Victory City by Salman Rushdie

Author:Salman Rushdie [Rushdie, Salman]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Knopf Canada
Published: 2023-02-07T00:00:00+00:00

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Deva Raya’s reign was a time of great success for Pampa Kampana, and she might easily have taken much justifiable pride in it. But in her verses describing those days, she was harshly self-critical.

“I begin to feel,” she wrote, “as if I am more than one person, and not all those persons are admirable. I am the mother of the city—even though few people believe I am she—but I am away from my own daughters and during this separation I do not feel like their mother at all. The years pass and I have not so much as ascertained if they are alive or dead. What elderly women they will have become if they still live, green-eyed ladies unknown to me and who do not know me either, even though I still remain superficially who I was a lifetime ago. That person, the person I see reflected in water or glass, I do not know who she is either. My daughter Yotshna asked me that question—‘Who are you?’—and I cannot answer it.

“This eternal youth is a kind of damnation. This power to affect the thoughts of others and to alter history is another curse. The witchcraft, the sorcery of magic seeds and metamorphosis, whose limits even I do not know, is a third. I am a ghost in a body that refuses to age. Vidyasagar and I are not so different after all. We are both specters of ourselves, lost within ourselves. What I know is that I am a bad mother, and my sons and daughters would all agree with that statement. Sometimes I feel I am not a person of any kind, that I no longer exist, that there is no longer an ‘I’ that I can identify with myself. Maybe I should go by a new name, or many new names in the interminable future that stretches ahead. When I say what my name is I am not believed because I am, of course, impossible.

“I am a shadow, or a dream. One night when darkness falls I might simply become a part of that darkness and disappear. I feel, often, that that would be no bad thing.”

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