Victory City(52)

—Yes, yes, he thought. I’ll prove how tolerant I’ve become! I’ll marry a Jain! Bhima Devi, she’s nice, I’ll marry her, and I’ll pray at her favorite temples too. And I’ll take a Muslim second wife. I’ll have to find one of those, but I’m sure I can come up with one. I’ve heard there’s a Muslim goldsmith in Mudgal whose daughter is very beautiful. I’ll look into it. And what else, my brilliant brain, what else?

—Water, Pampa Kampana whispered.

—Water?

—The city has grown so large, there isn’t enough water for everyone to drink. Build a dam! Build it below the confluence of the Tunga and the Bhadra, where they become the ample and fast-running Pampa, and then build a great aqueduct to bring the fresh river water into the city, and place pumps in all the squares so that the thirsty may drink and the dirty may bathe and wash their clothes, and then people will love you. Water creates love more easily than victory.

—Yes, yes! A dam! An aqueduct! Pumps! Water is love. I will be the God-King of Loving Dams. I’ll make love flow everywhere in the city and I will become the People’s Darling, their Best-Beloved. Anything else?

—You must be a patron of the arts! Bring poets to the court, Kumara Vyasa for the Kannada language, Gunda Dimdima for Sanskrit, and the king of poets, Srinatha, for the Telugu tongue! And you know what? I bet you can write excellent poetry yourself!

—Yes, yes, poetry, poets. And romances! I can write those, and I will!

—Bring mathematicians also. Our people love mathematics! And bring shipbuilders, not just for warships, but for trading vessels, and royal barges in which you can visit the three hundred ports in the empire! And make sure that plenty of these new people, painters, poets, calculators, designers, are women, who deserve it no less than men!

—Yes, yes! All this and more I will do. My thoughts are more brilliant than myself, but from now on I will be as magnificent as my thoughts.

—Oh, and one more thing. Get rid of those mummified old priests surrounding you and hissing their old-fashioned notions in your ear, and bring back the old royal council. You can put everyone in there, the poets, the mathematicians, the architects of the aqueduct and the dam, the diplomats, and their brilliance will reflect extra radiance upon your own.

—Good idea! I’m glad that came to me all of a sudden. I’ll do that right away.

And now, Pampa Kampana thought, my murderer of a grandson is a puppet on my strings.



* * *



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In those days the people of Bisnaga had a complicated relationship with memories. Perhaps they distrusted them unconsciously, without even knowing or believing that at the beginning of time Pampa Kampana had planted fictional histories in their ancestors, and created the whole city out of her fertile imagination. At any rate they were people who had little regard for yesterdays. They chose—like the denizens of Aranyani’s forest!—to live wholly in the present, without much interest in what came before, and if they needed to think about any day other than today, then that day was tomorrow. This made Bisnaga a dynamic place, capable of immense forward-looking energy, but also a place that suffered from the problem of all amnesiacs, which was that to turn away from history was to make possible a cyclical repetition of its crimes.

Ninety years had passed since Hukka and Bukka Sangama had scattered the magic seeds, and by now most people thought of that story as a fairy tale, and were sure that “Pampa Kampana” was the name of a good fairy, not a real person, but somebody in a story. Even Deva Raya, her grandson, thought so. He knew the story of how his father Bhagwat Sangama, the rejected child of the sorceress, became Hukka Raya II and vowed revenge on Pampa, his unloving mother, Deva Raya’s grandmother, and on Pampa Kampana’s favorites, her daughters, as well. Even if half of it was true, Deva Raya thought, that story was over. If his grandmother was alive, she would be around one hundred and ten years old, which was absurd, of course. And all that nonsense about her powers of sorcery, that was absurd too. She had probably been a mean old woman, but no sorceress, and now she was gone, and that old world could disappear along with her. All he wanted was to listen to the voice of his own genius in his head, pointing the way toward the future. Now it was time for aqueducts, mathematicians, ships, ambassadors, and poetry. Yes, yes!

As for Vidyasagar: Pampa Kampana’s enemy was entering his last days, having failed in his scheme to live as long as her and thwart her plans. She didn’t need to fear him anymore.

There were battles in the streets after Deva Raya made his sudden, radical change of direction. The thugs of the discarded power structure didn’t give up easily. From the cots of their antiquity the dismissed old guard guided their stormtroopers and tried to establish control over the streets. They were not used to being thwarted. They were accustomed to having their way, to being feared and therefore obeyed. But they faced unexpected opposition. The years of whispering bore unexpected fruit. From everywhere in Bisnaga, from backstreets and grand thoroughfares, from the quiet retreats of the elderly and the loud gathering places of the young, people poured out of doorways and resisted. The flag of the Remonstrance, a hand with the index finger raised, as if to remonstrate, was seen on every avenue, and that symbol was daubed on many walls. The transformation wrought by Pampa Kampana stood revealed in all its marvelous force. This was the birth of the New Remonstrance, as it came to be known: no longer anti-art, against women, or hostile toward sexual diversity, but embracing poetry, liberty, women, and joy, and retaining from the original manifesto only the First Remonstrance against the involvement of the religious world with that of government, the Second Remonstrance opposing mass religious gatherings, and the Fourth, which favored peace over war. The goon squads of the ancien régime retreated in disarray. That regime had seemed all-powerful, invincible, but in the end its whole apparatus crumbled in days and blew away like dust, revealing that it had rotted from the inside, so that when it was pushed, it was too weak to go on standing.