Victory City(21)

She understood that it was her destiny to lose everyone she cared for and to be left standing at the end surrounded by their burning corpses just as her nine-year-old self had stood alone watching her mother and the women burn. She would relive, in slow motion, over eons, the catastrophe of the lethal pyre of her childhood. Everyone would die just as before, but this second immolation would take almost two hundred and fifty years instead of a couple of hours.





6





Domingo Nunes, unable to disbelieve Pampa Kampana’s prophecy, spent that night and the whole of the next twenty-four hours getting drunk at the Cashew in the company of Bukka Sangama and Haleya Kote and crying out against Azrael the exterminating angel and Pampa’s prediction of his imminent arrival, so that when his heart did burst, just as Pampa had predicted it would, the news flew around Bisnaga that the legendary foreigner who had named the city was dead, and also that Pampa Kampana had revealed that she possessed the power of foretelling when people would move on from this life into the next—in short, that she could not only whisper them alive but also whisper them dead. After that day she was more feared than loved, and her refusal to grow older only intensified the terror she began to inspire. Hukka Raya I, generous to his deceased adversary in love, summoned a Catholic bishop from Goa and kept Domingo Nunes’s body on ice until the prelate arrived accompanied by a choir of twelve beautiful Goan youths whom he had personally trained, after which Nunes received a fine Roman send-off with all the trimmings. It was the first Christian funeral in Bisnaga, alien hymns were sung, the names of that exotic trinity of deities which bizarrely included a ghost were spoken, a plot of land outside the city wall was allocated for the burial of heathen foreigners, and that was that. Pampa Kampana stood beside her husband the king to bid her lover farewell, and it escaped nobody’s attention that Hukka Raya I wore every day of his fifty years of life upon his lined and weathered face, and in fact struck most people as looking much older than that, the cares of monarchy and the exigencies of war having aged him beyond his years; but Pampa Kampana had scarcely aged at all. Her youth and beauty were as terrifying as her prophecy of Domingo Nunes’s demise. The people of Bisnaga, who had loved her for her role in bringing the city into being, began to keep their distance from her after Domingo’s funeral, and when she journeyed through the streets they backed away from her royal carriage, and averted their fearful eyes.

Her feeling of being cursed clouded her naturally sunny nature, and when she and Hukka were together the atmosphere in the room was filled with the perfumes of their melancholy. Each one misunderstood the other. Hukka thought his wife’s sadness showed that she was in mourning for her dead lover, while Pampa Kampana ascribed the austere shadow that had fallen over Hukka to his newfound religious zeal, whereas in reality the king’s thoughts were full of schemes which he hoped would win him back his wife’s most tender affections, while she, sometimes, was wishing she could die.

For an hour each day they sat in the Hall of Public Audience, enthroned side by side, or rather lounging on a carpeted dais amid an amplitude of embroidered cushions, entertained by musicians playing the music of the south on the ten instruments of the Carnatic tradition, and waited upon by butlers carrying trays of sweetmeats and pitchers filled with fresh pomegranate juice, while the citizens of Bisnaga came before them with their various pleas, to be granted tax relief on account of the failure of the rains, or to be given permission to marry a daughter to a boy of a different caste, “because what to do, Your Majesties, it is love.” During these sessions Hukka did his best to suppress his growing puritanism and generously to grant as many requests as he could, hoping that his display of softheartedness would soften the heart of the queen.

In between responding to his people’s entreaties he tried to plead his own cause with Pampa Kampana. “I have been, I think, a good king,” he murmured to her. “I am widely praised for the systems of administration I have created.” But the creation of a civil service was unromantic, he quickly realized that, and to avoid boring Pampa Kampana he turned to matters of war. “In spite of my own desires, I have shown wisdom, and refrained from attacking the impregnable fortress of Golconda, leaving that heathen Diamond King to enjoy his kingdom a little longer, until our own army has been hardened by battle and can drag him down into the dust. However, I have gained many large tracts of land for the empire, passing the Malprabha river to the north and taking possession of Kaladgi, and reaching as far as both coasts, the Konkan as well as the Malabar. Also, after that upstart the sultan of Madurai killed Veera Ballala the Third, the last king of the old Hoysala Empire, I moved swiftly into that power vacuum and made the Hoysala territories our own…” Here he broke off, seeing that Pampa Kampana had fallen asleep.

In those days after the death of her lover Pampa Kampana began to feel oddly estranged from herself. She walked in the palace gardens through the tunnels of foliage the king had had constructed so that he could take his evening walks without being observed, and as she passed through those bougainvillea bowers she began to feel like a wanderer in a maze with a monster waiting at its heart: lost, that is to say, to herself. Who was she, she wondered. Maybe she was the monster at the heart of the maze, so that as she moved through that verdant labyrinth she was in reality getting ever closer to the beastliness of her true nature. Ever since the day of fire when her mother had chosen to become a stranger to her, after which a second mother, the goddess, had spoken to her through her own mouth, her identity had been transformed into a mystery she could not solve. Very often she felt like a means to an end—a deep channel through which the river of time could flow without flooding its banks, or an unbreakable container into which history was being shoveled. Her real self felt incomprehensible, impossible to approach, as if she too were burning in a fire. But it was becoming clear to her that the answer to the riddle was the point of the story of the world she had brought into being, and that she and Bisnaga would only learn that answer when they both simultaneously arrived at the end of their long tales.