Victory City(89)

She herself wrote that the whispers were a blessing. They brought the world back to her and took her back into the world. There was nothing to be done about the blindness but now it was more than just darkness, it was filled with people, their faces, their hopes, their fears, their lives. Joy had left her, first when Zerelda Li died, and then when her eyes were taken from her and she had understood that she had not escaped the curse of burning. But now, little by little, the whispered secrets of the city allowed joy to be reborn, in the birth of a child, in the building of a home, in the heart of loving families she had never met; in the shoeing of a horse, the ripening of fruits in their orchards, the richness of the harvest. Yes, she reminded herself, terrible things happened, a terrible thing had happened to her, but life on earth was still bountiful, still plenteous, still good. She might be blind, but she could see that there was light.

In the palace, however, the king was lost in darkness. Time had stopped all around the Lion Throne. He began to be quite unwell. Courtiers spoke to one another about seeing him wandering the corridors of the palace talking to himself, or, according to some reports, seemingly deep in conversation with ghosts. He spoke to his lost chief minister and asked for advice. None was given. He spoke to his junior queen, taken from him in childbirth, asking for love. No love was returned. He walked in the gardens with his dead children, he wanted to teach them things and push them on swings and pick them up and toss them in the air, but they didn’t want to play and were unable to learn. (Strangely, he had less time for his living daughter, Tirumalamba Devi. His departed children who would never grow up seemed more on his mind than his adult girl.)



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(Here Pampa Kampana’s text speaks of Tirumalamba Devi as an adult. We are obliged to comment that, as careful—not to say pedantic!—readers of the text may have calculated, Tirumalamba must in “reality” still have been a child. To these readers, and to all who encounter the Jayaparajaya in our pages, we offer the following advice: do not, as you experience Pampa Kampana’s tale, cling to a conventional description of “reality,” dominated by calendars and clocks. The author has previously—in her account of her six-generation-long “sleep” in the forest of Aranyani—shown that she is prepared to compress Time for dramatic purposes. Here she shows her willingness to do the opposite as well, stretching Time instead of abbreviating it, making it do her bidding, allowing Tirumalamba to grow up inside her magically expanded hours—the clocks paused outside her bubble but continuing to tick inside it. Pampa Kampana is the mistress of chronology, not its servant. What her verses instruct us to believe was so, we must accept. Anything else is folly.)



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Krishnadevaraya went into all the temples of Bisnaga to offer prayers and ask to be released from his torment, but the gods turned deaf ears to the man who had blinded the creator of the city, in whom the goddess had dwelled for more than two hundred years. He wrote poetry but then he tore it up. He asked the gathered poetic geniuses of the court, the Seven Remaining Elephants, whose talents were the pillars that held up the sky, to compose new work whose lyricism would renew the beauty of Bisnaga, but all of them confessed that the muse had departed and they were unable to write a word.

The king is mad, the whispers said.

Or it might have been that the king, filled with repentance and shame, consumed by the horror of self-knowledge—the knowledge that his lightning storms of rage had finally broken his own world and deprived him of its two most valuable citizens—was possessed by the need for expiation, and had no idea how or where to find it.

His health worsened. He took to his bed. The court physicians could find no cause. He seemed simply to have lost a reason for living. “All he wants,” the whispers said, “is to find some measure of peace of mind before he leaves.”

At some point during his rapid decline he remembered his brother, imprisoned in the fort at Chandragiri. In a state that many at the court believed to be the beginning of a terminal delirium, he cried out, “Here is one wrong I can right!” He gave the order to release Achyuta from his place of exile and escort him to Bisnaga City. “Bisnaga needs a king,” Krishnadevaraya proclaimed, “and my brother will rule when I am gone.” Very few people at the royal court had ever met Achyuta, but the rumors of his bad personality, his cruelty, his violent nature, were known to all. But nobody dared to speak against the king’s decree, until Princess Tirumalamba’s husband Aliya tried to intervene.

Aliya visited Krishnadevaraya on what people were beginning to think of as his deathbed. “Your Majesty, excuse me,” he said, bluntly, “but your brother Achyuta is well-known to be a savage. Why send for him when I am here? As your only surviving child’s husband, known to all as a serious man, a responsible man, surely that would be a better, less risky route for the succession to follow?”

The king shook his head, as if he was having difficulty remembering who Tirumalamba was, and who this older man, her husband, might be.

“I must make peace with my brother,” the king replied, waving a weak, dismissive hand. “Although Chandragiri is not such a bad place,” he added almost piteously. “The Raj Mahal there is fairly comfortable. However, I must set him free. As for you, just look after this daughter of mine properly, and when he is king her uncle Achyuta will treat you both with all the respect you certainly deserve.”