Victory City(4)

To everyone’s surprise it was not the monk but his eighteen-year-old companion who replied, in an ordinary, conversational voice, strong and low, a voice that gave no hint that it hadn’t been used for nine years. It was a voice by which both brothers were instantly seduced. “Suppose you had a sackful of seeds,” she said. “Then suppose you could plant them and grow a city, and grow its inhabitants too, as if people were plants, budding and flowering in the spring, only to wither in the autumn. Suppose now that these seeds could grow generations, and bring forth a history, a new reality, an empire. Suppose they could make you kings, and your children too, and your children’s children.”

“Sounds good,” said young Bukka, the more outspoken of the brothers, “but where are we supposed to find seeds like that? We are only cowherds, but we know better than to believe in fairy tales.”

“Your name, Sangama, is a sign,” she said. “A sangam is a confluence, such as the creation of the river Pampa by the joining of the Tunga and Bhadra rivers, which were created by the sweat pouring down the two sides of the head of Lord Vishnu, and so it also means the flowing together of different parts to make a new kind of whole. This is your destiny. Go to the place of the women’s sacrifice, the sacred place where my mother died, which is also the place where in ancient times Lord Ram and his brother Lakshman joined forces with the mighty Lord Hanuman of Kishkindha and went forth to battle many-headed Ravana of Lanka, who had abducted the lady Sita. You two are brothers just as Ram and Lakshman were. Build your city there.”

Now the sage spoke up. “It’s not such a bad start, being cowherds,” he said. “The sultanate of Golconda was started by shepherds, you know—in fact its name means ‘the shepherds’ hill’—but those shepherds lucked out because they discovered that the place was rich in diamonds, and now they are diamond princes, owners of the Twenty-Three Mines, discoverers of most of the world’s pink diamonds, and possessors of the Great Table Diamond, which they keep in the deepest dungeon of their mountaintop fortress, the most impregnable castle in the land, even harder to take than Mehrangarh, up in Jodhpur, or Udayagiri, right down the road.”

“And your seeds are better than diamonds,” the young woman said, handing back the sack that the brothers had brought with them.

“What, these seeds?” Bukka asked, very surprised. “But these are just an ordinary assortment we brought along as a gift for your vegetable patch—they are for okra, beans, and snake gourds, all mixed up together.”

The prophetess shook her head. “Not anymore,” she said. “Now these are the seeds of the future. Your city will grow from them.”

The two brothers realized at that moment that they were both truly, deeply, and forever in love with this strange beauty who was clearly a great sorceress, or at the very least a person touched by a god and granted exceptional powers. “They say Vidyasagar gave you the name of Gangadevi,” Hukka said. “But what is your real name? I would very much like to know that, so that I can remember you in the manner your parents intended.”

“Go and make your city,” she said. “Come back and ask me my name again when it has sprouted up out of rocks and dust. Maybe I’ll tell you then.”





2





After they had come to the designated place and scattered the seeds, their hearts filled with great perplexity and just a little hope, the two Sangama brothers climbed to the top of a hill of large boulders and thornbushes that tore at their peasant clothes, and sat down in the late afternoon to wait and watch. After no more than an hour, they saw the air begin to shimmer as it does during the hottest hours of the hottest days, and then the miracle city started growing before their astonished eyes, the stone edifices of the central zone pushing up from the rocky ground, and the majesty of the royal palace, and the first great temple too. (This was forever afterward known as the Underground Temple, because it had emerged from a place beneath the earth’s surface, and also as the Monkey Temple, because from the moment of its rising it swarmed with long-tailed gray temple monkeys of the breed known as Hanuman langurs, chattering among themselves and ringing the temple’s many bells, and because of the gigantic sculpture of Lord Hanuman himself that rose up with it, to stand by its gates.) All these and more arose in old-fashioned splendor and stared down toward the palace and the Royal Enclosure spreading out at the far end of the long market street. The mud, wood and cowshit hovels of the common people also made their humble way into the air at the city’s periphery.



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(A note on monkeys. It may be useful to observe here that monkeys will play a significant role in Pampa Kampana’s narrative. In these early verses the benevolent shadow of mighty Lord Hanuman falls across her pages, and his power and courage become characteristics of Bisnaga, the real-life successor to his mythical Kishkindha. Later, however, there will be other, malevolent monkeys to confront. There is no need to anticipate those events any further. We merely point out the dualist, binary nature of the monkey motif in the work.)



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In those first moments the city was not yet fully alive. Spreading out from the shadow of the barren bouldered hills, it looked like a shining cosmopolis whose inhabitants had all abandoned it. The villas of the rich stood unoccupied, villas with stone foundations upon which stood graceful, pillared structures of brick and wood; the canopied market stalls were empty, awaiting the arrival of florists, butchers, tailors, wine merchants, and dentists; in the red-light district there were brothels, but, as yet, no whores. The river rushed along and the banks where washerwomen and washermen would do their work seemed to wait expectantly for some action, some movement that would give meaning to the place. In the Royal Enclosure the great Elephant House with its eleven arches anticipated the coming of the tuskers and their dung.