Victory City(47)
“You look as beautiful as ever,” he replied. “I told you I was too old for you.”
Haleya Kote’s safe return was the good news, but the news he brought was hard to absorb. Number Two had replaced the royal council with a governing body of saints, the Divine Ascendancy Senate or DAS, headed up by a certain Sayana, the brother of Vidyasagar, and the city was now under this new senate’s strict religious control, as it “demolished” the philosophies of Buddhists and Jains as well as Muslims to celebrate the New Orthodoxy created by the thinkers of the Mandana mutt under the supervision of Vidyasagar, and made the New Orthodoxy—which was nothing more than the rephrasing of Vidyasagar’s earlier New Religion—the basis of Bisnagan society. This change was a mirror image of developments in the sultanate of Zafarabad, where Sultan Zafar had died (thus proving that he was not, after all, the Ghost Sultan of legend) and had been succeeded by another Zafar, another Number Two, a zealot of his own faith, who had installed a religious “council of protectors” of his own. So in place of the old tolerances, in which members of all faiths participated fully in the life of both kingdoms, there was a separation, and a sad migration to and fro between the kingdoms of people who were no longer safe in their homes. “This is just stupid,” Pampa Kampana said. “Whoever decided that our gods or theirs would want this kind of suffering had a basic misunderstanding of the nature of god-ness.” According to Haleya Kote most of the citizens of Bisnaga were unhappy about the new hard line, but kept their mouths shut because of Number Two’s creation of a squad of enforcers who reacted unkindly to any show of dissent. “So there’s this quite small hard-core group in charge, and most older people fear and detest it, but unfortunately a proportion of the young go along with it all, saying that the new ‘discipline’ is necessary to safeguard their identity.”
“And the army?” Pampa Kampana asked. “How do the soldiers feel about the dismissal of members of the other religion, which must include many senior officers?”
“So far the army has remained quiet,” Haleya Kote said. “I think the soldiers fear being asked to move against their fellow citizens, which would be hard for them, and so they insist on their neutrality.”
Vidyasagar himself was very rarely seen. Age had him in its grip. “He refuses to die,” Haleya Kote told Pampa Kampana, “or that’s what people say, but his body is not of the same opinion as his spirit. They say he’s like a living man in a body that’s no longer alive. He speaks through a dead mouth and gestures with dead hands. But he’s still the most powerful person in Bisnaga. Number Two refuses to go against his wishes, however crackpot they may be. He wanted to change the names of all the streets, to get rid of the old names that everyone knows and replace them with the long titles of various obscure saints, so now nobody is sure where anything is anymore, and even long-time residents of the city are obliged to scratch their heads when they need to find an address. One of the new things the Remonstrance is fighting for these days is to get the old familiar names back. This is how crazy things are.”
The Remonstrance had grown. Haleya Kote found many members willing to house him, feed him, shield him from unwelcome attention. It was no longer a small, insignificant cult, could now count its secret supporters in the thousands, and had changed its demands, dropping its less palatable early proposals and adopting, instead, an inclusive, kindly, syncretist worldview, which had turned it into a popular, although banned, opposition party. Its platform had the unusual characteristic of looking forward by looking back—in other words, it wanted the future to be what the past had been, and so turned nostalgia into a new kind of radical idea, according to which the terms “back” and “forward” were synonyms rather than opposites, and described the same movement, in the same direction.
There were handwritten leaflets scattered all over town, and graffiti on walls, but neither remained where they were put for very long. The gangs of the regime swept up the leaflets and burned them, and the graffiti artists knew that their archenemies would be close at hand, so they had to work fast. A single word was as much as anyone could put up, and by the next morning it had been washed away. So it was hard to protest, and yet the effort continued. The Remonstrance contained many highly motivated persons. Haleya Kote heard more than once the story of the heroic protester who dared to stand alone at the heart of the bazaar distributing pamphlets. When the DAS squad arrived to arrest him they found that the sheets of paper he was distributing were blank. No text was written on them, there were no drawings or coded symbols, nothing at all. Somehow this blankness angered the DAS team even more than slogans or cartoons would have.
“What does this mean?” they demanded. “Why isn’t there any message written here?”
“There’s no need,” the protester replied. “Everything is clear.”
Yotshna Sangama came out of their residence carrying water. “Let the man rest and drink,” she scolded her mother angrily. “He just got back from this long and dangerous errand you sent him on, he has had a long and dangerous journey home, it has all put years on his face, and you insist on interrogating him at once, without even allowing the poor fellow to sit down.”
Haleya Kote drank deeply and thanked her. “Don’t worry, princess,” he said, placing an intimate hand on her forearm. “It’s better that I get everything off my chest. My memory isn’t what it was and I should say it all before I start forgetting.”