The Assassin's Song (13 page)

The sheikh looked up above him and said, “Allah-karim knows this is not what we want.”

Bapu-ji and the sheikh by themselves walked over to the mosque, climbed up the steps to the verandah, and disappeared into the dark interior to converse in private. I and my two companions from Pirbaag were brought water. Not long afterwards the two elders appeared, solemn as before. They nodded to each other and then we left.

I slept fitfully that night. My mother kept vigil in the courtyard, sitting at my work table, occasionally flipping the pages of a magazine, or napping with her head in the crook of her arm on the table. Bapu-ji was in the library; the two attendants sat outside on the steps of the mausoleum. All was quiet, nothing happened. At four my father went to the temple to meditate. No one from the village attended that morning, and the azan from the mosque did not sound. At five my father came to get me, to perform the ritual of the Ganges water, which involved the pouring of ordinary water from a brass pot into a bowl, into which was mixed blessed water from a small glass bottle. Devotees would be served the sanctified water from the bowl. There had to be at least a second person present for this ancient ritual, and the attendants were not around. While Bapu-ji and I proceeded with the ritual—he let me pour from the bottle—there came a piercing scream from outside.

After the ceremony my father came out to sit on the pavilion. It was still early, the sky was a grey blue, and the air was cool and laced with woodsmoke. Ma brought hot milk for Bapu-ji and told me to come in for breakfast. Suddenly there were sounds of people outside on the road, and at almost that moment the attendants rushed in with the news that Salim Buckle's dead body had been discovered at the fork.

In the village later that morning life had returned to normal; the tire shed was open, a truck stood outside; bhajans were playing in Ramdas's flower shop. The fruit-seller's cart was active, and the barber had resumed his business. The children were in school or at play. And people came to the shrine to beg favours.

Salim Buckle's body was so mutilated it was taken straight to the mosque, washed by the men and kept covered until the funeral that same day. He had been cut up with a sword. Some said his heart had been cut out, others, his liver; a sword had been run through one eye. In the afternoon we boys
went and had a nervous look at the spot by the unpaved roadside where he was found; it had been washed with water and swept, but the ground was still dark where the blood had crept through. Dogs were sniffing around.

It was believed that the buckle man had been responsible for the desecration of the Damani family shrine and had paid the price; who exacted it could be surmised; they had gone anyway, and we had been saved devastation.

My father went to the funeral, but not to the burial ground. When he returned, he went not to his library but the sanctum of the mausoleum. There he spent the entire night in communion with the Pir.

By the friendship my brother has kept up, it is evident that the ghost of Salim Buckle still haunts us. What havoc has he planned for his revenge?

Negro. The Bible and the pangs of puberty. Isaac didn't matter.

Haripir returned to its normative mode, life proceeded as before. The weekly crowds at Pirbaag, Raja Singh's abrupt arrivals, my mother's furtive escapes to the movies—these highlights continued, inflecting my humdrum existence, marking the fitful passage of time. That day of the near-riot was now a chilly thought, a nightmare remembered. For long afterwards sometimes I would wake up with the clear image in my mind of that dead-still high noon when the knives were drawn. This dream scene became rare but I could never shake it off.

As I passed my fourteenth year, life seemed to bring new possibilities. That year, for one thing, a Christian teacher arrived at our school.

St. Arnold's was an old red-brick building connected by an open corridor to a modern, though already worn complex of classrooms behind. The older portion, some sixty years old, consisted of the principal's office and a storeroom, edged by a narrow verandah and a strip of garden in front. Next door but detached was the chapel, with its high vaulted ceiling and arched door, but it was dingy and neglected and used for nothing but the occasional meeting or by the boys to hide in the back and smoke. The large fenced ground outside was red and barren; it had for long been slated for a hospital construction but meanwhile it was our playground. There were only a handful of Christians in the school, including the principal and some pupils.

Everything about the new teacher, Mr. David, was colourful and unusual; cool, though the term was not in use then. His features immediately garnered him the nickname “Negro” among the boys. He was not darker
than most Gujarati men but his hair was a mass of curls and his facial features also seemed to suggest Africa to us; not that we knew much about the continent—except Tarzan of the movies and his jungle cry—or its people. He wore bright shirts, and when he took them off, a finely muscled body was revealed, and chest hair so neat, it could have been curled on purpose. The suggestion of alien savagery had snaked its way into our thoughts perhaps from some orthodox home, or even the school staff room.

Mr. David was in his thirties; he had a high voice, and he spoke Gujarati in the caustic, Kathiawadi way of my mother, besides Urdu and English. His given name was John. He had an easy, friendly manner with us, so different from the bullying ways of the other teachers. He taught us science and PT, and his English was smarter than even that of our haughty principal and senior English master, Mr. Joseph.

Red House had just played Yellow in a match of hutu-tutu on the volleyball court; dripping with sweat and covered with sand, I was walking to the outside tap to clean up before going home. Mr. David had stepped alongside, and I glowed with the privilege.

“Why don't you come to the church in the morning?” Mr. David asked. “I notice you come early to school sometimes. We have a small service every day before bell rings. A smart, intelligent boy like you should come to church.”

The church was a block away from the school, a high building of the same red brick, but far tidier, with a beautiful front garden. It seemed almost always deserted.

“I am not a Christian, sir,” I said to him, surprised that he shouldn't know that. “Are you a priest, sir?”

“I see,” he said, and laughed briefly before replying. “And no, I am the deacon—an assistant. Reverend Norman is the priest. You don't have to be a Christian, Karsan, to come. It's just for comradeship and to think about spiritual matters. What's important in life.”

In spite of his friendly manner, he seemed a lonely man. He was not even married, while most of our other teachers had thriving families living in the neighbourhood. Often after school I would see him sitting in a classroom marking exercise books or reading a paper, in no particular hurry to go anywhere.

“I teach the Christian students at noontime every Friday. Come and see if you like it,” said Mr. David. “We tell a lot of stories!”

“Do you drink wine, sir?”

His smile broke for an instant, then returned. He said slowly, “Not in the class, Karsan.”

To counter the open admiration and awe in which he was held by many students, his presence had also become the occasion for some vile gossip. Christians turned wine into blood, by some magic of the priest, before drinking it up; or, they were really Tantriks and the blood was women's blood; and so on.

I became uncomfortably silent, but much to my pleasure he rescued me in a couple of steps by going on to discuss the upcoming Cassius Clay fight with Floyd Patterson. Mr. David was also the boxing coach. To see him in gloves and shorts, sparring with an imaginary opponent to demonstrate technique, and perhaps to show off, dancing about lightly, throwing a left, then a right, was truly awesome. We would cheer him enthusiastically and mercilessly tease the invisible foe.

Raja Singh was my expert on matters of the world. The Christian wine, said he, became blood in their bodies only. For the rest of us wine was wine. And what was that? He was only too happy to enlighten.

“Wine, young friend, they call ‘daughter of the grape.’ Beautiful and seductive, this rose-cheeked temptress—many have followed her never to return.” A pause, then: “Don't touch it.”

“Have you had wine, Raja Singh?”

“Only as medicine, yaar …”

“And it gives strength?”

“Whisky, they say, Ji, sometimes does that …”

“Johnnie Walker?” A name from the advertisements.

“He is for the rich, yaar.” A tone of regret.

What a comfort this friend, with his knowledge about the world; and what a subversive, I now think. It seems to me sometimes that the difference between my raging brother and me was only the presence in my life of this turbaned ferryman, this lorry driver who gave me rides in his smelly truck called the Kaleidoscope and brought me the world in print and talk.

“Singh-ji—are holy people born the same way as others?”

He looked at me, grinned broadly.

“Yaar—everybody is born the same way—gods, rakshasas, people.” Punching a zestful fist into his other palm: “Even pirs!”

“Even pirs?”

“Even pirs.”

What I really wanted to know was whether I had come into the world the same way as other people. Bapu couldn't have done the sex thing with Ma, surely. He was holy, he was the avatar. Buddha was born in a special way, so was Jesus. Why not I, and Mansoor? But Ma, who sneaked off to the cinema wearing a burqa and hid pictures of Dilip Kumar and Sunil Dutt in her dresser, was hardly Mary.

I was growing up, and I didn't know what I really was.

One day to my amazement I came across two compact black objects inside my desk: they were the two Testaments of the Bible, bound in gleaming leather, adorned with glittering gold text on the front and the spine. The New Testament had a cross on it. I fingered them guiltily, then quickly closed the top of my desk. That night, at home in my room, I took the two books out from my satchel, handling them by the fingertips with reverence and admiration. They were holy books, containing knowledge and mystery and power. But were they for me? The wrong magic in the wrong hands could be devastating. These books were brand-new and illustrated with etchings of tall, solemn men in long beards and robes. Each book also contained a colour frontispiece. There was a place in them to write the owner's name, which I did, and to write notes at the back, which I attempted as I flipped the thin pages and began to read.

But of the two, the Old (as I called it) was the mesmerizing one, in spite of the language, because of its language. In the beginning was the Word. The Word! How beautiful, how profound. And then a multitude of stories, into which I would dip late into the night, reading about Moses and David; the patient Job, the forbearing Jonah; the strong Samson and the wily Delilah. And the one that touched me the most, kept me up late into the night, brooding—the story of the father, Abraham, who was willing to sacrifice his son, put him to the knife, for a calling … Didn't Isaac matter?—I asked myself. No, because the call of the Almighty had come.

Isaac didn't matter
, I wrote in the back of my Bible, and underlined it
firmly.
Son didn't matter to father.
God the father and Abraham the father; the Old Testament had many stubborn fathers. They could get angry and they could be kind; the biggest of them all, the God-father, wanted respect. He did not like to be denied. Indian gods were so unlike these overbearing fathers; they were magic and illusion, and they loved to play. Vishnu took nine births; he became a man-lion to fool and slay a demon; he became Buddha and Rama; in the form of Krishna he stole butter and played the flute and teased the gopis. And Shiva the Dancer jumped down from his statue to fetch water for Nur Fazal the sufi in Patan; his son was the smiling, good-luck Ganesh with the elephant face; from his hair flowed the sacred river Ganga … So different from God the father, Abraham the father, the Saheb my father.

The Saheb my father? Was I a sacrifice?

I would also read of a passion so tender I trembled and cried out with pain and shuddered and moaned, Pir Bawa forgive me …
I am my beloved's, and my beloved is mine
, which could be a line from the aching love songs of our Pir Bawa, which Bapu-ji said were only allegorical; but here in this Bible there was more:
Thy two breasts are like two young roses that are twins, which feed among the lilies
—

“Eh, Karsaniya, what is it?” comes Ma's voice. “Are you still awake?”

Silence; and in the other bed Mansoor breathes deeply on his back, undisturbed, his chest rising up and down in steady waves.

She waits outside, ears cocked; then walks away murmuring.

And I would return to my image of the tall, lithe Shilpa, Bapu-ji's new volunteer; and my Rabari tormenter of the red sari and the extra-large nose stud, whose name I didn't know, whom I had not seen for several months now …

I rose up to open to my beloved, please
… The Song of Solomon was my book of love and lust and longing. I would read and squirm and begged forgiveness for the karmic dirt I accumulated through my imaginings.