Victory City(51)

And another thing: the city had grown. Now there was a multitude to address, and this time she would have to persuade many of them that the cultured, inclusive, sophisticated narrative of Bisnaga that she was offering them was a better one than the narrow, exclusionary, and, to her way of thinking, barbarian official narrative of the moment. It was by no means certain that the people would choose sophistication over barbarianism. The party line regarding members of other faiths—we are good, they are bad—had a certain infectious clarity. So did the idea that dissent was unpatriotic. Offered the choice between thinking for themselves and blindly following their leaders, many people would choose blindness over clear-sightedness, especially when the empire was prospering and there was food on the table and money in their pockets. Not everybody wanted to think, preferring to eat and spend. Not everybody wanted to love their neighbor. Some people preferred hatred. There would be resistance.

Haleya Kote came to see her in the middle of the night when she had emerged for a few hours from her alcove of secret inwardness. Yotshna had told him he looked terrible, and now he looked even worse than when she said that. “I haven’t got long to go,” he told Pampa Kampana, “and I have a promise to keep.”

“Go,” she said. From a fold of her garment she took out a little pouch of gold coins. “Go and find this new foreigner, this Sir Paes, and buy the fastest horse he has to sell. Go and embrace her and tell her I send her my love.”

“She loves you too,” said Haleya Kote. “Won’t you come also?”

“You know I can’t do that,” Pampa Kampana said. “I have to sit in a hole behind an almirah and try to create a mass movement. Once I was a queen. Now I’m a revolutionary. Or is that too grand a word? Let’s say, I’m a witch behind a wardrobe.”

“Then I’ll say goodbye,” Haleya Kote said, “and I’ll go on my last ride.”



* * *



—

(In the Jayaparajaya Pampa Kampana tells an extraordinary tale of that ride. We must ask ourselves how she could know what happened, since she wasn’t there. It would be forgivable to conclude that the entire episode is an invention. The poet shrugs off such suspicions. The birds told her, she writes. Years later, she tells us, when she emerged from her seclusion, the crows and parrots spoke to her in the Master Language.)



* * *



—

“It was hard for him to go back,” said the crow. “First he had to bribe the Portuguese trader to bring the horse through the city gate to a secret meeting point. Then on the way to the forest he began to feel unwell.”

“As he neared the forest he developed a fever and entered a state of delirium,” said the parrot, “and he was shouting nonsense as he rode.”

The crow took up the story. “By the time he reached the forest his mind had gone completely, and he no longer knew who he was. All he knew was that he had to get into the forest to see her.”

“But, as you know, for men who don’t know who they are, or have forgotten, the forest is a dangerous place,” the parrot said.

“He ran into the forest shouting her name,” the crow continued. “But then he screamed as the forest’s magic took hold of him, and he fell to the ground, and didn’t get up.”

“She came running,” said the parrot, “but she was too late.”

“When she reached the fallen figure, it was no longer Haleya Kote, her beloved,” the crow declared, with great solemnity.

“It was a dying woman who looked a hundred years old,” the parrot sadly said.

“And the woman was wearing the old soldier’s clothes,” added the crow.





12





When the king’s adviser Sayana finally died Pampa Kampana decided it was time to act. There was no sign of Vidyasagar anywhere by then. If he was indeed still alive he was probably lying on a cot somewhere like an ancient baby, helpless, clinging to life out of sheer spite, but unable to do any living. His time was over. The ruling officers of the DAS were similarly toothless and wizened. It was as if cadavers were in charge of things, the dead ruling the living, and the living were tired of it.

From her alcove behind the almirah she began to whisper into the king’s ears. In the depths of his palace Deva Raya clutched at his head, not knowing where these extraordinary new thoughts were coming from all at once—not understanding how it was possible that he was having such inspirations, never having been the inspirational type before—and finally beginning to give himself the credit for arriving at a condition of true genius. The voice in his head told him so. It flattered him by saying that it, the voice, was the manifestation of that genius. He had to listen to, and be guided by, what it—what he himself!—was telling him to do.

The voice in his head told him to forget war and bigotry.

—You are Deva, godly, yes you are, but why be simply a god of Death? Aren’t you sick of coming home from battle spattered with blood and gore? Don’t you want to be a god of Life instead? Instead of armies, you could send diplomats, and make peace.

—Yes, yes, he thought, I’ll do exactly as I’m now suggesting to myself, I’ll send diplomats and make peace with them all, why not? Even with Zafarabad as well.

—And bigotry, the whisper reminded him. Forget bigotry, too.