Victory City(92)
In the years that followed, the story of Achyuta Deva Raya’s coronation feast, vividly told and retold, became the defining narrative of his reign. Everyone in Bisnaga carried around a mental image of the king and his drunken companions eating like swine and drinking like men who had been lost in a desert for many years; while the royal family and nobles of the court sat in silence, with folded hands, eating nothing; and while Aliya Rama Raya stood at the back of the dining hall, refusing even to sit and break bread with the new ruler, and plotting his next move.
Tirumalamba Devi gave Pampa Kampana a detailed description of the evening, and that is what we now have in the Jayaparajaya, transformed by the author into verse, but written in the princess’s neat hand. After Tirumalamba had finished her account, Pampa Kampana gave a deep sigh.
“These two men,” she said, “your husband and your uncle. Between them, they will be the destruction of us all.”
The last two leading men in the drama of Bisnaga were so unalike that people began to call them “Yes and No,” or “Up and Down,” or “Plus and Minus” to describe their opposed natures. “Forward and Back” was also used, and in this case Achyuta was definitely the one considered to be the backward party. He was the unsubtle one, the type who barges in through your front door, hits you over the head, and steals your house. Aliya was stealthy. If he stole your house you wouldn’t know it was going until it was gone. You’d be standing in the road, homeless, wondering where everything went. Achyuta made people think of a bear with angry bees flying around his head, perpetually agitated, swatting at the buzzing air. Aliya was still, like an archer just before he releases his deadly arrow. Achyuta was thick-bodied and gross, while Aliya reminded everyone of a skeleton—a walking skeleton with a long hard face and arms and legs so long and thin that there seemed to be no flesh on them, just skin and bone. Achyuta was excitable; Aliya was almost preternaturally calm. Achyuta was religious, in the sense of being hostile to followers of other religions; Aliya was cynical, and didn’t give a damn about your faith as long as you were of value. Achyuta, by general agreement, was not very intelligent. Aliya Rama Raya was the smartest man in the palace.
And yet, under Achyuta, Bisnaga survived. It no longer prospered in the old way, and it lost territories and influence, but at the end of his reign, it was still there. By the time Aliya was done, the empire was finished as well.
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Several years passed before Tirumalamba Devi persuaded Pampa Kampana to leave the Mandana mutt. She only left her room when she was told that the mutt had a pottery room with a wheel and a kiln, and so after a long time, and in spite of her blindness, she began to throw pots again. It seems probable that she herself made the pot which, in the end, would contain the manuscript of her life’s work. But for a long time the pottery room and her own cell were the only places she wanted to be.
In the end it was the new Pampa statue that persuaded her. Achyuta Deva Raya had been determined to make a show of his deep religious conviction and had commissioned this tribute to the goddess who was the local incarnation of Parvati, Shiva’s wife and Brahma’s daughter, after whom the river of Bisnaga was also named. The sculptor was a certain Krishnabhatta, the same Brahmin genius whom Krishnadevaraya had asked to carve the giant, terrifying figure of Lord Narasimha, the Man-Lion incarnation of Vishnu, out of a single monolith: Narasimha with the goddess Lakshmi on his left thigh and the dead body of the demon Hiranyakashyap on his lap. That statue had not been finished until after Krishnadevaraya’s death, but it was forever associated with his glory, and Achyuta ordered Krishnabhatta to make a Pampa-figure of equal size and grandeur, also carved out of a single block of stone, which would be placed in direct opposition to the Narasimha statue. It would be as if Achyuta’s magnificence, embodied in stone Lady Pampa, as large as Lord Narasimha and just as fearsome, was staring down the greatness of his predecessor.
“You have to come,” Tirumalamba Devi said to Pampa Kampana. “Because, so soon after its completion and blessing ceremony, everyone is already saying the statue is a tribute to you, the mother of us all, and that it’s Achyuta Deva Raya’s way of apologizing for the crime against you committed by his brother.” She giggled. “It’s driving my uncle insane.”
“Okay,” Pampa Kampana finally said. “My fingers will see what my eyes cannot.”
On the day Pampa Kampana left the mutt, with a white cloth wrapped around her head to shield her ruined eyes, and an umbrella held over her by Madhava Acharya himself in spite of his advancing years, all of Bisnaga came out to honor her. She heard the crowd’s cries and songs and was greatly moved and began, for the first time since her bloodied retreat, to consider the possibility of living in the world again, of finding her way back to some sort of love after the great hatred of the hot iron rod. When she reached the statue the sculptor himself guided her hands across its surface, describing its details and explaining its symbols.
With the help of Tirumalamba Devi and Madhava Acharya, she made an offering of flowers to the goddess, and took care to congratulate not only the sculptor but also the king for this supreme act of devotion. “It’s beautiful,” she said softly, and her words, repeated by many voices, rippled across the throng. “I see it clearly, as if it had restored my sight.”
News of the event reached the palace quickly and infuriated Achyuta, who saw that the work he had commissioned to bring glory to himself had unintentionally become a tribute to the blind woman of Mandana. (There were those who thought he should have known what would happen, and we, with the benefit of hindsight, can’t help but agree, but Achyuta was not a far-sighted man, nor, as has been noted, was he the most intelligent of rulers. As a result he was taken aback and angered by the people’s reaction to the Pampa statue, and perhaps his anger was increased by his realization of his own stupidity.)