market is talking about his army of wives.”
“The fucking is mostly theoretical,” said Madhuri Devi. “Yes, twelve thousand wives. This is to demonstrate his sexual prowess. I doubt he has been able to do anything energetic with any of them. He isn’t very fit, or well. He just likes to dress up in green satin robes with necklaces of jewels and many rings on his fingers, and lounge with his head in a wife’s lap and with other wives clustering around him. There is a plan to take all the wives out for a procession around the city to show them off to the people. Four thousand wives will be on foot, to show that they are little better than domestic servants. Four thousand will be on horseback to indicate higher status. And four thousand will be carried in palanquins. That’s the worst part.”
“Why?”
“He wants those four thousand wives to burn themselves on his funeral pyre when he dies. This is the condition on which he has made them queens, and because they have accepted he has placed them in the position of greatest honor.”
“There will be no more burning of living women on dead men’s pyres in Bisnaga,” Pampa Kampana said with great ferocity. “Never again.”
“Agreed,” said Madhuri Devi. “I think it’s a bit of the old DAS mentality that is still stuck in his head.”
While she watched Fernão Paes eat his foreign savage’s breakfast Pampa Kampana was remembering her mother, and the terrible flames, and deciding to whisper once more, and as soon as possible, into the ear of the king. Then Fernão Paes, having eaten, jumped up to start his day. Before he left for the stables he had one more word of wisdom for Pampa Kampana. “When people start talking about a golden age,” he said, “they always think a new world has begun which will last forever. But the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long. A few years, maybe. There’s always trouble ahead.”
In the hot season before the rains came they slept on the flat roof of Fernão Paes’s house, on charpai rope beds enclosed within white mosquito netting that made Pampa Kampana imagine that the whole world was a ghost and she the only living creature in it. Contained in that white cube in the darkness she felt as if unborn, waiting to enter life and make of it something new, something never seen before. She began to feel hopeful, and dreamed of herself riding a yali, a sort of leogryph, across the threshold of life into the future. In those days Deva Raya had ordered the construction of a new temple, the Vitthala, which would take ninety years to complete. In these early days of the temple’s construction a row of stone yalis pranced under the open sky, waiting for the great edifice to grow around and above them. When one entered or left such a temple, or when one began a new enterprise, it was good to ask a yali for its blessing. Pampa Kampana understood her yali dream as an auspicious sign of a new start.
She also knew that such superstitions were nonsense, and not to be relied upon any more than the astrological divinations of her friend.
One night when the air was pregnant with the moisture which had not yet begun to pour down, Pampa Kampana was woken up by the cawing of a crow near her ear. She woke up and understood that her other world had come to draw her away.
“Ka-ah-eh-va,” she said softly, so as not to wake Fernão Paes under his neighboring mosquito net.
“Well, not exactly,” the crow said in the Master Language. “But, family of, yes. You can call me that if you wish.”
“You bring me a message,” she said. “My daughters, how are they?”
“There is one daughter,” the crow said, “and the message comes from her.”
“What about my other daughter?” Pampa Kampana asked, although she knew what the answer must be.
“Died long ago,” the crow said tersely. “They say, of a broken heart, but I don’t know. I’m just a messenger. Don’t kill me. I’m just a crow.”
Pampa Kampana took a deep breath and controlled her tears.
“What’s the message?” she asked.
Yuktasri’s message was this: “War.”