Victory City(2)

Pampa’s own father had died young, long before the nameless battle, so her mother was not one of the newly widowed. Arjuna Kampana had died so long ago that Pampa had no memory of his face. All she knew about him was what Radha Kampana had told her, that he had been a kind man, the well-loved potter of the town of Kampili, and that he had encouraged his wife to learn the potter’s art as well, so after he died she took over his trade and proved to be more than his equal. Radha, in turn, had guided little Pampa’s hands at the potter’s wheel and the child was already a skilled thrower of pots and bowls and had learned an important lesson, which was that there was no such thing as men’s work. Pampa Kampana had believed that this would be her life, making beautiful things with her mother, side by side at the wheel. But that dream was over now. Her mother had let go of her hand and abandoned her to her fate.

For a long moment Pampa tried to convince herself that her mother was just being sociable and going along with the crowd, because she had always been a woman for whom the friendship of women was of paramount importance. She told herself that the undulating wall of fire was a curtain behind which the ladies had gathered to gossip, and soon they would all walk out of the flames, unharmed, maybe a little scorched, smelling a little of kitchen perfumes, perhaps, but that would pass soon enough. And then Pampa and her mother would go home.

Only when she saw the last slabs of roasted flesh fall away from Radha Kampana’s bones to reveal the naked skull did she understand that her childhood was over and from now on she must conduct herself as an adult and never commit her mother’s last mistake. She would laugh at death and turn her face toward life. She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld. She would refuse to die young and live, instead, to be impossibly, defiantly old. It was at this point that she received the celestial blessing that would change everything, because this was the moment when the goddess Pampa’s voice, as old as Time, started coming out of her nine-year-old mouth.

It was an enormous voice, like the thunder of a high waterfall booming in a valley of sweet echoes. It possessed a music she had never heard before, a melody to which she later gave the name of kindness. She was terrified, of course, but also reassured. This was not a possession by a demon. There was goodness in the voice, and majesty. Radha Kampana had once told her that two of the highest deities of the pantheon had spent the earliest days of their courtship near here, by the angry waters of the rushing river. Perhaps this was the queen of the gods herself, returning in a time of death to the place where her own love had been born. Like the river, Pampa Kampana had been named after the deity—“Pampa” was one of the goddess Parvati’s local names, and her lover Shiva, the mighty Lord of the Dance himself, had appeared to her here in his local, three-eyed incarnation—so it all began to make sense. With a feeling of serene detachment Pampa, the human being, began to listen to the words of Pampa, the goddess, coming out of her mouth. She had no more control over them than a member of the audience has over the monologue of the star, and her career as a prophet and miracle worker began.

Physically, she didn’t feel any different. There were no unpleasant side effects. She didn’t tremble, or feel faint, or experience a hot flush, or a cold sweat. She didn’t froth at the mouth or fall down in an epileptic fit, as she had been led to believe could happen, and had happened to other people, in such cases. If anything, there was a great calm surrounding her like a soft cloak, reassuring her that the world was still a good place and things would work out well.

“From blood and fire,” the goddess said, “life and power will be born. In this exact place a great city will rise, the wonder of the world, and its empire will last for more than two centuries. And you,” the goddess addressed Pampa Kampana directly, giving the young girl the unique experience of being personally spoken to by a supernatural stranger speaking through her own mouth, “you will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story, even though once you have finished telling it you will die immediately and nobody will remember you for four hundred and fifty years.” In this way Pampa Kampana learned that a deity’s bounty was always a two-edged sword.

She began to walk without knowing where she was going. If she had lived in our time she might have said that the landscape looked like the surface of the moon, the pockmarked plains, the valleys of dirt, the rock piles, the emptiness, the sense of a melancholy void where burgeoning life should have been. But she had no sense of the moon as a place. To her it was just a shining god in the sky. On and on she walked until she began to see miracles. She saw a cobra using its hood to shield a pregnant frog from the heat of the sun. She saw a rabbit turn and face a dog that was hunting it, and bite the dog on its nose and make it run away. These wonders made her feel that something marvelous was at hand. Soon after these visions, which might have been sent as signs by the gods, she arrived at the little mutt at Mandana.

A mutt could also be called a peetham but to avoid confusion let us simply say: it was a monk’s dwelling. Later, as the empire grew, the Mandana mutt became a grand place extending all the way to the banks of the rushing river, an enormous complex employing thousands of priests, servitors, tradesmen, craftsmen, janitors, elephant keepers, monkey handlers, stable hands, and workers in the mutt’s extensive paddy fields, and it was revered as the sacred place where emperors came for advice, but in this early time before the beginning began it was humble, little more than an ascetic’s cave and a vegetable patch, and the resident ascetic, still a young man at that time, a twenty-five-year-old scholar with long curly locks flowing down his back all the way to his waist, went by the name of Vidyasagar, which meant that there was a knowledge-ocean, a vidya-sagara, inside his large head. When he saw the girl approaching with hunger on her tongue and madness in her eyes he understood at once that she had witnessed terrible things and gave her water to drink and what little food he had.