Victory City

Krishna dies an ignominious death. Under Pampa’s regency, his kingdom was known throughout the world. By blinding her, he symbolically drives the kingdom back into darkness, and few people care about him by the time he dies. In one final act of foolishness, he calls for his brother to be released. In spite of everything Pampa has tried to tell Krishna, he cannot commit to naming a woman as his heir. Rather than install a queen, he calls forth a man with no redeeming qualities to set the final collapse of the empire into motion. Achyuta is not as explicitly evil as the rapist Vidyasagar, but he possesses the same streak of male arrogance, which hinders him from understanding his own limitations. Achyuta cannot comprehend how foolish he is, nor is he capable of governing in any meaningful sense. In this way, his rule is the opposite of what Pampa sought to accomplish. She wanted to build a better world for marginalized people, whereas Achyuta is only interested in his own power and pleasures. The grand ambitions for Bisnaga as a political and cultural project are replaced by the hedonistic pursuits of a man who sleeps in a golden bed while his people starve. Achyuta achieves nothing and dies an unremarkable death. That he should hold such a lasting place in the pantheon of the kings of Bisnaga is a damning indictment of what the city has become.

In contrast to Achyuta, the final king of Bisnaga is tragically convinced of his own cleverness. Aliya is almost a parody of a political schemer, a man who is regarded as too sly by his own unimpressed wife. Aliya tries to use his cunning to elevate Bisnaga’s status, but all he achieves is turning his allies against him to such an extent that they invade and destroy his kingdom. For years, Aliya warns about the destructiveness of Achyuta’s rule, only to demonstrate that he is a far worse ruler. The last king of Bisnaga is the embodiment of the entitled, arrogant, patriarchal attitudes Pampa sought to destroy.

During this time, however, Pampa has retreated from public life. Her great work, the poem Jayaparajaya becomes her primary occupation. Since she knows that the end is near, she becomes invested in creating the history of her city as it is reduced to a crumbling relic. In her blindness, Pampa can see far more than just the world around her. This added perspective allows her to write a more nuanced and authoritative account of Bisnaga’s history. Just as she could not have ruled Bisnaga as effectively as Queen Regent without her earlier failures, she cannot write the history of the city without the suffering she has endured on the city’s behalf. With her sight gone, with her status removed, with her family line destroyed, and with her magical youth rapidly fading away, everything that once defined her is coming to an end. In this moment, Pampa realizes that her dreams cannot be accomplished. She cannot build the version of Bisnaga that she had always wanted to build. What she can do, however, is create a historical document that might inspire generations that come after her. Pampa has seen firsthand how history is liable to repeat itself. Even with the threat of European colonization, even with the rivals of Bisnaga reducing the city to rubble, she knows that she will not be alone in history. Her poem becomes a message about Patriarchy and the Struggle for Equality, sent to the future, assuring little girls with big dreams that a better world can be made, so long as they possess the drive and the determination to act upon their desires. Pampa is not the architect of the society she wanted, she comes to understand, but she is the architect of its story, and her poem concludes with a declaration of her lasting power over all those men who tried to assert their power over her:

They will be remembered in the way I have chosen to remember them. Their deeds will only be known in the way they have been set down. They will mean what I wish them to mean. All that remains is this city of words. Words are the only victors (338).

Pampa could not prevent the foolish ambitions of men from destroying her city, but the city of words is eternal, and within it her power is unchallenged. Secure in this knowledge, she can happily surrender herself to the end of a life that has lasted far longer than she ever expected.