Victory City(57)
Pampa Kampana has little to tell us about the short-lived “Saluva dynasty,” even though in this period the fortunes of the empire were much restored, but she writes with affection about a certain Tuluva Narasa Nayaka, another general, whose “Tuluva dynasty” soon supplanted the Saluvas, and who regained the rest of the lost territories, kept Zafarabad and the other adversaries at a distance, and was the father of the man during whose reign Pampa Kampana would learn the most profound lesson in love of her long life. In her epic poem she taunts us, her readers, with this hint of a love story to come, but then refuses to elaborate further, writing only, with her characteristic simplicity of expression:
“Before all that, we had to fight the monkeys.”
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As she rode out of Bisnaga Pampa Kampana, saddened by her last conversation with Fern?o Paes, in which he had understood that he was no more than an echo of the past, was thinking about Domingo Nunes, and the three daughters whose father he had been, a father pushed into the shadows, his paternity never recognized. I wronged him, she told herself, and maybe that is why I have no grandchildren of his line. It is the revenge of his blood. Her daughters, who had inherited some, at least, of the magic with which the goddess had filled their mother, would be the end of a line, not the beginning of a dynasty. Magic would fade from the world and banality would replace it. As she rode back toward Aranyani’s forest, which was to say into the very heart of the fabulous, she was already mourning the victory of the humdrum, the mundane, over that other reality. The victory of the line of ordinary boys over that of extraordinary girls. And perhaps of pink monkeys over the forest of women.
Yuktasri Sangama was waiting for her at the edge of the forest, looking like her mother’s ghost. She was indifferent to the disparity in their appearances. “I know what it means to be your daughter,” she said to Pampa Kampana. “It means, to become your grandmother before I die.” She had no interest in discussing that any further. “I waited too long to call you,” she said. “Things are bad here, and the final conflict will begin very soon.”
The beginning of the problem was the willingness of the forest’s green and brown monkeys to invite groups of pink monkeys into their trees. Soon some of the pink leaders had persuaded the green monkeys that they needed to be afraid of the brown tribe, while other pink leaders persuaded the browns of the malicious intentions of the greens. The peace of the forest was broken, and the pink monkeys shrewdly sided with the greens in one area of the forest, the browns in another, and helped them to defeat their “rivals,” asking only to be rewarded with control of part of the tree-worlds of the defeated tribes. In a startlingly short time the pink monkeys had acquired footholds in the forest, and they used these to expand the areas of their control. They even hired many of the green and brown monkeys to help them in their enterprise. After that the wealth of the forest was at their mercy. “We did nothing,” Yuktasri told her mother. “We thought this was something between the monkey people and it wasn’t for us to intervene. We were stupid. We should have guessed that the pink ones would keep coming, and coming, and coming, there would be wave after wave of them, until they had taken over the whole forest.”
The goddess Aranyani could surely prevent the invasion, Pampa Kampana suggested, but Yuktasri shook her head. “She can surround the forest with her line of power, her protective rekha,” Yuktasri said, “but it won’t work if forest dwellers themselves invite the intruders in. And now the pinks are forest dwellers too, and many greens and browns support them, and talk about wanting to divide the forest into green zones and brown zones, and they are too dumb to understand that their attitude will lead to there being only one zone, neither brown nor green. Monkeys, what can you do?” Yuktasri said, her betrayal of the habitual respect of jungle denizens for one another indicating how bad the situation had become. “You can’t teach them anything.”
“How can I help?” Pampa Kampana said. “I don’t even live here anymore.”
“I don’t know,” Yuktasri replied. “But I thought, if I’m going to die fighting the pink invasion, I want you here too.”
“Because you need your mother,” Pampa Kampana asked, “or because you want her to die in the battle as well?”
“I don’t know,” old Yuktasri answered. “Maybe both.”
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(Here there is an unexplained break in continuity in the Jayaparajaya manuscript. It is possible that the author destroyed some pages, perhaps because the confrontation with her daughter was too painful to preserve in detail, or simply because Pampa Kampana turned away from that private matter to complete her account of the crisis. In her next passage she moves away abruptly from this mother–daughter scene and describes her second visit to the unseen forest goddess Aranyani. Here is that scene, as Pampa Kampana has written it. It should be noted that this is the only instance in the entire body of ancient literature in which the forest goddess revealed herself fully to any human being.)
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She, Pampa Kampana, spread out her arms and called the goddess’s name. Then the whirlwind came as before, and she was hidden inside the whirling leaves, and carried into the sky. The angry cheels were there, wheeling above the roof of the forest as before, and the golden ball of light, and she, Pampa Kampana, was standing on the topmost branch of the highest tree. But this time the ball of light dissolved into air and there she was, Aranyani, floating on the sky, presenting herself to Pampa Kampana without pretensions, not in the golden crown and bejeweled radiance of a god but plainly dressed in simple woodland clothes.