19
In the beginning there was only the pain, the kind of pain that made death feel desirable, a blessed relief. Finally that extreme pain subsided, and for a long time afterward there was nothing. She sat in darkness, ate a little when food was brought to her, and drank a little from the brass pitcher of water that had been placed in the corner of the room with a metal mug inverted over its neck. She slept a little although that felt unnecessary; blindness had erased the boundary between waking and sleeping, they felt like the same thing, and there were no dreams. Blindness erased time as well, and she quickly lost count of the days. On occasion she heard Timmarasu’s voice and understood that he had been brought into her room to visit her, but their blindnesses had nothing to say to one another, and he sounded weak and sick and she understood that the blinding had burned most of his remaining life out of him. Soon enough those visits ended. There were also visits from Madhava Acharya but she had nothing to say to him, which he understood, and simply sat quietly with her for a period of time that might have been minutes or hours, they were all the same now. There were no other visitors and that didn’t matter. She felt that her life had ended but she was cursed to go on living after its end. She was separated from her own history, and no longer felt like Pampa Kampana the maker of miracles whom the goddess had touched long ago. The goddess had abandoned her to her fate. She felt as if she were in a lightless cave, and even though at night someone came in and lit a stove to keep her warm the flames were invisible and cast no shadows on the wall. Nothing was all there was and she was nothing too.
They had tried to make the room comfortable for her but comforts were unimportant. She was aware of a chair and a bed but used neither, remaining squatting in a corner, her arms stretched forward, resting on her knees. Her rear was pushed up against a wall. She woke like this and went to sleep in the same position. It wasn’t easy for her to wash, or to agree to be washed, or to perform her natural functions, but she was aware that that happened from time to time, that people were tending to her, cleaning her, putting clean clothes on her body, brushing and oiling her hair. Except at these times she stayed in her corner, undying, undead, waiting for the end.
There was one unwelcome disturbance. A hubbub at the door and a voice saying, “The king, the king is here.” And then he was there, a particular, loud, voluble absence within the engulfing, undifferentiated, silent absence, and she felt his touch and understood that he was kissing her feet and begging to be forgiven. He was prostrate on the floor blubbering like a bad-mannered child. The sound was nauseating. She needed it to stop.
“Yes, yes,” she said. They were her first words since the blinding. “I know. You were angry, you got carried away, you weren’t thinking straight, you weren’t yourself. You need forgiving? I forgive you. Go and beg at the feet of old Saluva who was like a father to you. This was a death blow to him, and he needs to hear your stupid apology before he dies. As for me? I’ll live.”
He pleaded with her to return to the palace and live in comfort like the queen she was, and be waited on hand and foot, and be cared for by the best physicians, and sit at his right hand on a new throne of her own. She shook her head. “This is my palace now,” she said. “There are too many queens in yours.”
Tirumala Devi and her mother Nagala Devi had been confined to quarters, he told her. What they had done was unforgivable. He would never see them again.
“Nor will I,” said Pampa Kampana. “And it seems you find forgiveness harder to give than to receive.”
“What can I do?” Krishnadevaraya pleaded.
“You can leave,” she answered. “I will never see you again either.”
She heard him leave. She heard the knock on Timmarasu’s door. Then came the old man’s roar of wrath. With the last of his strength the brutalized chief minister cursed his king and told him that his misdeed would be a stain on his name for all time. “No,” Saluva Timmarasu bellowed. “I do not forgive you, and I would not, even if I lived out a thousand thousand lifetimes.”
That night he died, and the timeless silence returned, and closed in upon her.
The first dreams that came were nightmares. In them she saw again the blacksmith’s guilty face, the iron rod lowered into the furnace, and removed with its tip red-hot. She felt Ulupi Junior behind her, holding her arms, and Thimma the Huge towering over her, holding her head still. She watched the approach of the rod, felt its heat; then she woke up, shaking, sweating her lost eyesight out of every pore in her body. She dreamed about Timmarasu’s blinding too, even though she knew he was gone and didn’t have to fear anything anymore, neither the frown of the great nor the tyrant’s stroke. He had been mutilated first, so she had had to watch, and see her own fate before it happened. It was as if she had been blinded twice.
But yes, there were images again, the darkness was no longer absolute. She dreamed her whole life and did not know if she woke or slept while dreaming it; everything from the fire that took her mother to the furnace that burned her eyes. And because the story of her life was also the story of Bisnaga itself, she remembered her great-great-great-great-granddaughter Zerelda Li instructing her to record it all.
She called out to whoever was there, watching over her. “Paper,” she said. “And a feather, and some ink.”
Madhava Acharya came to sit with her again. “I want to say to you,” he said, “that by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue. You told me once that you were not my foe and I did not understand, but I understand now. I have been to see the king and told him that his own virtue has been tarnished by his misdeed, but I must still care for him as I must for all our people. I talked to him about his own poem, The Giver of the Worn Garland, which tells of the Tamil mystic we know as Andal; and I said, ‘Although you did not know it, all the time you were writing about Andal you were in fact writing about our Queen Pampa Kampana, all the beauty of Andal is Pampa Kampana’s beauty, and all the wisdom is Pampa Kampana’s wisdom. When Andal wore her garland and looked into the pond the image she saw there, the reflection in the water, was Pampa Kampana’s face. Thus you have mutilated the very thing you sought to celebrate, you have deprived yourself of the very wisdom in which your poem rejoices, and so you have committed a crime against yourself as well as her.’ I told him this to his face, and I saw the anger rise there, but my place at the head of Mandana protected me, at least for now.”
“Thank you,” she said. Spoken words came with difficulty. Perhaps written words would be easier.
“He allowed me to go to your rooms and bring some clothes,” Madhava Acharya told her. “I did this personally. I have also brought all your papers, your writings, in this satchel which I place here before you, and whatever paper, quill, and ink you need will be brought to you also. I can send our finest scribe to you, to guide your hand until it learns its way. From now on it is your hand that must see what your eye cannot, and it will.”
“Thank you,” she replied.
Her hand learned quickly, returned easily to the familiar relationships of paper and inkwell, and her carers expressed astonishment at the delicacy and accuracy of her script, the straightness of the lines of words as they marched across her sheets. She began to feel her selfhood returning as she wrote. She wrote slowly, much more slowly than in the past, but the writing was neat and clear. She could not describe herself as happy—happiness, she felt, had moved out of her vicinity forever—but as she wrote she came closer to the new place where it had taken up residence than at any other time.
Then the whispers began. At first she wasn’t clear what was happening, she thought people were talking in the corridor outside her room, and she wanted to ask them to please be quiet or at least take it elsewhere, but she soon understood that there was nobody outside. She was hearing the voices of Bisnaga within herself, telling her their stories. Things had gone into reverse, as if rivers had started flowing upstream. When she was a child a religious saint had taken her in, but that safe place had become unsafe, and friendship had soured into enmity; now another holy man, who had been an adversary, had metamorphosed into a friend and had given her safety and care. And in the early days of Bisnaga she had whispered people’s lives into their ears so that they could begin to live them; now the descendants of those people were whispering their lives into her ears instead. From the vendors of things taken as offerings to the city’s many temples—flowers, incense, copper bowls—she heard that sales had dramatically increased, because the blindings—followed by the death of Mahamantri Timmarasu—had filled people with uncertainty about the future, and they were praying to the gods for help. From the street of foreign traders she heard more worries and doubts, was Bisnaga about to collapse in spite of all its military success, should they be thinking about packing their bags and getting out before it was too late? Chinese voices and Malays, Persians and Arabs, spoke to her, and she only comprehended a little of what they said, but she could well understand the panic in their voices. She heard the voices of maidservants retelling the worries of their mistresses, and she heard astrologers prophesying a grim future. The female guards of the palace were full of grief and there were those who went so far as to think of mutiny. Temple dancers, the devadasis of the Yellamma temples, expressed their unwillingness to dance. Pampa Kampana even thought she could identify individual storytellers, here was Ulupi Junior grieving, and Thimma the Huge, here. All of Bisnaga was in crisis, and the voices of that crisis filled her waking thoughts. She heard the discontented mutterings of soldiers in the military cantonment, the gossipy voices of junior monks, the foul-mouthed scorn of courtesans. The king, so recently returned in triumph from his wars, was held in lower esteem than at any point in his reign, and people’s heads were full of the possibility of a palace coup. But who would dare rise up, and how, and when, and would it succeed, and if it did, oh, what then, and if it failed, oh, what if it failed? In what are now becoming known as the “blinded” verses of the Jayaparajaya, Pampa Kampana gave voice to the anonymous, to the ordinary citizens, the little people, the unseen, and many scholars assert that in these pages of the immense work Bisnaga comes most vividly to life.
She herself wrote that the whispers were a blessing. They brought the world back to her and took her back into the world. There was nothing to be done about the blindness but now it was more than just darkness, it was filled with people, their faces, their hopes, their fears, their lives. Joy had left her, first when Zerelda Li died, and then when her eyes were taken from her and she had understood that she had not escaped the curse of burning. But now, little by little, the whispered secrets of the city allowed joy to be reborn, in the birth of a child, in the building of a home, in the heart of loving families she had never met; in the shoeing of a horse, the ripening of fruits in their orchards, the richness of the harvest. Yes, she reminded herself, terrible things happened, a terrible thing had happened to her, but life on earth was still bountiful, still plenteous, still good. She might be blind, but she could see that there was light.
In the palace, however, the king was lost in darkness. Time had stopped all around the Lion Throne. He began to be quite unwell. Courtiers spoke to one another about seeing him wandering the corridors of the palace talking to himself, or, according to some reports, seemingly deep in conversation with ghosts. He spoke to his lost chief minister and asked for advice. None was given. He spoke to his junior queen, taken from him in childbirth, asking for love. No love was returned. He walked in the gardens with his dead children, he wanted to teach them things and push them on swings and pick them up and toss them in the air, but they didn’t want to play and were unable to learn. (Strangely, he had less time for his living daughter, Tirumalamba Devi. His departed children who would never grow up seemed more on his mind than his adult girl.)
(Here Pampa Kampana’s text speaks of Tirumalamba Devi as an adult. We are obliged to comment that, as careful—not to say pedantic!—readers of the text may have calculated, Tirumalamba must in “reality” still have been a child. To these readers, and to all who encounter the Jayaparajaya in our pages, we offer the following advice: do not, as you experience Pampa Kampana’s tale, cling to a conventional description of “reality,” dominated by calendars and clocks. The author has previously—in her account of her six-generation-long “sleep” in the forest of Aranyani—shown that she is prepared to compress Time for dramatic purposes. Here she shows her willingness to do the opposite as well, stretching Time instead of abbreviating it, making it do her bidding, allowing Tirumalamba to grow up inside her magically expanded hours—the clocks paused outside her bubble but continuing to tick inside it. Pampa Kampana is the mistress of chronology, not its servant. What her verses instruct us to believe was so, we must accept. Anything else is folly.)
Krishnadevaraya went into all the temples of Bisnaga to offer prayers and ask to be released from his torment, but the gods turned deaf ears to the man who had blinded the creator of the city, in whom the goddess had dwelled for more than two hundred years. He wrote poetry but then he tore it up. He asked the gathered poetic geniuses of the court, the Seven Remaining Elephants, whose talents were the pillars that held up the sky, to compose new work whose lyricism would renew the beauty of Bisnaga, but all of them confessed that the muse had departed and they were unable to write a word.
The king is mad, the whispers said.
Or it might have been that the king, filled with repentance and shame, consumed by the horror of self-knowledge—the knowledge that his lightning storms of rage had finally broken his own world and deprived him of its two most valuable citizens—was possessed by the need for expiation, and had no idea how or where to find it.
His health worsened. He took to his bed. The court physicians could find no cause. He seemed simply to have lost a reason for living. “All he wants,” the whispers said, “is to find some measure of peace of mind before he leaves.”
At some point during his rapid decline he remembered his brother, imprisoned in the fort at Chandragiri. In a state that many at the court believed to be the beginning of a terminal delirium, he cried out, “Here is one wrong I can right!” He gave the order to release Achyuta from his place of exile and escort him to Bisnaga City. “Bisnaga needs a king,” Krishnadevaraya proclaimed, “and my brother will rule when I am gone.” Very few people at the royal court had ever met Achyuta, but the rumors of his bad personality, his cruelty, his violent nature, were known to all. But nobody dared to speak against the king’s decree, until Princess Tirumalamba’s husband Aliya tried to intervene.
Aliya visited Krishnadevaraya on what people were beginning to think of as his deathbed. “Your Majesty, excuse me,” he said, bluntly, “but your brother Achyuta is well-known to be a savage. Why send for him when I am here? As your only surviving child’s husband, known to all as a serious man, a responsible man, surely that would be a better, less risky route for the succession to follow?”
The king shook his head, as if he was having difficulty remembering who Tirumalamba was, and who this older man, her husband, might be.
“I must make peace with my brother,” the king replied, waving a weak, dismissive hand. “Although Chandragiri is not such a bad place,” he added almost piteously. “The Raj Mahal there is fairly comfortable. However, I must set him free. As for you, just look after this daughter of mine properly, and when he is king her uncle Achyuta will treat you both with all the respect you certainly deserve.”
Aliya went to Queen Tirumala Devi and her mother Nagala Devi. “As senior queen,” he said, “you must intervene with the king. Isn’t the crown the reason why you wanted Tirumalamba to marry a man of consequence, an older, more authoritative figure than some callow youth? Wasn’t this your way of getting your family on to the throne of Bisnaga? Well then. Now is the hour when you must make your move.”
Tirumala Devi shook her head sadly. “My daughter hates me,” she said, “and she has turned away from her grandmother too. She thinks that when she was sick we didn’t care if she lived or died and our attention was focused solely on our son. Now she has averted her gaze from us both. There is nothing for us to gain by helping put her, and you, on the Lion Throne.”
“And is that true?” Aliya asked. “About your attention?”
“What a question,” said Nagala Devi. “It’s obvious rot. She always was a petulant child.”
Aliya returned to the weakening Krishnadevaraya. “You made a great mistake with Mahamantri Timmarasu and the lady Pampa Kampana,” he said. “Don’t make this second colossal error before you leave us.”
“Send for my brother,” Krishnadevaraya commanded him. “He will be your king.” It was the last decision of his life. A few days later he was dead. The once-great Krishnadevaraya, master of all of the south below the river whose name he shared, greatest victor who ever ruled the city of victory, in whose time Bisnaga became more prosperous than ever before, died in a kind of unspoken disgrace, much reduced in honor, and people were blind to his achievements, as if he had blinded all Bisnaga when he put out Pampa Kampana and Minister Timmarasu’s eyes.
The whispers told Pampa Kampana that his last word had been a bitter rebuke to himself.
“Remonstrance.”