20
After her father died Princess Tirumalamba Devi wandered the streets of Bisnaga like a lost soul, with Ulupi Junior following her from a distance, in case of need. But nobody approached the sad princess with bad intentions. Her sadness was like a veil protecting her from the unwelcome gaze of uncouth strangers. In the main bazaar street Sri Laxman and his brother Sri Narayan offered her fruit, pulses, seeds, and rice, but she passed on by with a small rueful shake of the head. On the banks of the river at dawn she watched worshippers praising Surya the god of the sun, but she herself had lost the desire to worship any god. The hilly landscape of immense rocks and boulders dwarfed her and increased her feeling of insignificance. She felt like a mosquito or an ant. Her father had died without recognizing her rights and had insulted her husband by dismissing him without discussion. Her mother and grandmother were poisonous shrews. She was alone in the world, except for the old man to whom she was married, who spent his days lost in intrigue, trying to get his allies into positions of influence before the new king arrived in town. He had no time for her troubles. She drifted in and out among the quarters of the foreigners where porcelain, wine, and fine muslin could be found, and through the neighborhoods of noble families, and the gullies of the courtesans too. Only the Royal Enclosure where she had grown up, with its emerald pools and architectural beauties, failed to interest her. She meandered past the irrigation canals and the Yellamma temples whose dancing girls were the best in town. I no longer have a place in this place where everyone knows their place, she thought. In this way, lost and aimless, she found her way to the Mandana mutt, and her feet, which knew what she needed better than her head, brought her to Pampa Kampana’s door.
The whole city was holding its breath. Stories of Achyuta’s approach, his wild nights at hostelries on the road, the drunkenness, the gluttony, the women, the brawls, ran ahead of the royal party, and Bisnaga rightly feared that its new age would be very different from the regal grandeur of Krishnadevaraya in his prime, and the culture of art and tolerance which Queen Regent Pampa Kampana had fostered during the king’s years of military absences. Something louder and cruder was on the way. It was time to keep one’s head down and one’s nose clean. There was no telling in what direction Achyuta Deva Raya might aim his fabled vulgarity, to say nothing of his violent streak. Stories of men strung up by Achyuta and left hanging by the wayside because of some real or imagined act of disrespect rushed down the road from Chandragiri, like heralds of the new order, and struck fear into every heart.
“May I come in?” Tirumalamba Devi softly asked, and the woman squatting in the far corner of the room moved a hand very slightly in a gesture of invitation. The princess came in quickly, taking off her sandals, and moved forward to touch the blind woman’s feet.
“Don’t do that,” Pampa Kampana said. “In this place we meet as equals or not at all.”
Tirumalamba Devi sat down near her. “You are the mother of Bisnaga and have been so cruelly treated by its children, who are also yours,” she said, “and I am a child cruelly treated by my mother and my grandma too. So maybe I’m looking for a mother and you are in need of a child.”
After that they were friends. Tirumalamba Devi came every day, and soon Ulupi Junior left her there alone, telling her that she didn’t need security in this place, in which everyone was safe from harm. Sometimes the woman in the corner did not want to talk and they sat silently together. It was a good silence in which both women felt cared for, a silence that brought them closer. On other days Pampa Kampana wanted to talk, and told the younger woman stories from her earlier life, about the bag of seeds with which Hukka and Bukka gave birth to the city, and the battle against the pink monkeys, everything. Tirumalamba Devi listened in awe.
And every day Pampa Kampana tried to write. Tirumalamba Devi saw how hard it was for her, in spite of the skill of her hand. Finally she spoke up. “What I see,” she told Pampa Kampana, “is that because of your eyes, your hand moves very slowly, much more slowly than your mind, and that is hard for you. You can actually compose with great rapidity, isn’t it, but you can’t set it down fast enough, and the enforced slowness must be very frustrating, yes?”
Pampa Kampana made a small movement of the head, meaning to say, perhaps, but I have no other choice.
Tirumalamba Devi found the courage to make a bold suggestion. “When immortal Vyasa was composing the Mahabharata, he also did so at a very fast pace, no?” she asked. “But Lord Ganesh, who was taking the dictation, could keep up with him, no? Even when his pen broke, he broke off one of his elephant tusks and wrote with that. Isn’t it? For this reason we also call him Ekdanta, Ganesh One Tooth.”
“I am not Vyasa,” Pampa Kampana said, and a rare smile spread across her face. “And you still have all your teeth, I’m sure, and I also know that your ears are not so big.”
“But I can write as fast as you can recite,” Tirumalamba Devi said with shining eyes. “And if my pen breaks, I’ll do whatever it takes to go on without stopping.”
Pampa Kampana considered this.
“Can you dance?” she asked. “Because Lord Ganesh is a fantastic dancer. Can you ride on a rat? Will you wrap a serpent around your neck like a scarf, or around your waist like a belt?” Now her smile was very wide.
“If that’s what it takes,” Tirumalamba Devi said firmly, “then I will learn.”
Achyuta Deva Raya entered the Lotus Palace looking for someone to kill. He was a swarthy man in his fifties, thick-bearded, gap-toothed, pot-bellied, angry as only a man obliged by his detention in a remote place to suffer the attentions of country dentists can be. He was dressed as if for combat, in a leather jerkin over a chain-mail vest, well-worn boots on his feet, a sword at his waist and a shield on his back. His companions were a disorganized band of drinking ruffians that had provided his only social life in Chandragiri, and behind them came his official royal escort, a band of women warriors from the palace guard whose expressions bore witness to their anger at the lascivious approaches made by the king’s friends on the road, the king’s own inappropriate behavior, and their professional embarrassment at the brutish bad manners of the new monarch whom they were obliged to bring into the room of the Lion (or Diamond) Throne.
Waiting to greet him was what remained of the royal family: Krishnadevaraya’s senior queen Tirumala Devi and her mother Nagala Devi, Princess Tirumalamba Devi, and her husband Aliya Rama, whose decision to style himself as Aliya Rama Raya, while technically justifiable because of his marriage to Krishnadevaraya’s only surviving child, was certain to be seen by Achyuta as a red rag, inflammatory, even a declaration of war. “When a man has been exiled as long as I have,” Achyuta said, “he returns looking for revenge. The one responsible for my ruined life—my noble brother—is no longer here to face my wrath. But, in his absence, you people will do.”
“Twenty years is a long time,” Aliya replied, “and we can see that your banishment has not been kind either to your appearance or to your character. However, welcome, Uncle—I use the term of respect even though I am your senior by several years. Bisnaga is yours, as the late king decreed, and be assured that nobody here will consider rebellion against his will. But you should know that the people of the palace—the city’s aristocrats, its ministers and civil servants, and these formidable women of the guard—are loyal to the empire itself, not only to the occupant of the throne. They are loyal to those who have treated them well during the twenty years of your absence. Let me put it to you more plainly. They love the late king’s daughter, his only living child. And I am her chosen husband. So they are loyal, also, to me. The people outside the gates are the same. It is Bisnaga they love, and the king is the servant of their beloved, and must never betray it. Therefore be careful how you act, or your reign may be brief.”
“In addition,” Tirumala Devi said, “my father King Veera of Srirangapatna, my mother’s husband, guardian of your southern border, is watching closely, and should he be displeased, it would not go well for you.”
Achyuta turned to Princess Tirumalamba Devi. “And you, young lady, what do you say? Do you have some threats for me too?”
“My closest friend and second mother, the lady Pampa Kampana, sees everything through blinded eyes,” she answered. “So, learning from her example, I will say everything through closed lips.”
Achyuta scratched the back of his neck. Then his hand strayed to his sword and he grabbed the hilt, released it, grabbed it again, released it again. Then he scratched the top of his head with his right hand, ruffled his thick, unkempt, and graying hair, and furrowed his brow; while his left hand reached into his right armpit, like a man hunting for fleas. Then he shook his head, as if in disbelief. He looked over to his drinking buddies with an expression that said, Well, you’re not much use, are you. Then all of a sudden he burst into loud laughter and clapped his hands. “Family life, eh?” he cried. “You can’t beat it. It’s good to be home. And so, let’s eat.”
In the years that followed, the story of Achyuta Deva Raya’s coronation feast, vividly told and retold, became the defining narrative of his reign. Everyone in Bisnaga carried around a mental image of the king and his drunken companions eating like swine and drinking like men who had been lost in a desert for many years; while the royal family and nobles of the court sat in silence, with folded hands, eating nothing; and while Aliya Rama Raya stood at the back of the dining hall, refusing even to sit and break bread with the new ruler, and plotting his next move.
Tirumalamba Devi gave Pampa Kampana a detailed description of the evening, and that is what we now have in the Jayaparajaya, transformed by the author into verse, but written in the princess’s neat hand. After Tirumalamba had finished her account, Pampa Kampana gave a deep sigh.
“These two men,” she said, “your husband and your uncle. Between them, they will be the destruction of us all.”
The last two leading men in the drama of Bisnaga were so unalike that people began to call them “Yes and No,” or “Up and Down,” or “Plus and Minus” to describe their opposed natures. “Forward and Back” was also used, and in this case Achyuta was definitely the one considered to be the backward party. He was the unsubtle one, the type who barges in through your front door, hits you over the head, and steals your house. Aliya was stealthy. If he stole your house you wouldn’t know it was going until it was gone. You’d be standing in the road, homeless, wondering where everything went. Achyuta made people think of a bear with angry bees flying around his head, perpetually agitated, swatting at the buzzing air. Aliya was still, like an archer just before he releases his deadly arrow. Achyuta was thick-bodied and gross, while Aliya reminded everyone of a skeleton—a walking skeleton with a long hard face and arms and legs so long and thin that there seemed to be no flesh on them, just skin and bone. Achyuta was excitable; Aliya was almost preternaturally calm. Achyuta was religious, in the sense of being hostile to followers of other religions; Aliya was cynical, and didn’t give a damn about your faith as long as you were of value. Achyuta, by general agreement, was not very intelligent. Aliya Rama Raya was the smartest man in the palace.
And yet, under Achyuta, Bisnaga survived. It no longer prospered in the old way, and it lost territories and influence, but at the end of his reign, it was still there. By the time Aliya was done, the empire was finished as well.
Several years passed before Tirumalamba Devi persuaded Pampa Kampana to leave the Mandana mutt. She only left her room when she was told that the mutt had a pottery room with a wheel and a kiln, and so after a long time, and in spite of her blindness, she began to throw pots again. It seems probable that she herself made the pot which, in the end, would contain the manuscript of her life’s work. But for a long time the pottery room and her own cell were the only places she wanted to be.
In the end it was the new Pampa statue that persuaded her. Achyuta Deva Raya had been determined to make a show of his deep religious conviction and had commissioned this tribute to the goddess who was the local incarnation of Parvati, Shiva’s wife and Brahma’s daughter, after whom the river of Bisnaga was also named. The sculptor was a certain Krishnabhatta, the same Brahmin genius whom Krishnadevaraya had asked to carve the giant, terrifying figure of Lord Narasimha, the Man-Lion incarnation of Vishnu, out of a single monolith: Narasimha with the goddess Lakshmi on his left thigh and the dead body of the demon Hiranyakashyap on his lap. That statue had not been finished until after Krishnadevaraya’s death, but it was forever associated with his glory, and Achyuta ordered Krishnabhatta to make a Pampa-figure of equal size and grandeur, also carved out of a single block of stone, which would be placed in direct opposition to the Narasimha statue. It would be as if Achyuta’s magnificence, embodied in stone Lady Pampa, as large as Lord Narasimha and just as fearsome, was staring down the greatness of his predecessor.
“You have to come,” Tirumalamba Devi said to Pampa Kampana. “Because, so soon after its completion and blessing ceremony, everyone is already saying the statue is a tribute to you, the mother of us all, and that it’s Achyuta Deva Raya’s way of apologizing for the crime against you committed by his brother.” She giggled. “It’s driving my uncle insane.”
“Okay,” Pampa Kampana finally said. “My fingers will see what my eyes cannot.”
On the day Pampa Kampana left the mutt, with a white cloth wrapped around her head to shield her ruined eyes, and an umbrella held over her by Madhava Acharya himself in spite of his advancing years, all of Bisnaga came out to honor her. She heard the crowd’s cries and songs and was greatly moved and began, for the first time since her bloodied retreat, to consider the possibility of living in the world again, of finding her way back to some sort of love after the great hatred of the hot iron rod. When she reached the statue the sculptor himself guided her hands across its surface, describing its details and explaining its symbols.
With the help of Tirumalamba Devi and Madhava Acharya, she made an offering of flowers to the goddess, and took care to congratulate not only the sculptor but also the king for this supreme act of devotion. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly, and her words, repeated by many voices, rippled across the throng. “I see it clearly, as if it had restored my sight.”
News of the event reached the palace quickly and infuriated Achyuta, who saw that the work he had commissioned to bring glory to himself had unintentionally become a tribute to the blind woman of Mandana. (There were those who thought he should have known what would happen, and we, with the benefit of hindsight, can’t help but agree, but Achyuta was not a far-sighted man, nor, as has been noted, was he the most intelligent of rulers. As a result he was taken aback and angered by the people’s reaction to the Pampa statue, and perhaps his anger was increased by his realization of his own stupidity.)
“To hell with her,” he shouted from the throne. “She’s pretending to be the goddess now? There’s no room in my Bisnaga for witches or blasphemers. If blinding wasn’t enough to get rid of her, I’ll burn her alive.”
Pampa Kampana’s book makes no record of the names of Achyuta’s ministers but it appears that, whoever they were, they persuaded the king that the public burning of a woman held in high esteem by so many would be inadvisable. They could not, however, prevent him from descending upon the Mandana mutt and demanding to be shown to her room. Madhava Acharya led the way and they found her sitting in her usual corner, reciting, while Princess Tirumalamba Devi wrote down her verses.
“If I can’t burn you,” he told her, “I can certainly burn your book, which I don’t need to read to know that it’s full of unsuitable and forbidden thoughts, and then you will die and be forgotten, and nobody will know your name, and the statue will be mine again and remain so for all eternity. What do you say to that?”
Tirumalamba Devi leaped to her feet and placed herself between Achyuta and the blind woman. “You’ll have to kill me first,” she said. “Madam has a divine gift and to do what you threaten would be an act of sacrilege.”
Pampa Kampana stood up also. “Burn all the paper you want,” she said. “But every line of what I have written is held in my memory. To get rid of it you’ll need to cut off my head and stuff it with straw, as sometimes happens, in my book, to defeated kings.”
“I, too, have memorized this immortal text,” Madhava Acharya said. “So your axe will have to visit my neck as well.”
Achyuta’s face reddened. “The time may come soon,” he said roughly, “when I accept all your offers with pleasure. For the moment, to hell with you all. Keep out of my way, and you,” he pointed furiously at Pampa Kampana, “are forbidden to visit my statue.”
“That’s fine,” said Pampa Kampana. “My history will not be written in stone.”
Once the king had gone, she turned to the priest. “What you said wasn’t true,” she said. “You risked your life for a lie.”
“There are times when a lie matters more than a life,” he replied. “This was such a time.”
She settled back into her corner. “Very well,” she said. “Thank you both. Now perhaps we may proceed.”
“Sometimes I hate men,” Tirumalamba Devi said when Madhava Acharya had gone.
“I had a daughter who thought that way,” Pampa Kampana told her. “She preferred the company of women and was happiest in Aranyani’s enchanted forest. And if by ‘men’ you mean our recent royal visitor, that is understandable. But Madhava is a good man, surely. And what about your husband?”
“Aliya is all plots and conspiracies,” Tirumalamba answered. “He’s all secrets and schemes. The court is full of factions and he knows how to set one group against another, how to balance this interest against that one, and Achyuta can’t keep up; that kind of complication makes him dizzy. So Aliya has become a second power center, equal to the king, which is all he wants, at least for now. He’s a labyrinth. You never know which direction to go in. How can one love a maze?”
“Tell me this,” Pampa Kampana said. “I know princesses are imprisoned by their crowns and find it hard to choose their own path, but in your heart, what do you want from life?”
“Nobody ever asked me that,” Tirumalamba Devi said. “Not even my mother. Duty, duty, et cetera. Writing down your verses is the only thing that fills my heart.”
“But for yourself, what?”
Tirumalamba Devi took a breath. “In the street of the foreigners,” she said, “I get envious. They just come and go, no ties, no duties, no limits. They have stories from everywhere and I’m sure that when they go somewhere else we become the stories that they tell the people there. They even tell us stories about ourselves and we believe them even if they get everything upside down. It’s like, they have the right to tell the whole world the story of the whole world, and then just…move on. So. Here’s my stupid idea. I want to be a foreigner. I’m sorry to be so foolish.”
“I had a daughter like that too,” Pampa Kampana said. “And you know what? She became a foreigner and I think she was happy.”
“You don’t know?” Tirumalamba asked.
“I lost her,” Pampa Kampana replied. “But maybe she found herself.” She put a hand on the princess’s knee. “Go and search for a cheel feather,” she told her.
“A feather? Why?”
“Keep it safely,” said Pampa Kampana.
“They say you came here as a bird,” Tirumalamba said, awestruck.
“Let’s go back to work,” Pampa Kampana said. But before she started reciting again she added one more thing. “I have known foreigners,” she said. “I have even loved one or two. But you know what’s the most disappointing thing about them?”
“What?”
“They all look exactly the same.”
“Can I ask you the same question that you asked me?” Tirumalamba said. “Is there still something you hope for, something you want? I know, your lost eyesight, of course, excuse me, another stupidity. But some secret desire?”
Pampa Kampana smiled. “Thank you,” she said. “But my time of desiring is over. Now everything I want is in my words, and the words are all I need.”
“Then, by all means,” said Tirumalamba Devi, “let’s get back to work.”
It was the rainy season when everything heated up. Early in the morning Aliya Rama Raya had breakfast with his wife in their private chambers in the Lotus Palace, in silence, listening to the deceptively cheerful sound of the falling rain, and saying nothing on account of the servers. When they had finished eating and drinking, Aliya walked around all their rooms and made sure there were no unwelcome ears listening, no loose-tongued flunkies or gossipy maids. Then at last he spoke.
“I can hardly talk to the man,” Aliya told Princess Tirumalamba Devi, “his level of thought is so crude. He thinks like he eats, which is to say, piggishly.”
The loose, tense power-sharing arrangement between Achyuta the brutish king and Aliya his devious rival was unsatisfactory to both men, and their dispute had dragged on down the years and pulled Bisnaga in two opposite directions, which was unsatisfactory to everyone.
Tirumalamba made a careful answer. “Madhava Acharya says he’s very godly, no?”
“Yes,” Aliya said, “but he understands nothing. We are good, they are bad, that’s the sum total of his religion. Underneath that, I think, he’s afraid of them. And now that there’s a new they rising in the north—these Mughals—he’s even more scared.”
“But we have them everywhere in Bisnaga,” Tirumalamba said. “We have their places of worship in many neighborhoods, and they live among us, and are our friends and neighbors, and our children play together, and we say we are Bisnagan first and godly second, isn’t it? We say that. Some of our senior generals are also them, na? And in the Five Sultanates, we are everywhere there also. Senior personages, shopkeepers, all. Even some wives in their palaces are we.”
“I have reached out in a friendly way to the Five Sultans,” Aliya told her. “Seems they are even more scared of the Mughals than Achyuta is, even though their god is the same. I try to explain to him, god is not the thing. Being able to rule ourselves is the thing. Not being conquered and obliterated, but being powerful and free, this is the subject, for the sultans as well as for us. But he only says, Kalyug, Kalyug, the Dark Age is upon us, the demons are coming, and we must pray to Lord Vishnu, who comes to save us from the miseries of the Dark. We must pray for his strength against them and crush them all. It’s like a four-year-old trying to understand the sacred books. ‘Crush them all’? It would be stupid to try even if it was possible. ‘Crush them all’ is like asking, please come now and crush me. I’m talking to the sultans nicely, to avoid all this talk of crushing-vushing.”
“What does he say about that? Your…‘talking-shalking’?”
“These days we don’t say much to each other. That’s also bad. So here’s my idea. I have invited the Five Sultans to Bisnaga as our guests, to mediate between Achyuta and me.”
“But, husband, excuse me, isn’t that a terrible idea? It makes us look so weak, na?”
“It makes Achyuta look weak,” Aliya replied, looking off into the distance and smiling an unamused smile. “Not necessarily the rest of us.”
“But what if, thinking the king is weak, they attack and take some of our territory?”
“Why, then, dear wife, it will prove to all of Bisnaga that the king is not up to the job, and a change may be required.”
“So this is your plan,” Tirumalamba Devi said, shaking her head. “I don’t know, husband. People already say about you that you’re too sly. This will just prove it, no?”
“The people will accept sly,” Aliya said, quietly, “if it is accompanied by capable.”
Tirumalamba saw that there was no point in further discussion. “Have you told the king?” she asked.
“I’m going to tell him now.”
“But he will never agree, isn’t it? So stupid he isn’t.”
“The sultans are already on their way,” Aliya said. “I have already given orders for a grand welcome, and a banquet. They arrive tomorrow.”
Tirumalamba Devi stood up and prepared for her day with Pampa Kampana at the mutt. “Sly isn’t a big enough word for you,” she said as she left. “Maybe sneaky also. Also calculating. Maybe also a little underhand. It’s not so much ‘Yes and No.’ It’s more like, he says ‘No,’ and you say, ‘Then watch out for your back.’ ”
“Thank you,” Aliya Rama Raya said, and bowed slightly. “You can be a flatterer when you choose to be.” And he smiled, again, his thin little enigmatic smile.
“I’ll need an umbrella today,” she said, “and I’ll still get wet. You should get an umbrella too. The way you’re behaving, not just the rain but the whole sky could fall on your head.”
The state visit of the Five Sultans of the Deccan—rulers of Ahmadnagar, Berar, Bidar, Bijapur, and Golconda—didn’t last long, but brought about great changes. Old Adil Shah of Bijapur, heavily defeated by Krishnadevaraya at Raichur, arrived with a small army, and wore battle-stained military clothes. Even older Qutb Shah of Golconda brought an even bigger force, and arrayed himself in dazzling diamonds. Both of them gave the impression of men who needed a show of armed force to make them appear strong, and therefore they both looked weak. Hussain Shah of Ahmadnagar and Darya of Berar were unwell, and looked like men who knew they wouldn’t live long. Ali Barid of Bidar was the youngest, healthiest, and most confident of the five. He brought the smallest retinue, as if telling the rulers of Bisnaga, you wouldn’t dare.
No sooner had they arrived than Achyuta Deva Raya, infuriated by Aliya Rama Raya’s stratagem, told them their services weren’t required. “Okay, so you’re here, not my idea but that’s the way it is,” he told them in his uncouth fashion. “However, we don’t need any advice from the likes of you. You’ve made the journey for nothing. Too bad. Stay a while, rest up, we’ll eat tonight, and then you can all be on your way.”
What he thought was: Four sick old men and a kid. Nothing to fear here. He also had a number of unpleasant thoughts about followers of that religion which it is unnecessary to repeat here. The Five Sultans no doubt entertained equally unpleasant thoughts about him.
That evening at dinner, Aliya Rama Raya spoke one by one to all Five Sultans. He soon learned that Hussain Shah of Ahmadnagar and Darya of Berar looked down on Ali Barid of Bidar and Adil Shah of Bijapur because their dynasties had been started by former slaves of foreign origin (their slave ancestors had come from Georgia). Qutb Shah of Golconda looked down on Hussain Shah and Darya because Hussain’s family had originally been Brahmin Hindus, and the Berar sultanate descended from Hindu converts too. Qutb Shah was hated and feared by all four others because of the wealth and power of Golconda. All five seemed happier talking to Aliya than to one another. As for Achyuta, he sat some way away from his guests at the far end of the table, and drank. It was the only way, he reckoned, to get through this disaster of an evening.
Aliya Rama Raya thought: How interesting that they really don’t like one another. We need to keep it that way.
Outside, the rain thundered down. The roof of the banqueting hall proved to be in need of repair and provided an imperfect defense against the downpour. Water came through in several places. Palace staff ran about with buckets and mops. It was necessary to hold umbrellas over the heads of the sultans of Bijapur and Golconda. This did nothing to improve the general mood.
Achyuta the king was right. The evening was a disaster. The Five Sultans left the next morning before dawn, all of them furious about their pointless journey.
Adil Shah of Bijapur thought: Bisnaga is in terrible shape, divided against itself, run-down, leaky-roofed, confused. Time, perhaps, to make a decisive move.
The banquet was notable for one other thing. It was the last function of state at which the now very old Nagala Devi was present, seated between her grim daughter ex-Queen Tirumala Devi and her reserved, though pleasant-faced, granddaughter Tirumalamba Devi. The three women sat upright, ate little, drank less, said nothing, and retired early. That night, Nagala Devi died.
The old lady slipped away quietly in the night lying in bed listening to the frogs croaking during a break in the rain. “It was the only thing she did quietly in her whole life,” her granddaughter Tirumalamba said to Pampa Kampana at the mutt, before bursting into tears. “You can go on loving somebody even if you feel unloved by that person, isn’t it,” she wept. “Maybe it makes things worse. If you stopped loving them the pain would be less. When I was a little girl I sat at her feet and she told me stories and took me to see things. She was different then. Maybe she was happier. She told me about Tirumalaiah, the chief who built our great temple, or so she said, more than five hundred years ago. Then she took me to the temple and showed me everything, all the way inside, even the sanctum containing the god and the snake with seven heads. She also took me to the beautiful waterfall. Srirangapatna is an island inside the Kaveri river which divides when it reaches our home and then reunites beyond it. She is the one who told me that that place, the place where the two streams of the river rejoin, is the most auspicious place for the scattering of ashes. She took me to see it and pointed to the best place from which to do that work. So now we must take her there and scatter her on the water.”
“Talk to your mother,” Pampa Kampana said. “She has lost her mother and she needs her daughter by her side.”
“You are my mother now,” Tirumalamba Devi said. “I am your daughter.”
“No,” Pampa Kampana told her. “Not today.”
Tirumalamba found her mother Tirumala Devi alone in her bedroom with a dry-eyed face as impenetrable as a locked door. “Your grandmother gave up her marriage to come and live here in Bisnaga with me. She loved your grandfather and he still loves her and yet they agreed she would come with me and make sure I was safe in this hellish place where everyone thought we were nothing but poisoners.”
“We should take her back to her husband now,” Tirumalamba said.
“I want to go back also,” her mother told her. “You don’t want or need me and I have no place here anymore. I want to spend the few years that remain at home, as my father’s daughter once again, so that we may comfort each other for our loss.”
“Ask the king,” Tirumalamba told her. “I’m sure he will agree.”
They did not embrace, or weep together. Some wounds are too deep to be healed.
Tirumala Devi asked for an audience with Achyuta. He received her formally, seated on the throne while she stood before him like a common supplicant. She ignored the insult and spoke courteously. “As my husband and mother have both left us,” she said, “I ask that I be allowed to return to my father’s house, my work here being complete.”
“But it’s not complete,” Achyuta said, picking strands of fatty meat from his teeth. “You being in Bisnaga keeps your father honest. He will not dare to break our agreement or move against us in any way while we have you.”
“I must scatter my mother’s ashes in the Kaveri,” Tirumala Devi said. “It would be her last wish and I must fulfill it.”
“There are holy rivers here also,” the king said dismissively. “Put her in the water of the Pampa or the Krishna. They will serve you just fine. No reason to make the long journey into the south.”
“So I am your prisoner,” Tirumala Devi said. “Or should I say, your hostage.”
“You are a peace treaty in the form of a living person,” Achyuta said. “Think of it that way. That should feel better, huh. Well, even if it doesn’t.”
The former senior queen returned to her rooms where her daughter found her, still with a face of iron.
“He refused, then,” Tirumalamba Devi said. “I’ll talk to Aliya. He will surely find a way.”
But this turned out to be a rare instance when the two disputatious heads of Bisnaga spoke as one. “He’s right,” Aliya Rama Raya told his wife. “If we lose your mother, we lose Veera too. There are already rumors of his growing disloyalty. She will have to stay.”
“You have me,” she argued. “Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” Aliya told her, without trying to soften the blow. “It isn’t. Not until I am really the king on the Lion Throne.”
“You mean ‘unless,’ I suppose,” the princess corrected him.
“If I had meant ‘unless,’ ” he replied, “I would not have said ‘until.’ ”
Tirumalamba left him and brought the bad news to Tirumala Devi. “He won’t help,” she said, and her mother made no attempt to hide her scorn. “So you are still a second-rater,” Tirumala Devi told her only living child. “If my son had survived, I know my situation would have been very different.”
Her daughter turned to go. “Don’t worry about me,” Tirumala Devi called after her. “I know how to get out of here without anybody’s help.” Then she turned her gaze to the window and watched the rain fall, the improbable, unyielding, interminable rain. The next morning they found her dead in her bed, holding a small bottle in her hand that had contained a poison so deadly that there was no known antidote for it. And so the prophecy of Krishnadevaraya came true. The poisoner ends up drinking the poison.
Aliya Rama Raya accompanied Tirumalamba Devi on her rain-sodden journey back to Srirangapatna with the ashes of her mother and grandmother, along with a heavily armed guard of honor. King Veera met them with an equally well-armed retinue of his own and escorted them to the confluence of the Kaveri. The rain stopped suddenly, the clouds clearing to reveal a bright sky, as if a curtain had been parted, as if the heavens were paying their last respects to the two queens. After the ashes had been scattered there were prayers and then a feast of remembrance and the next day the journey back to Bisnaga.
“I’m sorry to tell you that your grandpa Veera is definitely planning to break away from our alliance,” Aliya told Tirumalamba once they were safely away from Srirangapatna. “Now that I’ve seen him face-to-face and looked into his traitorous eyes there’s no doubt in my mind about it.”
The Jayaparajaya tells us about the end of King Veerappodeya’s story, in a manner one can only describe as terse. It’s possible that Pampa Kampana kept it short so as not to distress his granddaughter unduly, or, alternatively, that Tirumalamba Devi abbreviated the account as she wrote it down. All we are told is this: that King Veera did indeed announce that his agreement with Bisnaga was at an end, and obliged the battalions of troops from Bisnaga stationed at Srirangapatna to withdraw. No sooner had this happened than the powerful neighboring ruler of Mysore, seeing that Srirangapatna no longer had the added strength of the Bisnaga army at its disposal, attacked in strength, overthrew King Veera, and absorbed Srirangapatna into the kingdom of Mysore. The text does not dwell on Veera’s fate. If his head was severed, if it was stuffed with straw and displayed in Mysore as a trophy, we cannot say.
As a result of this tragic mishap, the southern frontier of the Bisnaga Empire was left vulnerable and exposed, and its enemies grew in confidence and strength.
Sad to relate, King Achyuta fell into bad habits as time went by. Pampa Kampana in her monastic room at Mandana listened to the whispers of the city and heard everything: how in the beginning Achyuta had been prevented by Madhava Acharya—whose opinions on widow-burning had been greatly reshaped by his growing friendship with Pampa Kampana—from throwing all of Krishnadevaraya’s widows on his funeral pyre, and had therefore flung them all out of the palace to fend for themselves on the streets, even the high-ranking—and now relatively old—surrogates of the gopis of Krishna the god. After that he had acquired five hundred wives of his own, and spent most of his waking hours being pleasured by them. (They lived in cell-like rooms in cloisters adjacent to the palace, and when not involved in decadent acts with the king led lives more like celibate nuns.) He had also begun to insist that the court’s senior noblemen should kiss his feet on a daily basis, which was not, let us say, an endearing requirement. Those who were willing to kiss the king’s feet with genuine enthusiasm were given gifts of yak-tail fans, and it would not be exaggerating matters to say that those nobles who received such fans were also the ones who hated the king most deeply. He slept in a bed made of solid gold, refused to wear any garment more than once, and so great were the expenses of his lavish court that his ministers were obliged to increase taxes on the citizenry, after which the people hated him too. There were banquets at court almost every night, at which seventeen courses were eaten and much wine drunk, and while the king and his cronies were feasting on venison, partridges, and doves, the common people were reduced to dining on cats, lizards, and rats, all of which were sold in the city’s markets, alive and kicking, so that people knew that they were at least getting fresh meat.
Pampa Kampana, too, was changing. When Tirumalamba Devi came to write down her verses, they were often little more than lamentations about her cursed gift of longevity, her obligation to go on living until the bitter end. “I can see it,” she told Tirumalamba, “as if it had already happened. I can see the damage to the gopuram of the Vitthala Temple, and the smashing of the Pampa statue and the Hanuman statue as well, and the burning of the Lotus Palace. But I must wait until time catches up with me before I set it down.”
“Maybe it won’t happen,” Tirumalamba said, distressed by these images of destruction. “Maybe it was just a bad dream.”
Pampa Kampana, kindly, did not argue. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe so.”
She was developing many of the attributes of great old age. The woman Tirumalamba saw before her, disfigured as her face was by the blinding, still looked like someone in, perhaps, her late thirties, but Pampa Kampana had given up caring what she looked like. The illusion of youth was of no import to her anymore. She no longer needed to bother about seeing her idiotically young reflection, so she was free to inhabit the old crone she felt herself to be. Her skin felt dry, so she scratched it. Her joints felt creaky, so she complained about them creaking. Her back hurt, and when she stood she needed a walking stick and was unable to straighten her body. “At my age things should be a whole lot worse,” she told Tirumalamba. “But to hell with that. Things are bad enough.”
She had also developed a sort of sleeping sickness. At times Tirumalamba would find her prone and unconscious and when the sickness first began Tirumalamba would panic and think the old lady had died, but then Pampa Kampana’s heavy breathing would reassure her. Sometimes Pampa Kampana slept for several days at a time, and gradually these periods lengthened into weeks, or even months, and she would wake up with the appetite of a hungry elephant. The sleep did not seem natural to Tirumalamba, it felt as if it came from the divine sphere, perhaps as a gift to make it easier for Pampa Kampana to pass the time that needed to be passed before her final release from the goddess’s spell.
It was during these long sleeps that Pampa Kampana dreamed the future. So they were not entirely restful.
By this time Tirumalamba herself was no longer young, and she, too, had various physical complaints, her bad teeth, her digestive tract, but she kept these to herself and allowed the old woman to fulminate. “Maybe if you just go on telling the story,” she suggested gently, “that will make you feel a little better.”
“I did have one dream,” Pampa Kampana said. “I was visited by two yalis, not made of wood or stone but real, living creatures.” She had dreamed of yalis before, and had been happy to be with those supernatural beings, half-lion and half-horse, and with elephant tusks, whom people thought of as protectors of gateways. “They came to reassure me. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘When the time comes we will appear at your side to take you across the threshold to the Eternal Realm.’ That was comforting.” The memory put an end to her bad mood. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go on.”
Then, to Tirumalamba’s astonishment, she quoted Siddhartha Gautama, which is why the Buddha’s Five Remembrances, or a version of them, can be found in the Jayaparajaya, which is otherwise not a Buddhist text.
I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape it.
I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape it.
I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape it.
There is no way to escape being separated from everyone I love, and all that is dear to me.
My actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.
Adil Shah of Bijapur had sworn an oath never to drink a drop of wine until he had recaptured Raichur. This was hard for him, as he was a man who loved good wine, and he was often tempted to break his oath, but did not. After the unpleasant gathering of the Five Sultans at Bisnaga, at which Achyuta and the other kings all drank copiously, Adil Shah, who had remained sober throughout that very long and awkward evening, decided it was time to act. He had never forgotten the humiliating message he had received from Krishnadevaraya, Kiss my feet, and resolved that Krishnadevaraya’s degraded successor Achyuta, who was so enamored of foot-kissing that he obliged even his most senior courtiers to abase themselves, needed to be taught the lesson of good manners that Krishnadevaraya had never learned.
He gathered his forces and attacked Raichur. The Bijapur army’s surprise arrival found the forces of Bisnaga unprepared for battle, and they were swiftly overrun. In the next few weeks the whole of the Raichur doáb region came under the control of Bijapur once again, and Adil Shah, standing beside the famous freshwater spring in the Raichur citadel, declared, “Today this spring will yield not water, but wine.”
Things were going badly wrong for Achyuta Deva Raya. Not only had he lost Raichur, which Krishnadevaraya had thought of as the jewel in his crown, but the king of Mysore, having overwhelmed King Veera in the south, had further expansionist plans, and there was a new Portuguese viceroy in Goa, Dom Constantine de Braganza, who was not content with being a horse-trader, was eyeing the whole of the west coast, and developing imperialist ambitions of his own.
Achyuta did nothing, as if he was afraid to act. He was unpopular at court, in the streets, and among the armed forces, and his inaction proved to be fatal. Aliya Rama Raya seized the moment, dethroned him, and packed him off to Chandragiri to rot. He died there a short time later. And so the last ruler of Bisnaga came to the throne.