The Assassin's Song (10 page)

“Yes, thank you, Professor Barua. And thank you for the Postmaster Flat you've kindly allocated me. It's very convenient.”

“Yes, you were lucky.”

He saw the surprise on my face and smiled indulgently, as if to admit, no, it was not luck but special pleading by a mutual friend. He himself is from the northeast, with that region's typical flat, oriental features; a brilliant but modest man, from what I understand, an analytic philosopher not without a sense of humour.

“I understand you are quite a singer—perhaps you can sing for us—my wife organizes a singing circle on Sundays in the Guest House lounge …”

I stared at him, gauging sincerity. “Sometimes I sing to myself—to recall the tunes—”

“You should record them.”

“I'm recording the words.”

“Record the tunes, the ragas—before we lose these folk melodies. I can make a tape recorder available for you—would you like to have one?”

I said yes. And permission to travel was also granted, fare was given, for the purpose of visiting New Delhi for research. Not that I needed the fare, but it comes with the package of generosity that's been awarded to me. He was being kind, but obviously he would have to inform the major, my guardian angel from the CBI.

“Take care,” he said in the western fashion as I left his office. Perhaps he meant more. I nodded.

The bus arrives in Delhi at past six, and stiff and bleary I hop down onto the sidewalk. Public buses are groaning their way round the circus, already full; a newspaper and paperback vendor sets up on the sidewalk; a beggar
woman walks by, both arms stretched out before her automaton-like. A chai-wallah is pumping his stove. It feels warm and laden here, after the quick mountain air I've left behind. As soon as life returns to unlock my stiff limbs, I negotiate with an auto-rickshaw to take me to a university guest house recommended to me by the director. It turns out to be a miserable excuse for one (though the grounds are impeccable), dark inside, the room infested with mosquitoes that greet me with vigour as soon as I step in; but the rate is cheap and full breakfast is ten rupees, who is to quibble? The watchman, who checks me in, looks suspicious, what with the recent bombing in one of the city's busiest markets. Kashmiri terrorists are suspected.

After a cold bath and breakfast I walk to Connaught Place, ignoring several autos on the way, perhaps as a paranoid precaution against being followed, until I reach Block C, where I wave down a vehicle.

First stop is the Sahitya Akademi Library. There is material here to look up. The medieval world of Nur Fazal has begun to interest me as never before. I had received it as legend and myth, magic and mystery, all special to us; now I see it more as a real, historical period and myself as a thread in its endless extension. The 1260s or thereabouts—when the sufi arrived in India—what did the world look like then? The Mongols had conquered it from Beijing to Baghdad, for one thing … the Crusades had been defeated finally by Saladin, the great universities of Europe had been founded … there was the Inca empire in America, the Mali empire in Africa … Vast armies moved, peoples perished. What of the individual? Can we really understand the past beyond the facts? When we define the terms, perhaps. I enter the great halls of the library, pay the required fees, and look up the works of the thirteenth-century court poet Amir Khusrau, whose master Alaudin Khilji had sent his generals from Delhi to conquer Gujarat. Thus came the ignoble end of the great city of Patan. Khusrau wrote a narrative poem about the conquest, a tender love story describing how the Gujarati princess Deval became the object of passion of the prince, Alaudin's son Khizr Khan, for whose sake she was captured and taken to Delhi. A tragic story, really, for that was not the end of her fate; Alaudin was killed, Khizr was blinded then killed, and Deval ended her days in the harem of an upstart. But we at Pirbaag, I recall, had a different take on the story of our Gujarati princess.

What's surprising is that, old as it is, and historically vague, the story carries a bitter potency for the nationalist fanatics of today, shames their modern manhood, goads them into states of rage and hatred.

At noon, holding photocopies, I emerge into the now blazing summer heat and take an auto to Old Delhi.

On Chandni Chowk, the main thoroughfare, I thread my way purposefully for a while through the bustle of rickshaws and touts and shoppers and handcarts, before I admit to the uselessness of my solo venture and stop at a sidewalk vendor. Where is Azad Gully, I inquire. Ay!—he asks around, gets a satisfactory answer, then motions to a waiting bicycle rickshaw in what is evidently a prearrangement; a wiry man of about thirty pushes his vehicle towards me. We come to an agreement on the fare, I climb in, and the lean muscles do their job and carry me off among crowds first through one gully, then another, the jeweller's market, the paper market, the perfume market, where finally I am dropped off.

A schoolboy in uniform points to a quiet, narrow alleyway, into whose dark shadows I enter. Inside, a single shopfront is open, a man sitting at a counter observing me as I come along; it's a belt workshop, the showcase under his elbows crammed with buckles of all sorts. Some men or boys work behind him on the floor, sitting in a circle. He directs me to the door of an old-style haveli across the lane. I step in through that door, enter a large courtyard, stop short. All around me the ruins of ancient buildings. Directly in front is a raised platform where perhaps dancing nautch girls performed once upon a time. The great Ghalib could have come to recite his poetry here; he lived not far from where I stand. The courtyard is strewn with rubble; the platform, which has a roof, is stacked with brown boxes containing, according to the description on the sides, computer monitors. A girl stares at me from a doorway to my right; she points to a dilapidated flight of open stairs across the yard, towards which I venture uncertainly. The sky above me is blue as I climb up; in the distance some birds, a couple of kites. The steps are high, and I have to breathe harder as I ascend; the girl down below watches me curiously.

The first-floor landing is abandoned; hardly any structure remains— piles of rubble, a doorway in a fragment of wall; beyond all that, apparently, open air, a sheer fall. There is a second floor, which is less broken; that it is supported at all is a miracle. The landing has no ceiling, but a
doorway leads me leftwards to another one and thence around to a set of rooms. On the way, through missing walls I can look down upon the cartons and the girl, still watching me. A woman of about thirty now immediately covers her head upon sighting me, at the same time picking up a wailing baby from the floor.

“Is Mansoor here?” I ask.

She turns a blank stare at me.

“A Gujarati man—” Chhota sa, this height?

“Omar Bhai, from Gujarat—Haripur?” A high voice.

“Hari-
pir
,” I correct her, wearily, and she gives me a startled look.

She points me to a door, where someone has already appeared.

I have seen him only once since my return and the sight startles me again—so much ingrained in me is the picture of the little prankster I left behind. He is unshaved, his hair is dishevelled, and he wears a blue dhoti and white singlet.

“You came, Bhai,” Mansoor says softly; we embrace awkwardly.

“How are you?”

“Well. Come, Bhai—follow me, to my room.”

We climb up a step, walk past more crumbled, incomplete walls, then arrive at a blue oil-painted door. He shoots back the bolt, pushes in the two door panels, and we enter his room: a dark haunting place, the only window small and barred, from which enters a stale, pallid daylight. A naked bulb on a table lamp is the other source of light. There is a chair, a small table, and a bed, upon which we both sit. And look at each other.

“Are you all right?”

“Yes … yes, I am all right. As all right as possible.”

“Meaning what,” I ask desperately. “Mansoor, what are you doing here—in such a place?”

“It's temporary, until I have some money—you brought the money, Bhai?”

“Yes, but it can't last you long, Mansoor.”

“I know. But long enough.”

He speaks softly, with a smile and what I hope I only imagine is a mad gleam in the eye. There is much I want to ask him—what happened to Pirbaag, to Ma and Bapu, what he's been up to—to continue from where we left off abruptly in Ahmedabad only a few weeks ago. But the time, the
place don't seem right. How could the two of us, princes of Pirbaag, have ended up here, of all places—an ancient ruin in a gully in Old Delhi, in an atmosphere of secrecy and fear?

“Come, let's go somewhere and have a meal,” I tell him. Perhaps outside in the light we can talk. And he looks starved. He readily agrees. He changes first, into trousers and shirt, and he combs his hair, taking his time, as though waiting for something.

A muezzin's cry finally rises up from the Jama Mosque nearby. My brother throws a glance at the clock. “Come, let's pray,” he says.

I look at him, dumbstruck. He picks up a mat from behind the chair, and without a glance at me throws it on the floor, and quickly does the Muslim prayer. A geometric abstraction, symbol of piety, normally I would respect it. But it gives me a shiver of apprehension. When did he become this way? Is it faith or bitter reaction he's expressing?

Downstairs, as we step out of the haveli, the man in the belt store shouts a greeting and Mansoor replies, “Salaam, Mukhtiar!”

It is then that I look at the small rectangular wooden signboard above the store: “Salim Belt and Buckle.”

I stop to stare at my brother, a response he seems to expect.

“Mukhtiar from Haripir?” I ask him.

“The same.”

Mukhtiar, one of the two sons of Salim Buckle, a man who met a ghastly fate in our village long ago. Hardly a comforting presence here. Two pairs of eyes pin me, as I briefly take in this situation. Then with an awkward smile and a wave at the shopkeeper, saying, “Let's go, Mansoor,” I lead my brother away.

At the restaurant in a main street, where it's bright and peopled and cheerful, I watch him polish off his thali with an emotion I can barely suppress. From where we sit, the gold market up the street appears all aglitter with fluorescent light and jewellery, gangs of well-dressed women swarming around the shops, some with cellphones to their ears.

“Since when have you become ‘Omar,’ ” I ask severely, in a low voice.

“I don't want a sufi-pufi name,” he answers with an arrogant smile.

“You know who Mansoor was—after whom you were named?”

“He was a crazy guy who let himself be killed.”

“Because he believed in the truth—”

“And so do I.”

“Why ‘Omar’?”

“He was a great fighter.”

“And what are you fighting, Bhai? Tell me.”

He does not answer.

“And Mukhtiar? What's he up to in Delhi?”

“He has his business. He lives with his family, and he found me that room where I stay.”

We order more tea, one more samosa each, and bright orange jelebis from the woks. We sit in silence awhile, look at the human traffic outside, watch the flurry of waiters running hither and thither and shouting their orders. It occurs to me that my brother has not inquired once about how I have fared all these years abroad, about the life I've left behind. To him, I simply abandoned them all. Now he looks up at me and smiles.

“You know they are looking for you?” I tell him. “The police?”

Comes the passionate reply, “They are looking for scapegoats only. Any Muslim will do, to deflect attention from the crimes of Modi's government in Gujarat. They started a genocide there, Bhai, everyone knows it, yet no one is willing to use that word.”

He takes a quick breath, we fall into silence. I realize I don't know what to say to my brother because I cannot face his answers, their implications. The killings in Gujarat have taken away my own certainty; I simply cling to my beliefs due to a certain obstinacy, a residual blind faith in our society, that it would never allow premeditated, government-sponsored pogroms.

“Then you are not up to anything silly?” I ask him finally and hopelessly.

He does not answer, busily blows on the steaming tea in his hand, pauses to guide a film of cream to a side of the cup with his little finger.

Having taken his time, he says, “You know, Brother—when we reply sticks for sticks and swords for swords, we are always cut down because we are few and unorganized. It's the big thing that makes the difference— makes them scared.”

“What ‘big thing’? What are you saying? Are you crazy?”

Again the silence. And I notice we have managed to draw a few stares from the other tables.

“Who's ‘we’?” I ask crossly but quietly. “The world does not divide so
neatly into ‘we’ and ‘them,’ Mansoor, there was no such thing when we were growing up!”

“There is, now.”

He accompanies me to the main street. Chandni Chowk is one place that's heavily watched, I tell myself nervously.

He says, “You left a long time ago, Bhai. I grew up in a different India than the one you knew, and I am a Muslim.”

I don't know what to say to this, for there is a truth to it. Desperately I plead, “Promise me you will not do anything stupid—”

“Depends on what you mean.”

We've reached the end of the road, the Red Fort is before us, the Jain sanctuary for birds on our right. We've just passed the place where the Sikh Guru Tegh Bahadur was martyred by Aurangzeb the Mogul emperor, as the plaque outside informs passersby.

The old wounds, the old battles. They and we, and no place in the middle.

“Try and see sense,” I plead as we embrace, then we head off in opposite directions.