Victory City(87)
Forty more years would pass before the final collapse of Bisnaga, but its long, slow downfall began on the day of Krishnadevaraya’s wild, willful, terrible command, the day on which Saluva Timmarasu and Pampa Kampana had their eyes put out by hot iron rods. Neither of them resisted when the women warriors guarding the court manacled and chained them. The women guards were weeping, and when Thimma the Huge and Ulupi Junior walked the two sentenced figures out through the gates of the Royal Enclosure they were weeping freely as well. They moved slowly toward the blacksmith’s forge with their captives, down the great bazaar street crowded by horrified people wailing in disbelief, slowing down as they neared the forge, as if they were unwilling to arrive. Moments later, as the shrieks of pain rose up from the forge, first a man’s cry, then a woman’s, it was possible to hear the blacksmith sobbing also, unable to bear the thing he had been obliged to do. These tears and cries did not die away, but rather grew in volume and spread out across the city, flowing down broad thoroughfares and along narrow streets, pouring in through every window and door, until the air itself was weeping, and the earth gave up great sighs. Some hours later the king ventured out in his carriage to assess the temper of the city and the gathered crowds pelted him with shoes to express their disgust.
“Remonstrance!” people cried. “Remonstrance!” It was an unprecedented rebuke to power, a roaring in the street, and after that people thought of Krishnadevaraya differently, and the sun of his glory set and did not rise again.
After the blinding, Timmarasu and Pampa Kampana sat trembling in the forge on stools brought to them by the blacksmith, who was unable to stop apologizing, even after they forgave him; and the best doctor in Bisnaga came running to them with soothing poultices for their bloody ruined eye sockets; and strangers brought them food to eat and water for their thirst. Their chains were removed and they were free to go wherever they chose, but where could they go? They remained in the blacksmith’s forge, dizzy and close to fainting from pain, until a young monk ran up from the Mandana mutt with a message from Madhava Acharya.
“From this day forward,” the monk said quietly, reciting the Acharya’s words, “you will both be our most respected guests, and it will be our honor to serve you and care for your every need.”
The two unfortunates were guided carefully into a waiting bullock-cart which moved slowly through the streets toward Mandana. The monk drove the cart; Thimma the Huge and Ulupi Junior walked beside it; and it felt as if the whole city watched it on its journey to the mutt. The only noise to be heard was the sound of inconsolable grief, and a single word, rising above the tears.
“Remonstrance!”
19
In the beginning there was only the pain, the kind of pain that made death feel desirable, a blessed relief. Finally that extreme pain subsided, and for a long time afterward there was nothing. She sat in darkness, ate a little when food was brought to her, and drank a little from the brass pitcher of water that had been placed in the corner of the room with a metal mug inverted over its neck. She slept a little although that felt unnecessary; blindness had erased the boundary between waking and sleeping, they felt like the same thing, and there were no dreams. Blindness erased time as well, and she quickly lost count of the days. On occasion she heard Timmarasu’s voice and understood that he had been brought into her room to visit her, but their blindnesses had nothing to say to one another, and he sounded weak and sick and she understood that the blinding had burned most of his remaining life out of him. Soon enough those visits ended. There were also visits from Madhava Acharya but she had nothing to say to him, which he understood, and simply sat quietly with her for a period of time that might have been minutes or hours, they were all the same now. There were no other visitors and that didn’t matter. She felt that her life had ended but she was cursed to go on living after its end. She was separated from her own history, and no longer felt like Pampa Kampana the maker of miracles whom the goddess had touched long ago. The goddess had abandoned her to her fate. She felt as if she were in a lightless cave, and even though at night someone came in and lit a stove to keep her warm the flames were invisible and cast no shadows on the wall. Nothing was all there was and she was nothing too.
They had tried to make the room comfortable for her but comforts were unimportant. She was aware of a chair and a bed but used neither, remaining squatting in a corner, her arms stretched forward, resting on her knees. Her rear was pushed up against a wall. She woke like this and went to sleep in the same position. It wasn’t easy for her to wash, or to agree to be washed, or to perform her natural functions, but she was aware that that happened from time to time, that people were tending to her, cleaning her, putting clean clothes on her body, brushing and oiling her hair. Except at these times she stayed in her corner, undying, undead, waiting for the end.
There was one unwelcome disturbance. A hubbub at the door and a voice saying, “The king, the king is here.” And then he was there, a particular, loud, voluble absence within the engulfing, undifferentiated, silent absence, and she felt his touch and understood that he was kissing her feet and begging to be forgiven. He was prostrate on the floor blubbering like a bad-mannered child. The sound was nauseating. She needed it to stop.
“Yes, yes,” she said. They were her first words since the blinding. “I know. You were angry, you got carried away, you weren’t thinking straight, you weren’t yourself. You need forgiving? I forgive you. Go and beg at the feet of old Saluva who was like a father to you. This was a death blow to him, and he needs to hear your stupid apology before he dies. As for me? I’ll live.”