Victory City(3)

After that, at least in Vidyasagar’s version of events, they lived together easily enough, sleeping on opposite corners of the floor of the cave, and they got along fine, in part because the monk had sworn a solemn vow of abstinence from the things of the flesh, so that even when Pampa Kampana blossomed into the grandeur of her beauty he never laid a finger on her although the cave wasn’t very big and they were alone in the dark. For the rest of his life that was what he said to anyone who asked—and there were people who asked, because the world is a cynical and suspicious place and, being full of liars, thinks of everything as a lie. Which is what Vidyasagar’s story was.

Pampa Kampana, when asked, did not reply. From an early age she acquired the ability of shutting away from her consciousness many of the evils that life handed out. She had not yet understood or harnessed the power of the goddess within her, so she had not been able to protect herself when the supposedly abstinent scholar crossed the invisible line between them and did what he did. He did not do it often, because scholarship usually left him too tired to do much about his lusts, but he did it often enough, and every time he did it she erased his deed from her memory by an act of will. She also erased her mother, whose self-sacrifice had sacrificed her daughter upon the altar of the ascetic’s desires, and for a long time she tried to tell herself that what happened in the cave was an illusion, and that she had never had a mother at all.

In this way she was able to accept her fate in silence; but an angry power began to grow in her, a force from which the future would be born. In time. All in good time.

She did not say a single word for the next nine years, which meant that Vidyasagar, who knew many things, didn’t even know her name. He decided to call her Gangadevi, and she accepted the name without complaint, and helped him gather berries and roots to eat, to sweep out their poor residence, and to haul water from the well. Her silence suited him perfectly, because on most days he was lost in meditation, considering the meanings of the sacred texts which he had learned by heart, and seeking answers to two great questions: whether wisdom existed or there was only folly, and the related question of whether there was such a thing as vidya, true knowledge, or only many different kinds of ignorance, and true knowledge, after which he was named, was possessed only by the gods. In addition, he thought about peace, and asked himself how to ensure the triumph of nonviolence in a violent age.

This was how men were, Pampa Kampana thought. A man philosophized about peace but in his treatment of the helpless girl sleeping in his cave his deeds were not in alignment with his philosophy.

Although the girl was silent as she grew into a young woman, she wrote copiously in a strong flowing hand, which astonished the sage, who had expected her to be illiterate. After she began to speak she admitted that she didn’t know she could write either, and put the miracle of her literacy down to the benevolent intervention of the goddess. She wrote almost every day, and allowed Vidyasagar to read her scribblings, so that during those nine years the awestruck sage became the first witness of the flowering of her poetic genius. This was the period in which she composed what became the Prelude to her Victory and Defeat. The subject of the main part of the poem would be the history of Bisnaga from its creation to its destruction, but those things still lay in the future. The Prelude dealt with antiquity, telling the story of the monkey kingdom of Kishkindha, which had flourished in that region long ago in the Time of Fable, and it contained a vivid account of the life and deeds of Lord Hanuman the monkey king, who could grow as big as a mountain and leap across the sea. It is generally agreed by scholars and ordinary readers alike that the quality of Pampa Kampana’s verse rivals, and perhaps even improves upon, the language of the Ramayana itself.

After the nine years were over, the two Sangama brothers came to call: the tall, gray-haired, good-looking one who stood very still and looked deep into your eyes as if he could see your thoughts, and his much younger sibling, the small rotund one who buzzed around him, and everyone else, like a bee. They were cowherds from the hill town of Gooty who had gone to war, war being one of the growth industries of the time; they had joined up with a local princeling’s army, and because they were amateurs in the arts of killing they had been captured by the Delhi sultan’s forces and sent into the north, where to save their skins they pretended to be converted to the religion of their captors and then escaped soon afterward, shedding their adopted faith like an unwanted shawl, getting away before they could be circumcised according to the requirements of the religion in which they didn’t really believe. They were local boys, they now explained, and they had heard of the wisdom of the sage Vidyasagar and, to be honest, they had also heard of the beauty of the mute young woman who lived with him, and so here they were in search of some good advice.

They did not come empty-handed. They brought baskets of fresh fruits and a sack of nuts and an urn filled with milk from their favorite cow, and also a sack of seeds, which turned out to be the thing that changed their lives. Their names, they said, were Hukka and Bukka Sangama—Hukka the handsome oldster and Bukka the young bee—and after their escape from the north they were looking for a new direction in life. The care of cows had ceased to be enough for them after their military escapade, they said, their horizons were wider now and their ambitions were greater, so they would appreciate any guidance, any ripples flowing from the amplitude of the Ocean of Knowledge, any whispers from the deeps of wisdom that the sage might be willing to offer, anything at all that might show them the way. “We know of you as the great apostle of peace,” Hukka Sangama said. “We’re not so keen on soldiering ourselves, after our recent experiences. Show us the fruits that nonviolence can grow.”