Victory City(93)

“To hell with her,” he shouted from the throne. “She’s pretending to be the goddess now? There’s no room in my Bisnaga for witches or blasphemers. If blinding wasn’t enough to get rid of her, I’ll burn her alive.”

Pampa Kampana’s book makes no record of the names of Achyuta’s ministers but it appears that, whoever they were, they persuaded the king that the public burning of a woman held in high esteem by so many would be inadvisable. They could not, however, prevent him from descending upon the Mandana mutt and demanding to be shown to her room. Madhava Acharya led the way and they found her sitting in her usual corner, reciting, while Princess Tirumalamba Devi wrote down her verses.

“If I can’t burn you,” he told her, “I can certainly burn your book, which I don’t need to read to know that it’s full of unsuitable and forbidden thoughts, and then you will die and be forgotten, and nobody will know your name, and the statue will be mine again and remain so for all eternity. What do you say to that?”

Tirumalamba Devi leaped to her feet and placed herself between Achyuta and the blind woman. “You’ll have to kill me first,” she said. “Madam has a divine gift and to do what you threaten would be an act of sacrilege.”

Pampa Kampana stood up also. “Burn all the paper you want,” she said. “But every line of what I have written is held in my memory. To get rid of it you’ll need to cut off my head and stuff it with straw, as sometimes happens, in my book, to defeated kings.”

“I, too, have memorized this immortal text,” Madhava Acharya said. “So your axe will have to visit my neck as well.”

Achyuta’s face reddened. “The time may come soon,” he said roughly, “when I accept all your offers with pleasure. For the moment, to hell with you all. Keep out of my way, and you,” he pointed furiously at Pampa Kampana, “are forbidden to visit my statue.”

“That’s fine,” said Pampa Kampana. “My history will not be written in stone.”

Once the king had gone, she turned to the priest. “What you said wasn’t true,” she said. “You risked your life for a lie.”

“There are times when a lie matters more than a life,” he replied. “This was such a time.”

She settled back into her corner. “Very well,” she said. “Thank you both. Now perhaps we may proceed.”

“Sometimes I hate men,” Tirumalamba Devi said when Madhava Acharya had gone.

“I had a daughter who thought that way,” Pampa Kampana told her. “She preferred the company of women and was happiest in Aranyani’s enchanted forest. And if by ‘men’ you mean our recent royal visitor, that is understandable. But Madhava is a good man, surely. And what about your husband?”

“Aliya is all plots and conspiracies,” Tirumalamba answered. “He’s all secrets and schemes. The court is full of factions and he knows how to set one group against another, how to balance this interest against that one, and Achyuta can’t keep up; that kind of complication makes him dizzy. So Aliya has become a second power center, equal to the king, which is all he wants, at least for now. He’s a labyrinth. You never know which direction to go in. How can one love a maze?”

“Tell me this,” Pampa Kampana said. “I know princesses are imprisoned by their crowns and find it hard to choose their own path, but in your heart, what do you want from life?”

“Nobody ever asked me that,” Tirumalamba Devi said. “Not even my mother. Duty, duty, et cetera. Writing down your verses is the only thing that fills my heart.”

“But for yourself, what?”

Tirumalamba Devi took a breath. “In the street of the foreigners,” she said, “I get envious. They just come and go, no ties, no duties, no limits. They have stories from everywhere and I’m sure that when they go somewhere else we become the stories that they tell the people there. They even tell us stories about ourselves and we believe them even if they get everything upside down. It’s like, they have the right to tell the whole world the story of the whole world, and then just…move on. So. Here’s my stupid idea. I want to be a foreigner. I’m sorry to be so foolish.”

“I had a daughter like that too,” Pampa Kampana said. “And you know what? She became a foreigner and I think she was happy.”

“You don’t know?” Tirumalamba asked.

“I lost her,” Pampa Kampana replied. “But maybe she found herself.” She put a hand on the princess’s knee. “Go and search for a cheel feather,” she told her.

“A feather? Why?”

“Keep it safely,” said Pampa Kampana.

“They say you came here as a bird,” Tirumalamba said, awestruck.

“Let’s go back to work,” Pampa Kampana said. But before she started reciting again she added one more thing. “I have known foreigners,” she said. “I have even loved one or two. But you know what’s the most disappointing thing about them?”

“What?”

“They all look exactly the same.”

“Can I ask you the same question that you asked me?” Tirumalamba said. “Is there still something you hope for, something you want? I know, your lost eyesight, of course, excuse me, another stupidity. But some secret desire?”