Victory City

  PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF CANADA

  Copyright © 2023 Salman Rushdie

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Published in 2023 by Alfred A. Knopf Canada, a division of Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto, and simultaneously in the United States by Random House, an imprint and division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York, and in the United Kingdom by Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Vintage, part of the Penguin Random House group of companies. Distributed in Canada by Penguin Random House Canada Limited, Toronto.

  www.penguinrandomhouse.ca

  Knopf Canada and colophon are registered trademarks.

  Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

  Title: Victory City / Salman Rushdie.

  Names: Rushdie, Salman, author

  Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 2022023504X | Canadiana (ebook) 20220235058

  | ISBN 9781039000551 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781039000568 (EPUB)

  Classification: LCC PR6068.U757 V53 2023 | DDC 823/.914—dc23

  Victory City is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Cover illustration: Sonali Zohra

  ep_prh_6.0_142519746_c0_r0

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Part One: Birth

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Part Two: Exile

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Part Three: Glory

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Part Four: Fall

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  By Salman Rushdie

  About the Author

  PART

  ONE

  | Birth |

  1

  On the last day of her life, when she was two hundred and forty-seven years old, the blind poet, miracle worker, and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax in the heart of the ruined Royal Enclosure, as a message to the future. Four and a half centuries later we found that pot and read for the first time the immortal masterpiece named the Jayaparajaya, meaning “Victory and Defeat,” written in the Sanskrit language, as long as the Ramayana, made up of twenty-four thousand verses, and we learned the secrets of the empire she had concealed from history for more than one hundred and sixty thousand days. We knew only the ruins that remained, and our memory of its history was ruined as well, by the passage of time, the imperfections of memory, and the falsehoods of those who came after. As we read Pampa Kampana’s book the past was regained, the Bisnaga Empire was reborn as it truly had been, its women warriors, its mountains of gold, its generosity of spirit and its times of mean-spiritedness, its weaknesses and its strengths. We heard for the first time the full account of the kingdom that began and ended with a burning and a severed head. This is that story, retold in plainer language by the present author, who is neither a scholar nor a poet but merely a spinner of yarns, and who offers this version for the simple entertainment and possible edification of today’s readers, the old and the young, the educated and the not so educated, those in search of wisdom and those amused by folly, northerners and southerners, followers of different gods and of no gods, the broad-minded and the narrow-minded, men and women and members of the genders beyond and in between, scions of the nobility and rank commoners, good people and rogues, charlatans and foreigners, humble sages, and egotistical fools.

  * * *

  —

  The story of Bisnaga began in the fourteenth century of the Common Era, in the south of what we now call India, Bharat, Hindustan. The old king whose rolling head got everything going wasn’t much of a monarch, just the type of ersatz ruler who crops up between the decline of one great kingdom and the rise of another. His name was Kampila of the tiny principality of Kampili, “Kampila Raya,” raya being the regional version of raja, king. This second-rate raya had just about enough time on his third-rate throne to build a fourth-rate fortress on the banks of the Pampa river, to put a fifth-rate temple inside it, and to carve a few grandiose inscriptions into the side of a rocky hill, but then the army of the north came south to deal with him. The battle that followed was a one-sided affair, so unimportant that nobody bothered to give it a name. After the people from the north had routed Kampila Raya’s forces and killed most of his army they grabbed hold of the phony king and chopped off his crownless head. Then they filled it with straw and sent it north for the pleasure of the Delhi sultan. There was nothing particularly special about the battle without a name, or about the head. In those days battles were commonplace affairs and naming them was a thing a lot of people didn’t bother with; and severed heads were traveling across our great land all the time for the pleasure of this prince or that one. The sultan in his northern capital city had built up quite a collection.

  After the insignificant battle, surprisingly, there was an event of the kind that changes history. The story goes that the women of the tiny, defeated kingdom, most of them recently widowed as a result of the no-name battle, left the fourth-rate fortress, after making final offerings at the fifth-rate temple, crossed the river in small boats, improbably defying the turbulence of the water, walked some distance to the west along the southern bank, and then lit a great bonfire and committed mass suicide in the flames. Gravely, without making any complaint, they said farewell to one another and walked forward without flinching. Nor were there any screams when their flesh caught fire and the stink of death filled the air. They burned in silence; only the crackling of the fire itself could be heard. Pampa Kampana saw it all happen. It was as if the universe itself was sending her a message, saying, open your ears, breathe in, and learn. She was nine years old and stood watching with tears in her eyes, holding her dry-eyed mother’s hand as tightly as she could, while all the women she knew entered the fire and sat or stood or lay in the heart of the furnace spouting flames from their ears and mouths: the old woman who had seen everything and the young woman just starting out in life and the girl who hated her father the dead soldier and the wife who was ashamed of her husband because he hadn’t given up his life on the battlefield and the woman with the beautiful singing voice and the woman with the frightening laugh and the woman as skinny as a stick and the woman as fat as a melon. Into the fire they marched and the stench of their death made Pampa feel like retching and then to her horror her own mother Radha Kampana gently detached her hand and very slowly but with absolute conviction walked forward to join the bonfire of the dead, without even saying goodbye.

  For the rest of her life Pampa Kampana, who shared a name with the river on whose banks all this happened, would carry the scent of her mother’s burning flesh in her nostrils. The pyre was made of perfumed sandalwood, and an abundance of cloves and garlic and cumin seeds and sticks of cinnamon had been added to it as if the burning ladies were being prepared as a well-spiced dish to set before the sultan’s victorious generals for their gastronomic delight, but those fragrances—the turmeric, the big cardamoms, and the little cardamoms too—failed to mask the unique, cannibal pungency of women being cooked alive, and made their odor, if anything, even harder to bear. Pampa Kampana never ate meat again, and could not bring herself to remain in any kitchen in which it was being prepared. All such dishes exuded the memory of her mother and when other people ate dead animals Pampa Kampana had to avert her gaze.

  Pampa’s own father had died young, long before the nameless battle, so her mother was not one of the newly widowed. Arjuna Kampana had died so long ago that Pampa had no memory of his face. All she knew about him was what Radha Kampana had told her, that he had been a kind man, the well-loved potter of the town of Kampili, and that he had encouraged his wife to learn the potter’s art as well, so after he died she took over his trade and proved to be more than his equal. Radha, in turn, had guided little Pampa’s hands at the potter’s wheel and the child was already a skilled thrower of pots and bowls and had learned an important lesson, which was that there was no such thing as men’s work. Pampa Kampana had believed that this would be her life, making beautiful things with her mother, side by side at the wheel. But that dream was over now. Her mother had let go of her hand and abandoned her to her fate.

  For a long moment Pampa tried to convince herself that her mother was just being sociable and going along with the crowd, b
ecause she had always been a woman for whom the friendship of women was of paramount importance. She told herself that the undulating wall of fire was a curtain behind which the ladies had gathered to gossip, and soon they would all walk out of the flames, unharmed, maybe a little scorched, smelling a little of kitchen perfumes, perhaps, but that would pass soon enough. And then Pampa and her mother would go home.

  Only when she saw the last slabs of roasted flesh fall away from Radha Kampana’s bones to reveal the naked skull did she understand that her childhood was over and from now on she must conduct herself as an adult and never commit her mother’s last mistake. She would laugh at death and turn her face toward life. She would not sacrifice her body merely to follow dead men into the afterworld. She would refuse to die young and live, instead, to be impossibly, defiantly old. It was at this point that she received the celestial blessing that would change everything, because this was the moment when the goddess Pampa’s voice, as old as Time, started coming out of her nine-year-old mouth.

  It was an enormous voice, like the thunder of a high waterfall booming in a valley of sweet echoes. It possessed a music she had never heard before, a melody to which she later gave the name of kindness. She was terrified, of course, but also reassured. This was not a possession by a demon. There was goodness in the voice, and majesty. Radha Kampana had once told her that two of the highest deities of the pantheon had spent the earliest days of their courtship near here, by the angry waters of the rushing river. Perhaps this was the queen of the gods herself, returning in a time of death to the place where her own love had been born. Like the river, Pampa Kampana had been named after the deity—“Pampa” was one of the goddess Parvati’s local names, and her lover Shiva, the mighty Lord of the Dance himself, had appeared to her here in his local, three-eyed incarnation—so it all began to make sense. With a feeling of serene detachment Pampa, the human being, began to listen to the words of Pampa, the goddess, coming out of her mouth. She had no more control over them than a member of the audience has over the monologue of the star, and her career as a prophet and miracle worker began.

  Physically, she didn’t feel any different. There were no unpleasant side effects. She didn’t tremble, or feel faint, or experience a hot flush, or a cold sweat. She didn’t froth at the mouth or fall down in an epileptic fit, as she had been led to believe could happen, and had happened to other people, in such cases. If anything, there was a great calm surrounding her like a soft cloak, reassuring her that the world was still a good place and things would work out well.

  “From blood and fire,” the goddess said, “life and power will be born. In this exact place a great city will rise, the wonder of the world, and its empire will last for more than two centuries. And you,” the goddess addressed Pampa Kampana directly, giving the young girl the unique experience of being personally spoken to by a supernatural stranger speaking through her own mouth, “you will fight to make sure that no more women are ever burned in this fashion, and that men start considering women in new ways, and you will live just long enough to witness both your success and your failure, to see it all and tell its story, even though once you have finished telling it you will die immediately and nobody will remember you for four hundred and fifty years.” In this way Pampa Kampana learned that a deity’s bounty was always a two-edged sword.

  She began to walk without knowing where she was going. If she had lived in our time she might have said that the landscape looked like the surface of the moon, the pockmarked plains, the valleys of dirt, the rock piles, the emptiness, the sense of a melancholy void where burgeoning life should have been. But she had no sense of the moon as a place. To her it was just a shining god in the sky. On and on she walked until she began to see miracles. She saw a cobra using its hood to shield a pregnant frog from the heat of the sun. She saw a rabbit turn and face a dog that was hunting it, and bite the dog on its nose and make it run away. These wonders made her feel that something marvelous was at hand. Soon after these visions, which might have been sent as signs by the gods, she arrived at the little mutt at Mandana.

  A mutt could also be called a peetham but to avoid confusion let us simply say: it was a monk’s dwelling. Later, as the empire grew, the Mandana mutt became a grand place extending all the way to the banks of the rushing river, an enormous complex employing thousands of priests, servitors, tradesmen, craftsmen, janitors, elephant keepers, monkey handlers, stable hands, and workers in the mutt’s extensive paddy fields, and it was revered as the sacred place where emperors came for advice, but in this early time before the beginning began it was humble, little more than an ascetic’s cave and a vegetable patch, and the resident ascetic, still a young man at that time, a twenty-five-year-old scholar with long curly locks flowing down his back all the way to his waist, went by the name of Vidyasagar, which meant that there was a knowledge-ocean, a vidya-sagara, inside his large head. When he saw the girl approaching with hunger on her tongue and madness in her eyes he understood at once that she had witnessed terrible things and gave her water to drink and what little food he had.

  After that, at least in Vidyasagar’s version of events, they lived together easily enough, sleeping on opposite corners of the floor of the cave, and they got along fine, in part because the monk had sworn a solemn vow of abstinence from the things of the flesh, so that even when Pampa Kampana blossomed into the grandeur of her beauty he never laid a finger on her although the cave wasn’t very big and they were alone in the dark. For the rest of his life that was what he said to anyone who asked—and there were people who asked, because the world is a cynical and suspicious place and, being full of liars, thinks of everything as a lie. Which is what Vidyasagar’s story was.

  Pampa Kampana, when asked, did not reply. From an early age she acquired the ability of shutting away from her consciousness many of the evils that life handed out. She had not yet understood or harnessed the power of the goddess within her, so she had not been able to protect herself when the supposedly abstinent scholar crossed the invisible line between them and did what he did. He did not do it often, because scholarship usually left him too tired to do much about his lusts, but he did it often enough, and every time he did it she erased his deed from her memory by an act of will. She also erased her mother, whose self-sacrifice had sacrificed her daughter upon the altar of the ascetic’s desires, and for a long time she tried to tell herself that what happened in the cave was an illusion, and that she had never had a mother at all.

  In this way she was able to accept her fate in silence; but an angry power began to grow in her, a force from which the future would be born. In time. All in good time.

  She did not say a single word for the next nine years, which meant that Vidyasagar, who knew many things, didn’t even know her name. He decided to call her Gangadevi, and she accepted the name without complaint, and helped him gather berries and roots to eat, to sweep out their poor residence, and to haul water from the well. Her silence suited him perfectly, because on most days he was lost in meditation, considering the meanings of the sacred texts which he had learned by heart, and seeking answers to two great questions: whether wisdom existed or there was only folly, and the related question of whether there was such a thing as vidya, true knowledge, or only many different kinds of ignorance, and true knowledge, after which he was named, was possessed only by the gods. In addition, he thought about peace, and asked himself how to ensure the triumph of nonviolence in a violent age.

  This was how men were, Pampa Kampana thought. A man philosophized about peace but in his treatment of the helpless girl sleeping in his cave his deeds were not in alignment with his philosophy.