18
Krishnadevaraya, returning to his palace, discovered that Bisnaga City during the regency had become the fabulous place of which Pampa Kampana had always dreamed. Its wealth was everywhere on display, in the finery worn by the people, in the goods available for purchase in its stores, and, most of all, in the lavishness of its languages, which had been raised to a point of ecstasy by the great poets to whom she had given homes to live in and stages from which to speak. Trading ships from Bisnaga were traveling everywhere and spreading the news of its wonders, and now foreign visitors—traders, diplomats, explorers—thronged its streets, applauding its beauty and comparing it favorably to Beijing and to Rome. Every man may come and go and live according to his own creed. Great equity and justice is observed to all, not only by the rulers, but by the people, one to another. These words were written by a red-haired, green-eyed Portuguese visitor to Bisnaga named Hector Barbosa, a scrivener and an interpreter of the Malayalam language based in Cochin, and the latest incarnation of the foreign men who had populated Pampa Kampana’s life. This time, however, she resisted his charms. “I’ve had enough of your reappearances,” she told the mystified Barbosa. “I’ve got work to do.”
She allowed him, however, to tell her his traveler’s tales. From Barbosa and other newcomers she heard rumors of the strangeness of the faraway world, of, for example, a town called Toruń in the far north of the place called Europe, where they baked great quantities of gingerbread, and where a man had begun to suggest that the sun, and not the earth, was the center around which everything moved; and of a city called Firenze or Florence in the south of Europe where they drank the finest wines on earth, painted the greatest paintings, and read the most profound philosophers, but where the princes were cynical and cruel. She remembered learning from Vidyasagar that an Indian astronomer, Aryabhata, had proposed a heliocentric system a thousand years earlier than the fellow from Toruń, but his ideas had been rejected by his peers; and she knew also that cruelty and cynicism of the Florentine kind were not the exclusive characteristics of foreign princes. “Anyway,” she wrote, “it’s good to learn that over there is not so very unlike over here, and that human intelligence and human stupidity, as well as human nature, the best and worst of it, are the great constants in the changing world.”
Bisnaga had become a world-city. Even the birds in the sky seemed different, as if they, too, had traveled here from far away, drawn by the growing fame of Bisnaga. Fishermen told her that there were new fishes in the sea at Goa and Mangalore, and Sri Laxman had begun to display and sell unheard-of alien fruits. Welcoming the king home, and giving up her regency, Pampa Kampana greeted him thus: “I return to you your city, heart of your empire, which is now a wonder of the world.”
She had built a new pavilion for him, the Conquest of the World Pavilion, where the great poets of the land assembled each day to sing his praises in several languages while the most beautiful women of the court fanned him with yak-tail fans. There were musicians and dancers in the streets to greet the returning heroes, and there were fireworks too, as fine as any that Domingo Nunes had created in the old days. It was a glorious return, all of it intended by Pampa Kampana to distract from the fact that Tirumala Devi, returning with two children, a daughter and a son, intended to make it plain to everyone that she—not only the senior queen but also the queen mother of the next king—that she, and not the outgoing queen regent, was the real power in the land alongside Krishna the Great.
Nagala Devi, now the grandmother to the future king, made sure Pampa Kampana understood her new situation. She came to stand beside the ex-regent, ostensibly to watch the carnival in the streets with her, but actually to gloat. “Whatever you are,” Nagala Devi said, “a very old woman disguised by magic as a much younger one, or just a brilliant fraud, it no longer matters. As queen regent you were a sort of servant promoted above your station for pragmatic reasons. Now you’re just a servant again, and any ambitions you may have had, have been nullified by the birth of the Crown Prince Tirumala Deva and the Princess Tirumalamba his sister. Once Krishnadevaraya dies you will be nobody. Actually, it feels like you’re nobody now.”
Then—soon after Krishnadevaraya’s return—the drought began. Without water even the most prosperous land begins to wither, and Bisnaga during the great dryness was no exception. Fields cracked open and swallowed cows. Farmers committed suicide. The river shrank and drinking water had to be rationed in the city. The army was thirsty and a thirsty army is no good in a fight, unless it’s a fight over access to water. Foreigners began to leave town in search of rain. The people, always hungry for allegory, began to wonder if the drought was a curse upon the king, if in spite of all his temple offerings he had displeased the gods and this unending barrenness was a judgment upon the slaughter of the one hundred thousand. This feeling intensified when it became known that one hundred miles to the northeast, at Raichur, situated in the “doáb,” the land between the two rivers Pampa and Krishna, it was raining hard, and the famous fresh-water spring in Raichur’s high citadel was flowing freely, so water was plentiful, and the harvest promised to be good.
The increasing frequency of the king’s bouts of bad temper was becoming alarming to Minister Timmarasu and to Pampa Kampana as well. At first they thought his irritability might have been caused by exhaustion, by the stress and fatigue of six years away from home, but even now, in the bosom of his capital, fanned by yak-tails and constantly entertained, his mood was often foul. Then the day came when he walked into the throne room clapping his hands and brimming with energy. “I have it,” he announced. “We have to conquer Raichur and then we will be masters of their rain.”
This was close to insanity, but neither Pampa Kampana nor Timmarasu could prevent Krishnadevaraya from putting his plan into action. “I had a vision,” he declared. “My father the old soldier came to me in a dream and said, ‘Without Raichur the empire will remain incomplete. Take that fortress and it will be the jewel in your crown.’ ” He ordered the army to get ready to march.
“Raichur is in the hands of Adil Shah of Bijapur,” Timmarasu warned, “and to move against him after the long amicable peace with that sultanate ever since the battle of Diwani, after which, Your Majesty will recall, Bijapur acknowledged our preeminence…such a move may look like bad faith, and provoke the other sultanates to rise up and come to the defense of their co-religionist.”
“This isn’t about religion,” Krishnadevaraya roared. “This is about destiny.”
The battle for Raichur proved to be the most perilous conflict of his reign. Krishnadevaraya marched north with half a million men, thirty thousand horses and five hundred war elephants, and faced Adil Shah’s army waiting on the far side of the river Krishna with an equal force. Nobody could say who would prevail. But in the end it was Adil Shah’s army that fled the field.
Krishnadevaraya sent Adil Shah a contemptuous message. “If you want to live, come over here and kiss my feet.” When he read this the deeply insulted sultan ran away, swore to fight again another day, and was saved, for the moment, from choosing between humiliation and death; but the doors of the fort were smashed down, and the white flag of surrender raised. The soldiers of Bisnaga rushed to the spring and drank as deeply as they could, and no other sultan of the Deccan, having learned of the fall of Raichur, dared march against Krishnadevaraya, and the empire of Bisnaga had all the land below the river Krishna in its grasp. And the next day, back home in Bisnaga City and across all the lands of the empire, the drought ended and the rains came. The streets burst back into life.
In the king’s absence, Pampa Kampana was Queen Regent again, which infuriated Tirumala Devi and Nagala Devi, in whose opinion the Crown Prince Tirumala Deva should have had that honor, even though he was just a boy, and his decisions should have been guided by his mother and grandmother. But Timmarasu had seen how well the city had flourished under Pampa Kampana’s guardianship and he had vetoed that idea. After that the senior queen and her mother were Timmarasu’s sworn enemies. For a time, however, they had other matters on their mind, because both the prince and princess were unwell.
The unbearable dry heat of the drought unleashed a sickness that was killing people all over Bisnaga and even the cool of the thick-walled palace rooms did not offer enough protection. It was an unpredictable illness whose cause nobody knew; a curse piled upon a curse. The young people’s fevers rose very high, then returned to normal, then rose again. They coughed, then they did not cough, then they coughed. There were days of diarrhea, then no diarrhea, then there it was again. Up and down, up and down: it was like riding an ocean wave. Tirumala Devi and Nagala Devi suffered along with the youngsters, and it is true that a part of their suffering was caused by motherly and grandmaternal love and concern, but it must be said that they also knew that their own futures were tied to the life of the young ones, in particular the life of the crown prince. Princess Tirumalamba recovered her health first and could not help noticing that this happy news caused her mother and grandmother a good deal less joy than the recovery of Prince Tirumala Deva ten days later. This was wounding, made her feel unloved, and embittered her toward the women in her family for the rest of her life. After she was married off at the age of thirteen to a certain Aliya Rama, a much older, ambitious, conniving fellow with royal aspirations of his own, she separated herself from Tirumala Devi and Nagala Devi, and turned to face in a new direction.
Golden ages never last long, as the horse-trader Fernão Paes once said. Krishnadevaraya’s time of glory was coming to an end. The drought tarnished the gold, the rains came to burnish it again, the king returned from Raichur in triumph, the heat sickness went away, but a short while later the deterioration began, and the beginning of it was the death of the crown prince Tirumala Deva. The king had come home with a great plan. He would abdicate the throne in his son’s favor, ensuring a trouble-free succession, and after that he would act as the lad’s mentor and guide, forming a trinity of high advisers along with Timmarasu and ex–Queen Regent Pampa Kampana. But no sooner had Krishnadevaraya announced his intentions than the boy fell sick again, his forehead was on fire while the rest of his body shivered, and this time there was no recovery. He slid rapidly down into darkness, and died.
The king broke the skull of his burning son and entered a state of screaming, ranting agony driven by grief, rage at the gods, and furious suspicion of everyone in the vicinity. The palace was plunged into chaos as courtiers tried to avoid the royal presence lest they be accused of having had a hand in the boy’s death. Rumors of foul play burst out beyond the palace walls and filled the city’s bazaars. The most repeated theory was that a traitor at court, in the service of the vanquished Adil Shah, had somehow managed to poison the prince. And the moment poison was mentioned people’s thoughts turned to the two notorious Poison Ladies, the senior queen and her mother, but nobody could understand why they would wish to assassinate their own son and grandson. So confusion reigned. Then Queen Tirumala Devi and her mother Nagala Devi themselves came forward with an accusation that changed Bisnaga’s history.
“The king sat on his Diamond Throne, weeping, inconsolable, looking for someone to blame,” Pampa Kampana tells us, “and the two wicked ladies with their nails as long as daggers and painted the color of blood pointed their fingers at wise old Saluva Timmarasu, and also at myself.”
“Can’t you see? Are you blind?” Tirumala Devi declaimed. “This woman, this fraud and murderess, has become drunk on power and plans to seize the throne with your dishonest minister’s help. They are whispering about you behind your back. ‘The king is mad,’ the whispers say, ‘the king has lost his mind and cannot rule, and it is the duty of the two most able persons at court to take his place.’ The whispers are spreading everywhere. People are starting to believe them. They wake up every morning with the whispers in their heads.
“Your son was the first victim of these two traitors. If you do nothing, you will be the second. I ask you again: are you too blind to see what’s in front of your face? Only a blind man could fail to see something so obvious. Has the king my husband gone blind?”
Krishnadevaraya in his agony shouted at his minister. “Timma? What do you say to this?”
“It is contemptible,” Timmarasu said. “I say nothing. I let my years of faithful service speak for me instead.”
“You told me to kill more people,” Krishnadevaraya cried. “It’s what people expect, you said. Then I did, I beheaded the soldiers, one hundred thousand of them, is that enough for you, I asked you, will that satisfy the people? But then people started to call me insane. The king is mad. I see it. I see your plan. That was your idea all along.”
He turned to Pampa Kampana. “And you? Will you also refuse to plead your case?”
“I will say only that it is a kind of derangement in the world when a mere accusation, supported by nothing, feels like a guilty verdict. That way madness lies for us all,” said Pampa Kampana.
“Madness again,” the king bellowed. “You seduced the people while I was away. Yes, yes. You made yourself queen of their hearts and now you want to clear your path to this throne. Women should be kings, that’s what you always say, isn’t it? Women should be kings as well as men? This is what’s behind your actions. It is very clear.”
Pampa Kampana said no more. A terrible silence fell. Then the king stood up and stamped his foot. “No,” he declared. “The king is not blind. The king sees very well what is in front of his eyes to see. But these two will see no more. Seize them! Blind them both!”
Forty more years would pass before the final collapse of Bisnaga, but its long, slow downfall began on the day of Krishnadevaraya’s wild, willful, terrible command, the day on which Saluva Timmarasu and Pampa Kampana had their eyes put out by hot iron rods. Neither of them resisted when the women warriors guarding the court manacled and chained them. The women guards were weeping, and when Thimma the Huge and Ulupi Junior walked the two sentenced figures out through the gates of the Royal Enclosure they were weeping freely as well. They moved slowly toward the blacksmith’s forge with their captives, down the great bazaar street crowded by horrified people wailing in disbelief, slowing down as they neared the forge, as if they were unwilling to arrive. Moments later, as the shrieks of pain rose up from the forge, first a man’s cry, then a woman’s, it was possible to hear the blacksmith sobbing also, unable to bear the thing he had been obliged to do. These tears and cries did not die away, but rather grew in volume and spread out across the city, flowing down broad thoroughfares and along narrow streets, pouring in through every window and door, until the air itself was weeping, and the earth gave up great sighs. Some hours later the king ventured out in his carriage to assess the temper of the city and the gathered crowds pelted him with shoes to express their disgust.
“Remonstrance!” people cried. “Remonstrance!” It was an unprecedented rebuke to power, a roaring in the street, and after that people thought of Krishnadevaraya differently, and the sun of his glory set and did not rise again.
After the blinding, Timmarasu and Pampa Kampana sat trembling in the forge on stools brought to them by the blacksmith, who was unable to stop apologizing, even after they forgave him; and the best doctor in Bisnaga came running to them with soothing poultices for their bloody ruined eye sockets; and strangers brought them food to eat and water for their thirst. Their chains were removed and they were free to go wherever they chose, but where could they go? They remained in the blacksmith’s forge, dizzy and close to fainting from pain, until a young monk ran up from the Mandana mutt with a message from Madhava Acharya.
“From this day forward,” the monk said quietly, reciting the Acharya’s words, “you will both be our most respected guests, and it will be our honor to serve you and care for your every need.”
The two unfortunates were guided carefully into a waiting bullock-cart which moved slowly through the streets toward Mandana. The monk drove the cart; Thimma the Huge and Ulupi Junior walked beside it; and it felt as if the whole city watched it on its journey to the mutt. The only noise to be heard was the sound of inconsolable grief, and a single word, rising above the tears.
“Remonstrance!”