Victory City(88)

He pleaded with her to return to the palace and live in comfort like the queen she was, and be waited on hand and foot, and be cared for by the best physicians, and sit at his right hand on a new throne of her own. She shook her head. “This is my palace now,” she said. “There are too many queens in yours.”

Tirumala Devi and her mother Nagala Devi had been confined to quarters, he told her. What they had done was unforgivable. He would never see them again.

“Nor will I,” said Pampa Kampana. “And it seems you find forgiveness harder to give than to receive.”

“What can I do?” Krishnadevaraya pleaded.

“You can leave,” she answered. “I will never see you again either.”

She heard him leave. She heard the knock on Timmarasu’s door. Then came the old man’s roar of wrath. With the last of his strength the brutalized chief minister cursed his king and told him that his misdeed would be a stain on his name for all time. “No,” Saluva Timmarasu bellowed. “I do not forgive you, and I would not, even if I lived out a thousand thousand lifetimes.”

That night he died, and the timeless silence returned, and closed in upon her.



* * *



—

The first dreams that came were nightmares. In them she saw again the blacksmith’s guilty face, the iron rod lowered into the furnace, and removed with its tip red-hot. She felt Ulupi Junior behind her, holding her arms, and Thimma the Huge towering over her, holding her head still. She watched the approach of the rod, felt its heat; then she woke up, shaking, sweating her lost eyesight out of every pore in her body. She dreamed about Timmarasu’s blinding too, even though she knew he was gone and didn’t have to fear anything anymore, neither the frown of the great nor the tyrant’s stroke. He had been mutilated first, so she had had to watch, and see her own fate before it happened. It was as if she had been blinded twice.

But yes, there were images again, the darkness was no longer absolute. She dreamed her whole life and did not know if she woke or slept while dreaming it; everything from the fire that took her mother to the furnace that burned her eyes. And because the story of her life was also the story of Bisnaga itself, she remembered her great-great-great-great-granddaughter Zerelda Li instructing her to record it all.

She called out to whoever was there, watching over her. “Paper,” she said. “And a feather, and some ink.”



* * *



—

Madhava Acharya came to sit with her again. “I want to say to you,” he said, “that by your example you have taught me kindness, and shown me that it expands to include all people, not only the true believers but the unbelievers and other-believers also, not only the virtuous but also those who know not virtue. You told me once that you were not my foe and I did not understand, but I understand now. I have been to see the king and told him that his own virtue has been tarnished by his misdeed, but I must still care for him as I must for all our people. I talked to him about his own poem, The Giver of the Worn Garland, which tells of the Tamil mystic we know as Andal; and I said, ‘Although you did not know it, all the time you were writing about Andal you were in fact writing about our Queen Pampa Kampana, all the beauty of Andal is Pampa Kampana’s beauty, and all the wisdom is Pampa Kampana’s wisdom. When Andal wore her garland and looked into the pond the image she saw there, the reflection in the water, was Pampa Kampana’s face. Thus you have mutilated the very thing you sought to celebrate, you have deprived yourself of the very wisdom in which your poem rejoices, and so you have committed a crime against yourself as well as her.’ I told him this to his face, and I saw the anger rise there, but my place at the head of Mandana protected me, at least for now.”

“Thank you,” she said. Spoken words came with difficulty. Perhaps written words would be easier.

“He allowed me to go to your rooms and bring some clothes,” Madhava Acharya told her. “I did this personally. I have also brought all your papers, your writings, in this satchel which I place here before you, and whatever paper, quill, and ink you need will be brought to you also. I can send our finest scribe to you, to guide your hand until it learns its way. From now on it is your hand that must see what your eye cannot, and it will.”

“Thank you,” she replied.

Her hand learned quickly, returned easily to the familiar relationships of paper and inkwell, and her carers expressed astonishment at the delicacy and accuracy of her script, the straightness of the lines of words as they marched across her sheets. She began to feel her selfhood returning as she wrote. She wrote slowly, much more slowly than in the past, but the writing was neat and clear. She could not describe herself as happy—happiness, she felt, had moved out of her vicinity forever—but as she wrote she came closer to the new place where it had taken up residence than at any other time.

Then the whispers began. At first she wasn’t clear what was happening, she thought people were talking in the corridor outside her room, and she wanted to ask them to please be quiet or at least take it elsewhere, but she soon understood that there was nobody outside. She was hearing the voices of Bisnaga within herself, telling her their stories. Things had gone into reverse, as if rivers had started flowing upstream. When she was a child a religious saint had taken her in, but that safe place had become unsafe, and friendship had soured into enmity; now another holy man, who had been an adversary, had metamorphosed into a friend and had given her safety and care. And in the early days of Bisnaga she had whispered people’s lives into their ears so that they could begin to live them; now the descendants of those people were whispering their lives into her ears instead. From the vendors of things taken as offerings to the city’s many temples—flowers, incense, copper bowls—she heard that sales had dramatically increased, because the blindings—followed by the death of Mahamantri Timmarasu—had filled people with uncertainty about the future, and they were praying to the gods for help. From the street of foreign traders she heard more worries and doubts, was Bisnaga about to collapse in spite of all its military success, should they be thinking about packing their bags and getting out before it was too late? Chinese voices and Malays, Persians and Arabs, spoke to her, and she only comprehended a little of what they said, but she could well understand the panic in their voices. She heard the voices of maidservants retelling the worries of their mistresses, and she heard astrologers prophesying a grim future. The female guards of the palace were full of grief and there were those who went so far as to think of mutiny. Temple dancers, the devadasis of the Yellamma temples, expressed their unwillingness to dance. Pampa Kampana even thought she could identify individual storytellers, here was Ulupi Junior grieving, and Thimma the Huge, here. All of Bisnaga was in crisis, and the voices of that crisis filled her waking thoughts. She heard the discontented mutterings of soldiers in the military cantonment, the gossipy voices of junior monks, the foul-mouthed scorn of courtesans. The king, so recently returned in triumph from his wars, was held in lower esteem than at any point in his reign, and people’s heads were full of the possibility of a palace coup. But who would dare rise up, and how, and when, and would it succeed, and if it did, oh, what then, and if it failed, oh, what if it failed? In what are now becoming known as the “blinded” verses of the Jayaparajaya, Pampa Kampana gave voice to the anonymous, to the ordinary citizens, the little people, the unseen, and many scholars assert that in these pages of the immense work Bisnaga comes most vividly to life.