Victory City(84)
(He had not.)
Pratapa sued for peace. At the signing of the treaty at the Simhachalam hill, Krishnadevaraya met his vanquished opponent face-to-face for the first time, and asked him a simple question. “So you see, do you not, that we are the same after all, you and I, mirrors of one another, and there’s no difference between us?”
Prataparudra knew that he was being asked to apologize for his emphasis on the gulf in class, dynastic history, and caste between his own dynasty and the kings of Bisnaga. He made a last stand against such humiliation. “I confess,” he said, “that I do not perceive the likeness.”
“If you are so blind and vain,” Krishnadevaraya told him, screaming with fury, “then let us tear up this piece of paper and I will burn your defeated empire to the ground, and kill every member of your family I can find, beginning, naturally, with you.”
Pratapa bowed his head. “I was mistaken,” he said. “Now that I look more closely, I see that we are exactly the same.”
* * *
—
As a part of the peace treaty, Prataparudra gave his daughter Tuka to Krishnadevaraya in marriage. Tirumala Devi, who was present at the surrender meeting at Simhachalam, was furious. She stormed into the king’s tent and berated him. “In the first place,” she said, “there is the offense to me. And in the second place, are you too stupid to see that this ‘marriage’ is part of a plot against you?” Krishnadevaraya tried to calm her down, but at the wedding ceremony itself, Tirumala Devi intervened just before Tuka fed the king the traditional sweetmeat. Tirumala Devi insisted that a food taster eat a piece of it first, and when the man fell down dead the assassination attempt was foiled.
“I told you so,” Tirumala Devi said to the horrified king.
Tuka did not attempt to deny her part in the plot. Instead she shouted, “How can this low-grade man, this king from the gutter, be fit to marry a high-born person like myself?” After that she was sent to the most remote part of the empire to live out her days in solitary captivity and the king, moved to a fit of rage, ordered that her quarters be made harshly uncomfortable and the food given to her be as unpleasant as possible.
“Don’t worry,” said Tirumala Devi. “I’ll take care of that.”
The book of Pampa Kampana does not provide a clear resolution to the story of Tuka, but there is a heavy hint about how it ended in the following verses:
Do not tempt Madam Poison
by seeking to be a poisoner,
or your fate may be sealed
by your folly.
* * *
—
Six years had passed since Krishnadevaraya left Bisnaga City at the head of his men (and women). Now at last it was time to go home.
18
Krishnadevaraya, returning to his palace, discovered that Bisnaga City during the regency had become the fabulous place of which Pampa Kampana had always dreamed. Its wealth was everywhere on display, in the finery worn by the people, in the goods available for purchase in its stores, and, most of all, in the lavishness of its languages, which had been raised to a point of ecstasy by the great poets to whom she had given homes to live in and stages from which to speak. Trading ships from Bisnaga were traveling everywhere and spreading the news of its wonders, and now foreign visitors—traders, diplomats, explorers—thronged its streets, applauding its beauty and comparing it favorably to Beijing and to Rome. Every man may come and go and live according to his own creed. Great equity and justice is observed to all, not only by the rulers, but by the people, one to another. These words were written by a red-haired, green-eyed Portuguese visitor to Bisnaga named Hector Barbosa, a scrivener and an interpreter of the Malayalam language based in Cochin, and the latest incarnation of the foreign men who had populated Pampa Kampana’s life. This time, however, she resisted his charms. “I’ve had enough of your reappearances,” she told the mystified Barbosa. “I’ve got work to do.”
She allowed him, however, to tell her his traveler’s tales. From Barbosa and other newcomers she heard rumors of the strangeness of the faraway world, of, for example, a town called Toruń in the far north of the place called Europe, where they baked great quantities of gingerbread, and where a man had begun to suggest that the sun, and not the earth, was the center around which everything moved; and of a city called Firenze or Florence in the south of Europe where they drank the finest wines on earth, painted the greatest paintings, and read the most profound philosophers, but where the princes were cynical and cruel. She remembered learning from Vidyasagar that an Indian astronomer, Aryabhata, had proposed a heliocentric system a thousand years earlier than the fellow from Toruń, but his ideas had been rejected by his peers; and she knew also that cruelty and cynicism of the Florentine kind were not the exclusive characteristics of foreign princes. “Anyway,” she wrote, “it’s good to learn that over there is not so very unlike over here, and that human intelligence and human stupidity, as well as human nature, the best and worst of it, are the great constants in the changing world.”
Bisnaga had become a world-city. Even the birds in the sky seemed different, as if they, too, had traveled here from far away, drawn by the growing fame of Bisnaga. Fishermen told her that there were new fishes in the sea at Goa and Mangalore, and Sri Laxman had begun to display and sell unheard-of alien fruits. Welcoming the king home, and giving up her regency, Pampa Kampana greeted him thus: “I return to you your city, heart of your empire, which is now a wonder of the world.”