Victory City(53)
The king in his palace, bewildered by the speed of these events, heard the voice, which he thought of as the voice of his own genius, whispering in his ears.
—You have done it.
—Yes, yes, he assured himself. Yes, I have.
A new day dawned in Bisnaga. Pampa Kampana abandoned her alcove and emerged into the daylight. Her disguise, her agyatvaas, turned out to be her own appearance. In the second-golden-age years that followed the great Change, and the rise of members of the Remonstrance to prominent places in the government of the state, Pampa Kampana was unrecognizable, seen by one and all as a woman in her middle twenties, known only by a small inner circle to be the great founder of the city who was approaching one hundred and ten years of age. The astrologer Madhuri Devi, her closest confidante and now one of the high leaders of the Remonstrance, was appointed to the royal council, and recommended her friend to the king as a woman of unusual qualities, whom it would be well to employ in the service of the state.
“What’s your name?” Deva Raya asked, when Pampa Kampana was brought into his presence.
“Pampa Kampana,” Pampa Kampana replied.
Deva Raya roared with laughter. “That’s a good one,” he cried, wiping his eyes. “Yes, yes, young lady! You’re my grandmother, of course you are, and you’re lucky—I don’t bear my father’s grudges, and we need a matriarch of your wisdom on my team.”
“No, thank you, Your Majesty,” replied Pampa Kampana haughtily. “In the first place, if you don’t believe me now, when I am nobody, then you will not trust me then, when I am a counselor at your side. And in the second place, as my friend Madhuri Devi the astrologer has told me, this is not my time, which is still many decades in the future, when I will marry a different king. I could not marry you anyway, because that would be incest.”
Deva Raya laughed his booming laugh again. “Madhuri Devi,” he cried, “your friend is a great humorist. Maybe she would agree to join us as a court jester? I haven’t laughed like this in years.”
“If you’ll excuse me, Your Majesty,” Pampa Kampana said, trying not to sound affronted, “I will take my leave.”
* * *
—
Deva Raya’s reign was a time of great success for Pampa Kampana, and she might easily have taken much justifiable pride in it. But in her verses describing those days, she was harshly self-critical.
“I begin to feel,” she wrote, “as if I am more than one person, and not all those persons are admirable. I am the mother of the city—even though few people believe I am she—but I am away from my own daughters and during this separation I do not feel like their mother at all. The years pass and I have not so much as ascertained if they are alive or dead. What elderly women they will have become if they still live, green-eyed ladies unknown to me and who do not know me either, even though I still remain superficially who I was a lifetime ago. That person, the person I see reflected in water or glass, I do not know who she is either. My daughter Yotshna asked me that question—‘Who are you?’—and I cannot answer it.
“This eternal youth is a kind of damnation. This power to affect the thoughts of others and to alter history is another curse. The witchcraft, the sorcery of magic seeds and metamorphosis, whose limits even I do not know, is a third. I am a ghost in a body that refuses to age. Vidyasagar and I are not so different after all. We are both specters of ourselves, lost within ourselves. What I know is that I am a bad mother, and my sons and daughters would all agree with that statement. Sometimes I feel I am not a person of any kind, that I no longer exist, that there is no longer an ‘I’ that I can identify with myself. Maybe I should go by a new name, or many new names in the interminable future that stretches ahead. When I say what my name is I am not believed because I am, of course, impossible.
“I am a shadow, or a dream. One night when darkness falls I might simply become a part of that darkness and disappear. I feel, often, that that would be no bad thing.”
* * *
—
On the day Vidyasagar died and the city was plunged into mourning and prayer, Pampa Kampana in the grip of a different melancholy made her first visit to the drinking place called the Cashew and ordered a jug of the powerful feni liquor that Haleya Kote used to drink long ago in the company of a man who would be king. She had emptied half the jug when a man approached her, a foreign-seeming fellow with green eyes and red hair.
“A beautiful lady like yourself should not be sitting here with a jug full of solitary sadness,” the man said, speaking with a heavy accent. “I would like to lighten your burden, if you will permit.”
She scrutinized him closely. “It’s not possible,” she said. “You’re long dead. I’m the only one who doesn’t die.”
“I assure you that I am alive,” the stranger replied.
“Don’t be ridiculous,” she said. “Your name is Domingo Nunes, as I should know because we were lovers for many years, and this is an apparition caused by the alcohol, because you certainly no longer exist.”
And it was on the tip of her tongue to say, but she did not say it, “Also, by the way, you are the father of my three daughters.”
“I have heard the name of Nunes,” the stranger replied, marveling. “He was one of the pioneers who paved the way for my business here. But he is someone from a long time ago, too long ago for you, surely. I am also Portuguese. My name is Fern?o Paes.”