Victory City(8)

“How did this happen?” Hukka asked his brother in wonderment.

“There’s your answer,” said Bukka, pointing.

Coming toward them through the crowd, dressed in an ascetic’s simple saffron wrap, and carrying a wooden staff, was Pampa Kampana, with whom they were both in love. There was a fire blazing in her eyes, which would not be extinguished for more than two hundred years.

“We built the city,” Hukka said to her. “You said when we had done that we could ask you for your real name.”

So Pampa Kampana told them her name, and congratulated them as well. “You’ve done well,” she said. “They just needed someone to whisper their dreams into their ears.”

“The people needed a mother,” Bukka said. “Now they have one, and everything works.”

“The city needs a queen,” said Hukka Raya I. “Pampa is a good name for a queen.”

“I can’t be the queen of a town without a name,” said Pampa Kampana. “What’s it called, this city of yours?”

“I’ll name it Pampanagar,” Hukka said. “Because you built it, not us.”

“That would be vanity,” said Pampa Kampana. “Choose another name.”

“Vidyanagar, then,” said Hukka. “After the great sage. The city of wisdom.”

“He would refuse that too,” Pampa Kampana said. “I refuse it for him.”

“Then I don’t know,” said Hukka Raya I. “Maybe Vijaya.”

“Victory,” Pampa Kampana said. “The city is a victory, that’s true. But I don’t know if such boastfulness is wise.”

The question of the name would remain unresolved until the stammering foreigner came to town.





3





The Portuguese visitor arrived on Easter Sunday. His name was Sunday as well—Domingo Nunes—and he was as handsome as the daylight, his eyes the green of the grass at dawn, his hair the red of the sun as it set, and he had a speech impediment that only made him more charming to the people of the new city, because it allowed him to avoid the arrogance of white men when confronted with darker skins. His business was horses, but in truth that was just a pretext, because his real love was travel. He had seen the world from Alpha to Omega, from up to down, from give to take, from win to lose, and he had learned that wherever he went the world was illusion, and that that was beautiful. He had been in floods and fires and other hairbreadth escapes, and had seen deserts, quarries, rocks, and hills whose heads touched heaven. Or so he said. He had been sold into slavery, and afterward redeemed, and after that he had gone on journeying, telling the stories of his travels to all who would listen, and those tales were not of the humdrum quotidian variety, not accounts of the everydayness of the world, but of its wonders; or, rather, they were stories that insisted that human life was not banal, but extraordinary. And when he arrived in the new city he understood immediately that it was one of the greatest of miracles, a marvel to be compared to the Egyptian Pyramids, the Hanging Gardens of Babylon, or the Colossus of Rhodes. Accordingly, after he had sold the string of horses he had brought from the port of Goa to the head groom at the army cantonment, he went immediately to observe the golden city wall with disbelieving eyes—as he afterward wrote in the journal of his visit, sections of which were quoted by Pampa Kampana in her book. The wall was rising from the ground as he watched, higher every hour, smoothly dressed stones appearing out of nowhere and placing themselves alongside and on top of one another in immaculate alignment without any visible sign of stonemasons or other workers; which was possible only if some great occultist was nearby, conjuring the fortifications into being with a wave of his imperious wand.

“Foreigner! Come here!” Domingo Nunes had learned enough of the local language to understand that he was being addressed, peremptorily, with little attempt at courtesy. In the shadow of the barbican gate that stood between the city and the cantonment, its twin towers rising higher and higher into the sky as he watched, a small man was leaning out between the curtains of a lordly palanquin. “You! Foreigner! Here!”

The man was either a rude buffoon, or a prince, or both, thought Domingo Nunes. He decided to be on the safe side, and answer discourtesy with courtesy. “At your sir sir service sir,” he declared with a deep bow, which impressed Crown Prince Bukka, who was still getting used to being a person before whom strangers bowed deeply.

“Are you the horse guy?” Bukka asked, no less rudely. “I was told a horse-trader who couldn’t talk properly was in town.”

Domingo Nunes gave an intriguing reply. “I pay my way with whore whore horses,” he said, “but in seek secret I am one of those whose tata task it is to travel the whir whir world and tell its tales, so that others may no no know what it’s like.”

“I don’t know how you tell stories,” Bukka said, “when you have such trouble finishing sentences. But this is interesting. Come sit beside me. My brother the king and I myself would like to hear these tales.”

“Before that,” Domingo Nunes dared to say, “I muss muss must know the secret of this magic war war wall, the greatest won wonder I have ever seen. Who is the mum magician who is doodoo doing this? I must shay shay shake his hand.”

“Get in,” Bukka said, moving over to make room for the foreigner in the palanquin. The men tasked with carrying the palanquin tried not to show their feelings about the increased load. “I’ll present you to her. The city whisperer and the giver of seeds. Hers is a story that should be told far and wide. You’ll see that she is a storyteller too.”