Victory City(101)

Pampa Kampana fell silent and put her hands up to her face.

“The king?” Tirumalamba Devi shouted. “Pampa Kampana, what news?”

“Alas, the king is old,” Pampa Kampana wailed. “He is old and the battle is long. He has been up on that elephant a long time.”

“What has happened?” Tirumalamba Devi cried. “Tell me at once!”

“Alas for us all, my queen,” Pampa Kampana wept through sightless eyes. “The king…the king…needed to piss.”

“To piss? Pampa Kampana, you speak of piss?”

“Oh, the king came down from his elephant to relieve himself. He was on the ground. And oh, here come the elephants of Ahmadnagar! The beasts of Hussain Shah! I see an elephant’s trunk. It stretches out! It curls around your husband! It captures the king in the middle of his stream.”

“He is taken? Oh, day of terror, day of doom!”

“Oh, my queen, my queen, I dare not say what there is to say. I cannot say the words and then ask you, ‘write them down.’?”

“Tell me,” Tirumalamba Devi said, all of a sudden very quiet and still, with a blank look in her eye.

“They bring the king to Hussain Shah. Aliya does not ask for mercy, and receives none. Oh, my queen, my daughter. They have cut off his head.”

Tirumalamba Devi showed no trace of emotion. She gave the impression of being completely focused on her work as Pampa Kampana’s scribe.

“His head,” she repeated, and wrote the words down.

“Oh, they have stuffed it with straw and put it up on a long pole and they are riding back and forth so all the army of Bisnaga can see it. Oh, sad discouragement of our men, and our women soldiers too. See, they cease the fight, they retreat, they turn, they run. Oh, Venkatadri is fallen, and Tirumala Raya flees the battlefield. He is coming back to Bisnaga. The army is finished. The battle is lost.”

“The battle is lost,” Tirumalamba Devi repeated, as she wrote. “The battle is lost.”

Pampa Kampana emerged from her trancelike state of possession. “I’m so sorry, my daughter,” she said. “And now you must go. The army of the alliance cannot find the queen of Bisnaga here when they come.”

“Where could I go?” Tirumalamba Devi said in her insanely controlled voice. “How should I go anywhere? I am the daughter and granddaughter of the poison queens. I should leave the way my mother did, by drinking down my death.”

“You said once that you wanted to become a foreigner,” Pampa Kampana said. “That you envied their wandering lives as strangers, without attachments. Now you should do it. You should fly away and go, who knows where. Far from here, far from murder and fire. Put down the feather pen and pick up the other feather. What little remains to be written, I can write.”

“Fly away,” Tirumalamba Devi repeated.

“Will you do it?” Pampa Kampana demanded. “You must. They must not take you.”

“What about you?”

“Nobody cares about an old dying blind woman,” Pampa Kampana said. “My time here is finally over. Don’t worry about me. Pick up the cheel feather and you can go.”

“You can really do that?”

“This one last time,” Pampa Kampana said.

Tirumalamba Devi stood up with the cheel feather in her hand.

“Goodbye, then, my mother,” she said. “Do it. Send me away.”

Nobody saw the moment when the last queen of Bisnaga rose into the sky and departed forever, to places we cannot guess at. Even she who gave Tirumalamba the last gift of transformation could not see what she had wrought. She sat down again by the turret dome on the roof of the Elephant Stable, and wrote down just a little more.





22





Madhava Acharya had died some years earlier, and there was a new young Acharya in charge of the Mandana religious complex, but as an act of respect Madhava’s monastic cell had been left untouched, as if he had just walked out of the door for a minute and had not yet returned. It was a small and sparsely furnished room: a wooden cot, a wooden table, a wooden chair, and a shelf of books, Madhava Acharya’s personal copies of the Itihasa, the collection of the most important sacred texts, including the Mahabharata, the Ramayana, and the eighteen major and eighteen minor Puranas—copies which, according to the lore of the mutt, had once belonged to Vidyasagar himself. When Pampa Kampana as a young girl had first come to seek refuge in Vidyasagar’s cave he had taught her the traditions from these very same volumes in which, he said, all the knowledge necessary for a life in this world was contained. She had memorized many of the most important passages. It was to this room, to these volumes, that Pampa Kampana returned after the flight of the cheel who had been her friend, the queen. Hobbling with her stick through the rowdiness of the city, she made her way to the seminary with her satchel slung carefully over her shoulder. She knew she had entered the last days of her life and sought the comfort of the old books before the end, even though she could no longer read them. She longed to hold the Garuda Purana in her arms one last time, for she was thinking of Tirumalamba Devi’s transformation into a bird as well as musing about her own impending death—death, which was the last metamorphosis of life—and she wanted to recite that book’s account of the bird-god Garuda and his conversations with Vishnu, the most metamorphic of all the gods.