Victory City(55)

Fern?o told her he was puzzled by the king. “When I first came to Bisnaga, everyone was murdering everyone,” he said one morning at breakfast. (He ate breakfast like a savage: quantities of leavened bread, chunks of cheese made from cows’ milk, and coffee drowned in cows’ milk too, which he called gal?o—things that no right-minded person would eat at the beginning of the day.) “And I wrote in my journal,” he went on, “that Deva Raya and his murderous brothers only cared about getting drunk and fucking. I should have added, and killing one another.”

Ah, my male line of descent, Pampa Kampana thought. Worthless scum, all of them. The fathers who were my sons and their sons as well.

“Then Deva Raya fell under the influence of Vidyasagar, Sayana, and the DAS, and he sobered up and even became puritanical,” Paes continued. “Then all of a sudden he changed again, rejected the priests, and everyone celebrated his new open-mindedness, and now there are festivals and parties, and people say he’s a great king and this is a golden age. It’s my opinion that the fellow has no mind of his own, he needs someone to tell him how to behave and what to do, but it beats me who has drawn him away from the theocrats. There’s some secret individual or individuals somewhere, whispering in his ear.”

Yes, my dear, Pampa Kampana thought, but when I told you, you didn’t believe me.

“Maybe it’s Madhuri Devi,” she said. “The New Remonstrance seems to have become the ruling party, the group the king uses to run things.”

Pampa Kampana’s friendship with Madhuri Devi had continued, and the old astrologer, now a royal counselor, often talked to her about goings-on in the palace. Even though Madhuri now had quarters in the palace complex she had hung onto her old home, and she and Pampa met there privately, to drink tea and gossip. “The fact is, Deva Raya has lost all interest in the business of being king,” Madhuri said. “He leaves everything to us and has gone back to his carousing youthful ways, except that he really isn’t capable of very much wildness anymore.”

“Drinking and fucking,” Pampa Kampana mused. “Especially fucking, apparently. Everybody in the market is talking about his army of wives.”

“The fucking is mostly theoretical,” said Madhuri Devi. “Yes, twelve thousand wives. This is to demonstrate his sexual prowess. I doubt he has been able to do anything energetic with any of them. He isn’t very fit, or well. He just likes to dress up in green satin robes with necklaces of jewels and many rings on his fingers, and lounge with his head in a wife’s lap and with other wives clustering around him. There is a plan to take all the wives out for a procession around the city to show them off to the people. Four thousand wives will be on foot, to show that they are little better than domestic servants. Four thousand will be on horseback to indicate higher status. And four thousand will be carried in palanquins. That’s the worst part.”

“Why?”

“He wants those four thousand wives to burn themselves on his funeral pyre when he dies. This is the condition on which he has made them queens, and because they have accepted he has placed them in the position of greatest honor.”

“There will be no more burning of living women on dead men’s pyres in Bisnaga,” Pampa Kampana said with great ferocity. “Never again.”

“Agreed,” said Madhuri Devi. “I think it’s a bit of the old DAS mentality that is still stuck in his head.”

While she watched Fern?o Paes eat his foreign savage’s breakfast Pampa Kampana was remembering her mother, and the terrible flames, and deciding to whisper once more, and as soon as possible, into the ear of the king. Then Fern?o Paes, having eaten, jumped up to start his day. Before he left for the stables he had one more word of wisdom for Pampa Kampana. “When people start talking about a golden age,” he said, “they always think a new world has begun which will last forever. But the truth about these so-called golden ages is that they never last very long. A few years, maybe. There’s always trouble ahead.”



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In the hot season before the rains came they slept on the flat roof of Fern?o Paes’s house, on charpai rope beds enclosed within white mosquito netting that made Pampa Kampana imagine that the whole world was a ghost and she the only living creature in it. Contained in that white cube in the darkness she felt as if unborn, waiting to enter life and make of it something new, something never seen before. She began to feel hopeful, and dreamed of herself riding a yali, a sort of leogryph, across the threshold of life into the future. In those days Deva Raya had ordered the construction of a new temple, the Vitthala, which would take ninety years to complete. In these early days of the temple’s construction a row of stone yalis pranced under the open sky, waiting for the great edifice to grow around and above them. When one entered or left such a temple, or when one began a new enterprise, it was good to ask a yali for its blessing. Pampa Kampana understood her yali dream as an auspicious sign of a new start.

She also knew that such superstitions were nonsense, and not to be relied upon any more than the astrological divinations of her friend.

One night when the air was pregnant with the moisture which had not yet begun to pour down, Pampa Kampana was woken up by the cawing of a crow near her ear. She woke up and understood that her other world had come to draw her away.

“Ka-ah-eh-va,” she said softly, so as not to wake Fern?o Paes under his neighboring mosquito net.