Victory City(48)
“Hm,” Yotshna gave an unconvinced snort. “I see the queen here can still twist you around her finger. Maybe one day you’ll start listening to me.”
She walked off and left Haleya Kote and Pampa Kampana alone. What about Number Two’s brothers, Pampa now wanted to know, unimaginative Erapalli and mean-spirited Gundappa. What were they up to? Making trouble or keeping the peace? “As for the brothers,” Haleya Kote told her, “Number Two has sent them off to conquer Rachakonda, where people still follow the old gungajumna culture. That’s the word they use in that locality to describe the blending of Hindu and Muslim culture. In Rachakonda the two cultures flow into each other just like the rivers Ganga and Yamuna, and become one.”
“Just like things used to be in Bisnaga,” Pampa Kampana said.
“Number Two doesn’t approve of it, and nor does the DAS,” Haleya Kote said, “so Erapalli and Gundappa have instructions to destroy the great fort at Rachakonda and kill enough people to cure the rest of these ideas. Then the two of them can rule the region together.”
“And the uncles in their castles,” Pampa Kampana asked her last question. “What news of those three old bandits?”
“They never amounted to much,” Haleya Kote said. “Their stories hardly got started before they stopped. Now they are old and sick and far from Bisnaga and you don’t have to worry about them. They won’t last much longer.”
When Haleya Kote had finished his report, Pampa Kampana nodded slowly. “Your news about the Remonstrance is encouraging,” she said. “The seeds of change have been planted, but it will take time before the new plants grow. I must go to Bisnaga myself soon. I have hidden away like a rat in a hole and done nothing for too long. It’s time I started whispering to people again. If many of the young are seduced by Number Two’s nonsense, then it will be hard work. The wheel always turns in the end, but if that’s true about the young then it could take a long time. Still, we have to make a start.”
“I heard that,” Yotshna cried, rushing out of the residence to where her mother and Haleya Kote were standing in the glade. “Don’t you dare tell me you’ll both go to Bisnaga, literally jumping into the jaws of death, and leave me here in the forest alone?”
“You won’t be alone,” Pampa Kampana said. “Yuktasri is here.”
“No she isn’t,” Yotshna Sangama wailed. “She’s a savage in the jungle now, along with the other savages, spouting nonsense about pink monkeys. I’m the only one of all of us that hasn’t lost her mind, and now you’ll abandon me to go mad by myself alone in this dreadful place.”
“I have to be there,” Pampa Kampana said. “If one wants to change the direction of history, one can’t do it from a distance.”
“What if they catch you,” Yotshna exclaimed. “You’ll make the wrong kind of history then, won’t you.”
“They won’t catch me,” said Pampa Kampana. “And time has gone by, and that cools all tempers. Also, people forget. History is the consequence not only of people’s actions, but also of their forgetfulness.”
“You’re hard to forget,” her daughter told her. “And this is insanity.”
“Don’t worry,” Pampa Kampana tried to reassure her. “We’ll steal horses, so we won’t be away too long.”
* * *
—
As she passed beyond the outer edge of the enchanted forest, accompanied by Yotshna and Haleya Kote, Pampa Kampana realized for the first time that Aranyani’s magic had blurred the exiles’ perception of the passing of the years, and, in that world without mirrors, had blinded them all to the changes in their own bodies—or, more accurately, it had preserved them unchanged, keeping them as they had been when they first entered. Now she understood why Haleya Kote, on his return from Bisnaga, had looked so much older. When he left the forest his true age had revealed itself in his features, so he now seemed almost impossibly antique, no doubt granted such a long life by the magic of the wood. She began to work out her own age, to which she had never given any thought—in some way that she did not understand the forest had banished all such considerations from her consciousness—and she was alarmed to find, as she made her calculations, that she must be at least eighty-six years old; but because of the goddess Pampa’s gift of youth—not eternal youth, but long-lasting enough!—she still possessed the youth, vigor, and appearance of a young woman of perhaps twenty-five.
She was interrupted in her calculations by Yotshna’s horrified voice. “What have you done?” she shrieked. “What has happened to me?”
“I have done nothing,” Pampa Kampana replied. “The years have passed, but in the forest we have been living in a dream.”
“But you,” Yotshna shouted, “you look like a girl. You look like you could be my daughter. Who are you, anyway? I don’t even know who you are.”
“I’ve told you everything,” Pampa Kampana said, with a deep unhappiness in her voice. “This is my curse.”
“No,” cried Yotshna. “It’s mine. You are my curse. Look at Haleya Kote. He looks like he won’t live another hour. So you found a way of taking him from me, after all.”