Pampa Kampana built the city of Bisnaga out of thin air. She also populated the city with people, with animals, plants, with stories and histories, with culture and traditions — she didn’t just build a city, she built an entire civilization — all of it some 450 years ago.

Pampa Kampana’s story starts from when she was a little girl, when her city fell to foreign invaders and her mother (along with all the women of the city) walked fearlessly into leaping flames and consigned their lives to the most basic tenet of life — dignity. Pampa Kampana survived. Her childhood was lost in an instant, but she survived.

But when the goddess Pampa Kampana (yes, we are in a Rushdie fairytale) enters the body of the orphan girl, Pampa Kampana, she grants the latter the gift of the supernatural, the benefits of foresight, the avarice of sorcery, and the curse of near immortality — that is when things start to take a magical turn.

Two cowherds turned soldiers on the run from slavery, a bag of seeds, and Pampa Kampana’s promise leads to the city of Bisnaga being built. A big bursting city from the get go, the city is built as a beacon of opulence, of equality, of freedom, and of opportunity. Pampa Kampana made sure that no one in this megapolis had to endure her fate, her fright, her traumas. Bisnaga, named by a Portuguese merchant who favored the city, was magnificent.

But these stories end badly. Usually. And that’s what happened. The greatest challenge to existence is the passage of time. And while time does heal, time can also hurt. Opulence grew to corpulence. While there were ups and downs in the fate of Bisnaga, the centre never held — things fell apart. Time may have stood still for Pampa Kampana, but not for the fortunes of Bisnaga.

The idyllic megapolis that Pampa Kampana had conceived, it was starting to rot. As had Pampa Kampana. The process was long, but gradual. But together they were, together they would not. Exiled from the city she ruled over, returning again to the city she had built, the tale of Bisnaga was the fate of Pampa Kampana. There came an end of Bisnaga. There came an end to Pampa Kampana.

Rushdie, stabbed post the publication of Victory City, is rich with his magic, holding up a narrative that is as mesmerizing as it is metaphorical. A perfect rendition of the times we live in — not here or there˙, pretty much everywhere right now — Rushdie’s critical outreach through a tale most magnificent is unputdownable (hackneyed, but does justice).

The entire narrative is very brilliantly split into broad sections, each part a neat little passage of Pampa Kampana’s timeline, a timeline that took her through the zenith of all the ebb and flows that life could possible muster, through tumultuous emotions, reactions, and repercussions — and many victories, and through love, life, and loss.

And in all of this flows the story of the massive empire of Bisnaga, who’s reign saw her expand and rule over a subcontinent, who saw her story rise, her legends accrue — and yet, which crumbled slowly and steadily from the inside. Every passing generation lent something to the state of Bisnaga — both success and failure. Till it eventually collapsed at the end. As seeped in the moulds of history as the story of Bisnaga was, it felt thoroughly contemporary. The birth of a city with secular, inclusive, egalitarian ideals eventually coerced into a future with extreme religious legislation, and all of it happening organically, all of it eventually started to feel more like current affairs than the passages of an epic. All in all, it was very Harvey Two-Face reminding us that you die a hero, or you live long enough to see yourself become the villain of the piece.

And what of Pampa Kampana in the end? She died with her city. She knew her time was at an end. She knew that her city’s story had been told in its entirety. She knew this was the end. She didn’t fight her fate, she didn’t fight her city’s fate. She accepted what was going to happen and soon it was all over.

This is truly Rushdie at his absolute best. The magic realism genre is just muscle memory for him. At no point do you stray away from the story unfolding before you, at no point do you muddle through the generational characters that keep coming out of the woodwork, the entire bit where Pampa Kampana is reunited with her descendant and everything that follows from there — just pure genius. The writing of Rushdie can just transport you to another world and yet keep you firmly rooted to your reality, analyzing, dissecting, referring your way through a modern-day epic with present political and social undertones.

Magic.