Victory City(96)
“I must scatter my mother’s ashes in the Kaveri,” Tirumala Devi said. “It would be her last wish and I must fulfill it.”
“There are holy rivers here also,” the king said dismissively. “Put her in the water of the Pampa or the Krishna. They will serve you just fine. No reason to make the long journey into the south.”
“So I am your prisoner,” Tirumala Devi said. “Or should I say, your hostage.”
“You are a peace treaty in the form of a living person,” Achyuta said. “Think of it that way. That should feel better, huh. Well, even if it doesn’t.”
The former senior queen returned to her rooms where her daughter found her, still with a face of iron.
“He refused, then,” Tirumalamba Devi said. “I’ll talk to Aliya. He will surely find a way.”
But this turned out to be a rare instance when the two disputatious heads of Bisnaga spoke as one. “He’s right,” Aliya Rama Raya told his wife. “If we lose your mother, we lose Veera too. There are already rumors of his growing disloyalty. She will have to stay.”
“You have me,” she argued. “Isn’t that enough?”
“No,” Aliya told her, without trying to soften the blow. “It isn’t. Not until I am really the king on the Lion Throne.”
“You mean ‘unless,’ I suppose,” the princess corrected him.
“If I had meant ‘unless,’?” he replied, “I would not have said ‘until.’?”
Tirumalamba left him and brought the bad news to Tirumala Devi. “He won’t help,” she said, and her mother made no attempt to hide her scorn. “So you are still a second-rater,” Tirumala Devi told her only living child. “If my son had survived, I know my situation would have been very different.”
Her daughter turned to go. “Don’t worry about me,” Tirumala Devi called after her. “I know how to get out of here without anybody’s help.” Then she turned her gaze to the window and watched the rain fall, the improbable, unyielding, interminable rain. The next morning they found her dead in her bed, holding a small bottle in her hand that had contained a poison so deadly that there was no known antidote for it. And so the prophecy of Krishnadevaraya came true. The poisoner ends up drinking the poison.
Aliya Rama Raya accompanied Tirumalamba Devi on her rain-sodden journey back to Srirangapatna with the ashes of her mother and grandmother, along with a heavily armed guard of honor. King Veera met them with an equally well-armed retinue of his own and escorted them to the confluence of the Kaveri. The rain stopped suddenly, the clouds clearing to reveal a bright sky, as if a curtain had been parted, as if the heavens were paying their last respects to the two queens. After the ashes had been scattered there were prayers and then a feast of remembrance and the next day the journey back to Bisnaga.
“I’m sorry to tell you that your grandpa Veera is definitely planning to break away from our alliance,” Aliya told Tirumalamba once they were safely away from Srirangapatna. “Now that I’ve seen him face-to-face and looked into his traitorous eyes there’s no doubt in my mind about it.”
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The Jayaparajaya tells us about the end of King Veerappodeya’s story, in a manner one can only describe as terse. It’s possible that Pampa Kampana kept it short so as not to distress his granddaughter unduly, or, alternatively, that Tirumalamba Devi abbreviated the account as she wrote it down. All we are told is this: that King Veera did indeed announce that his agreement with Bisnaga was at an end, and obliged the battalions of troops from Bisnaga stationed at Srirangapatna to withdraw. No sooner had this happened than the powerful neighboring ruler of Mysore, seeing that Srirangapatna no longer had the added strength of the Bisnaga army at its disposal, attacked in strength, overthrew King Veera, and absorbed Srirangapatna into the kingdom of Mysore. The text does not dwell on Veera’s fate. If his head was severed, if it was stuffed with straw and displayed in Mysore as a trophy, we cannot say.
As a result of this tragic mishap, the southern frontier of the Bisnaga Empire was left vulnerable and exposed, and its enemies grew in confidence and strength.
* * *
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Sad to relate, King Achyuta fell into bad habits as time went by. Pampa Kampana in her monastic room at Mandana listened to the whispers of the city and heard everything: how in the beginning Achyuta had been prevented by Madhava Acharya—whose opinions on widow-burning had been greatly reshaped by his growing friendship with Pampa Kampana—from throwing all of Krishnadevaraya’s widows on his funeral pyre, and had therefore flung them all out of the palace to fend for themselves on the streets, even the high-ranking—and now relatively old—surrogates of the gopis of Krishna the god. After that he had acquired five hundred wives of his own, and spent most of his waking hours being pleasured by them. (They lived in cell-like rooms in cloisters adjacent to the palace, and when not involved in decadent acts with the king led lives more like celibate nuns.) He had also begun to insist that the court’s senior noblemen should kiss his feet on a daily basis, which was not, let us say, an endearing requirement. Those who were willing to kiss the king’s feet with genuine enthusiasm were given gifts of yak-tail fans, and it would not be exaggerating matters to say that those nobles who received such fans were also the ones who hated the king most deeply. He slept in a bed made of solid gold, refused to wear any garment more than once, and so great were the expenses of his lavish court that his ministers were obliged to increase taxes on the citizenry, after which the people hated him too. There were banquets at court almost every night, at which seventeen courses were eaten and much wine drunk, and while the king and his cronies were feasting on venison, partridges, and doves, the common people were reduced to dining on cats, lizards, and rats, all of which were sold in the city’s markets, alive and kicking, so that people knew that they were at least getting fresh meat.