Victory City(97)

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Pampa Kampana, too, was changing. When Tirumalamba Devi came to write down her verses, they were often little more than lamentations about her cursed gift of longevity, her obligation to go on living until the bitter end. “I can see it,” she told Tirumalamba, “as if it had already happened. I can see the damage to the gopuram of the Vitthala Temple, and the smashing of the Pampa statue and the Hanuman statue as well, and the burning of the Lotus Palace. But I must wait until time catches up with me before I set it down.”

“Maybe it won’t happen,” Tirumalamba said, distressed by these images of destruction. “Maybe it was just a bad dream.”

Pampa Kampana, kindly, did not argue. “Yes,” she said. “Maybe so.”

She was developing many of the attributes of great old age. The woman Tirumalamba saw before her, disfigured as her face was by the blinding, still looked like someone in, perhaps, her late thirties, but Pampa Kampana had given up caring what she looked like. The illusion of youth was of no import to her anymore. She no longer needed to bother about seeing her idiotically young reflection, so she was free to inhabit the old crone she felt herself to be. Her skin felt dry, so she scratched it. Her joints felt creaky, so she complained about them creaking. Her back hurt, and when she stood she needed a walking stick and was unable to straighten her body. “At my age things should be a whole lot worse,” she told Tirumalamba. “But to hell with that. Things are bad enough.”

She had also developed a sort of sleeping sickness. At times Tirumalamba would find her prone and unconscious and when the sickness first began Tirumalamba would panic and think the old lady had died, but then Pampa Kampana’s heavy breathing would reassure her. Sometimes Pampa Kampana slept for several days at a time, and gradually these periods lengthened into weeks, or even months, and she would wake up with the appetite of a hungry elephant. The sleep did not seem natural to Tirumalamba, it felt as if it came from the divine sphere, perhaps as a gift to make it easier for Pampa Kampana to pass the time that needed to be passed before her final release from the goddess’s spell.

It was during these long sleeps that Pampa Kampana dreamed the future. So they were not entirely restful.

By this time Tirumalamba herself was no longer young, and she, too, had various physical complaints, her bad teeth, her digestive tract, but she kept these to herself and allowed the old woman to fulminate. “Maybe if you just go on telling the story,” she suggested gently, “that will make you feel a little better.”

“I did have one dream,” Pampa Kampana said. “I was visited by two yalis, not made of wood or stone but real, living creatures.” She had dreamed of yalis before, and had been happy to be with those supernatural beings, half-lion and half-horse, and with elephant tusks, whom people thought of as protectors of gateways. “They came to reassure me. ‘Don’t worry,’ they said. ‘When the time comes we will appear at your side to take you across the threshold to the Eternal Realm.’ That was comforting.” The memory put an end to her bad mood. “Yes,” she said. “Let’s go on.”

Then, to Tirumalamba’s astonishment, she quoted Siddhartha Gautama, which is why the Buddha’s Five Remembrances, or a version of them, can be found in the Jayaparajaya, which is otherwise not a Buddhist text.

    I am of the nature to grow old. There is no way to escape it.

I am of the nature to have ill health. There is no way to escape it.

I am of the nature to die. There is no way to escape it.

There is no way to escape being separated from everyone I love, and all that is dear to me.

My actions are my only true belongings. My actions are the ground upon which I stand.





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Adil Shah of Bijapur had sworn an oath never to drink a drop of wine until he had recaptured Raichur. This was hard for him, as he was a man who loved good wine, and he was often tempted to break his oath, but did not. After the unpleasant gathering of the Five Sultans at Bisnaga, at which Achyuta and the other kings all drank copiously, Adil Shah, who had remained sober throughout that very long and awkward evening, decided it was time to act. He had never forgotten the humiliating message he had received from Krishnadevaraya, Kiss my feet, and resolved that Krishnadevaraya’s degraded successor Achyuta, who was so enamored of foot-kissing that he obliged even his most senior courtiers to abase themselves, needed to be taught the lesson of good manners that Krishnadevaraya had never learned.

He gathered his forces and attacked Raichur. The Bijapur army’s surprise arrival found the forces of Bisnaga unprepared for battle, and they were swiftly overrun. In the next few weeks the whole of the Raichur doáb region came under the control of Bijapur once again, and Adil Shah, standing beside the famous freshwater spring in the Raichur citadel, declared, “Today this spring will yield not water, but wine.”

Things were going badly wrong for Achyuta Deva Raya. Not only had he lost Raichur, which Krishnadevaraya had thought of as the jewel in his crown, but the king of Mysore, having overwhelmed King Veera in the south, had further expansionist plans, and there was a new Portuguese viceroy in Goa, Dom Constantine de Braganza, who was not content with being a horse-trader, was eyeing the whole of the west coast, and developing imperialist ambitions of his own.