Victory City(72)

The two women retreated indoors. There are those who afterward claimed that the mother was heard saying to her daughter, “We have other means besides prayer for achieving the ends we desire.” But this story remains uncorroborated and unconfirmed.

    Zerelda Li was not incorrect (Pampa Kampana writes)

When she said she needed to be careful

About what she put into her body.

For food, the great sustainer of life,

Can also be a way of ending it

If it passes through the wrong hands.





* * *



—

The first victim of poisoning in the royal palace of Bisnaga was a court poet, or so Pampa Kampana began to believe, and she held Nagala Devi and Tirumala Devi responsible for it in her book, even though one of the things Krishnadevaraya and Tirumala Devi had in common was their shared love of poetry. Places of honor at the court were given by Krishnadevaraya to the so-called “Eight Elephants,” the master poets whose genius held up the sky, as the king liked to say. Among them were the two maestros Allasani Peddana and Tenali Rama; the doomed versifier, Dhurjati; and Krishnadevaraya himself, though some saw this as evidence of the king’s rapidly growing immodesty and arrogance. Also, Tirumala Devi had brought a poet to Bisnaga in her retinue, one Mukku Thimmana, whose name meant “Nosey Thimmana,” because his most famous poem was the one to which we have previously alluded, an ode to the beauty of a woman’s nose, and Tirumala Devi had been given reason to believe that the nose in question was her own highly distinctive facial feature. Krishnadevaraya agreed to include Mukku Thimmana in his living pantheon, in spite of the numinous power of the number seven; and so there were Eight Elephants instead of seven.

Then Dhurjati died, grabbing at his belly after dinner in his private quarters, and being discovered dead with his hands still clutching his gut, and a little foam still bubbling in the corners of his mouth. Nobody was willing to say for sure that he had been murdered—who would want to murder an individual who was so universally loved?—and the medical consensus was that something had burst inside him and unleashed a fatal toxicity into his body. Such things happened, and it was a great sadness, but there was nothing to be done about it. And after that there were Seven Elephants again. If one wanted to be superstitious one might almost believe that an eighth elephant was an affront to the natural order, and the natural order had taken measures to set things right.

Pampa Kampana remembered Dhurjati’s final work, that long, beautiful lay celebrating the night of Gokulashtami when Zerelda Li, the “elusive dancer,” had danced before the king, infuriating the senior queen. Was it possible, she asked herself, that an awful revenge had been wrought upon the poet for overpraising the wrong queen, the junior who did not know her place? Was this a warning shot, intended to tell Zerelda Li to beware of overreaching, and to accept her secondary status once and for all? The whispered phrase “Madam Poison” was still circulating in the bazaar, and after Dhurjati’s death those whispers were a little louder than before. Pampa Kampana was beginning to believe them. It was hard for her, at that time, to go before the king and accuse his senior queen.

But the king had suspicions of his own.

It soon became clear that Tirumala Devi was on the warpath not only against Junior Queen Zerelda Li, but the entire troupe of surrogate gopis as well. She marched into the zenana pleasure rooms to confront the king during his daily playtime. The lesser wives scattered at her approach. “This second-rate paradise, this mimicry of the Basil Forest, what is it?” Tirumala Devi demanded. “Maybe it’s your love of Muslim culture, the many-wives-and-concubines thing, the spirits of their seven heavens, those houris ‘untouched by man or jinni.’?” You should put on manly clothes and give up this girly garbage.”

Krishnadevaraya was unrepentant. “Your own father has quite a stable of wives,” he said. “This has nothing to do with Hindus or Muslims. I honor my namesake Lord Krishna by re-creating his place of joy here in our own Bisnaga.”

“You know what I think would be a real paradise?” Tirumala asked him, revealing a line of thought surprising in its similarity to Pampa Kampana’s. “It would be a place, or maybe a time, when one woman was enough for one man.”

“That paradise already exists for most people,” Krishnadevaraya replied. “It’s called poverty.”

“Maybe we should rename it,” said his senior queen, “and think of it as wealth. Maybe you, for whom no number of women is enough, are the one who’s poor.”

“I heard you were the argumentative type,” said the king. “I like it. Don’t stop.”

“Get properly dressed,” she told him. “Then we’ll see about conversation.”

“By the way,” the king added as she was leaving, “you heard that poor Dhurjati died.”

“Yes,” she said with a shrug. “Something burst inside him, probably his heart. You know what they say about poets. They are in mourning from the day they are born, and they all die of sadness, because nobody can ever love them enough to satisfy them.”

“They say other things also,” said the king. “They whisper the words Shrimati Visha, for example, when you or your mother pass by.”

“Death is inevitable,” she replied. “The poor see murder everywhere. I see only fate, which I call karma, as is only right and proper, but you, in your Muslim clothes, with Urdu constantly on your tongue, would probably describe it as kismet.”