The Assassin's Song (15 page)

Shastri blushed deeply, then asked my father if he would consider
joining the advisory board of NAPYP; many eminent gurus who were concerned about the nation's sanskriti had joined. Bapu-ji said he would think about it.

Smartly decked out in my NAPYP uniform—khaki shorts, white shirt, red beret, and black shoes—I would depart early Sunday morning through our gate. A few of the faithful would leave the shrine with me, having taken part in the morning rituals at the temple, and chat respectfully with me, not unconscious of my curiously bright appearance. I was learning more about our nation, I would inform them proudly, and training to defend it. I wonder what they made of that; but they simply smiled and nodded and said, “Good!”

My friends and I and other boys, some of them from neighbouring villages, gathered noisily outside Shastri's house at the fork, waiting to be let in. Across the road in the village shop one of the Damanis would be perched at the till, attending to customers, handing out items of morning essentials. At seven thirty sharp the gate of the house would be opened by one of two strong-looking young men in pure white dhotis and smelling faintly of perfumed oil. We would pour in, remove our shoes, and line up in the small front yard to make obeisance to the statue of the monkey god Hanuman, giver of strength and virility, deity of the martial arts, while a hymn on tape extolled the god's virtues. It was Hanuman's army which had carried out the daring raid on Lanka, set that island fortress aflame, and rescued Sita. Some of us would have brought flowers for the god; mine I took surreptitiously from any grave at our shrine that looked especially well endowed that morning, with Ma's permission and no one else looking. After the Hanuman puja, we gave obeisance to our guru, Pradhan Shastri, sitting bare chested and cross-legged on the mat-covered ground, a few feet away from the god. We bowed and touched his feet and he would put a hand on our heads and smile his appreciation. He too gave off a sweet odour. We would then sit before him, the hymn would be turned off, and our lesson would begin.

We learned of our nation's glorious history, which began thousands of years ago, before any of the invaders came. There had been the glorious civilization at Ayodhya; its prince was the perfect man-god Rama, whose wife was the flawlessly virtuous and beautiful Sita, daughter of Janaka. We
learned about the great sages of yore and their wisdom. All the science that the western countries now boasted had already been revealed to our sages in the Vedas. China and Iran had received their civilizations from us, when the Europeans were still living in trees. Our civilization had possessed rockets and nuclear bombs thousands of years ago. What was Shiva's trishul but a missile; Vishnu's Garuda but a rocket? That had been our Golden Age. Everything was in equilibrium; dharma meant duty to parents, the law, the guru, the nation, everybody knew his place. But then the Indian man and woman became weak and soft, and the invaders came and raped the nation one by one.

Pradhan Shastri, declaiming in his dry voice, stirred our young blood. How could we Indians have let such glory waste away? How could we have allowed that evil Afghan Mahmoud of Ghazna to destroy and plunder the temple of Somnath not once but several times; or Alaudin Khilji's generals to drag the sacred lingam all the way to Delhi; or the queen and princess of Gujarat to end their lives in his harem? The story of Princess Deval's plight, as she was wrenched away from her father Karan's arms, brought a tear to the eyes of even the most stalwart and rude among us. Yes, we would reply to his rhetorical exhortation, “Taiyar chhie!” We were ready to fight.

Discipline was strict; any chatting or giggling during lessons could result in uth-bess, a painful, humiliating drill in which the “miscreant” had to crouch and stand up in succession fifty or a hundred times, holding his ears; repeated offence earned six cane strokes on the palm or two on the bottom. Further than that was shameful dismissal from this sacred army of Hanuman.

After an hour of heart-stirring history and rousing patriotism, in our shoes again we marched military fashion in twos to a playing field, singing patriotic songs, proudly holding our staves upright, as onlookers on the road watched and cheered. On the field we were put to a military-style drill, calisthenics, and sports. We were taught to wrestle and fight with our hands and with our staves; we crawled on our elbows with our weapons until we bruised and bled and despaired.

But with me Shastri was teasingly, cruelly ambivalent. He never hit me, in deference to my father's position, but he enjoyed humiliating me. He had discovered, somehow, my second name: Nur. I was Nur Karsan, just as my father was Nur Tejpal. I had told no one about my second name, it was
never used, was implicit, customary. And so, one day, to call me to attention he deliberately called me by the full name, “Nur Karsan!” totally startling me and drawing upon me a volley of laughter.

“Musalman nu naam laagé chhe,” sounds Muslim, he said, distaste all over his face.

“It's the name of our Pir Bawa!” I blurted out, then with presence of mind added, “Hindu-Muslim-Christian-Sikh are all the same to him!”

“That is true,” Pradhan Shastri said, startled at my vehemence, and turned away.

He knew I disliked wrestling, hated tangling with another and falling to the ground—even though my Dada had been a good wrestler in his youth. It gave Shastri great satisfaction to see me tumbling to the ground at the hands of his choice pupils, in the grip of a neck hold, my face in the sand. A few times, under the pretext of teaching me a move, he was on top of me, his oil-rubbed body exuding a repulsive sweaty perfume, his red lips emitting the smell of sweet jintan, his large eyes digging into mine, terrifying me.

I swore—I wished—then to have my vengeance on him. But like the other boys I also admired him and wanted to be liked by him. His dedication to and enthusiasm for the nation were impressive, and through him we were part of a national army of youthful volunteers ever watchful of our Mother India, who—he had convinced us—was in mortal danger from her enemies.

The world according to Mr. David was a different place from Pradhan Shastri's.

Occasionally during pt lesson on Saturday Mr. David would gather us around on the field and we would have a small picnic and discuss the affairs of the world. He would have sent a peon to bring gathiyas or bhajiyas from down the road and we would share a few bottles of soda. We were flattered to be taken seriously by a teacher. You are the future, he would tell us; let no one convince you otherwise. And we would glance quickly at each other and think, Yes, why not; we are young; the world is ours.

There was much to discuss. Who would win the third world war if it occurred—the godless Russians or the materialistic Americans? Only recently we had been on the brink, with a crisis in Cuba. Would Nehru's
policy of nonalignment succeed? Compared to the western countries, India was underdeveloped; Mr. David gave us the statistics to prove this. You could expect to live to be forty-five in India, but seventy if you lived in America. What if you went to live in America when you were fortyfour? How old are you, sir? Are the gods real? Are there many—the three hundred and thirty million of mythology—or is there the One? Questions about God could set him off like a rocket. Have you noticed that all the developed countries are Christian, he might say. And when we have a famine in Bihar or Orissa, who sends us wheat? Love thy neighbour is Christ's message, that is why they send us wheat and give us scholarships and help us in our five-year development plans.

“Are you saying, sir, that only Christians can be good?”

“No, I am not saying that …”

But his Christian enthusiasm had to be indulged.

It was not always the lofty questions about the world that we tackled; Mr. David also taught us about the facts of life.

“Which of you masturbates?” he asked once with a broad grin, one hand at his waist, a bottle of goli soda in the other. Korn muthiya maré chhé? Hein?

Red faces; twitchy hands.

“All right, which of you doesn't?”

Nervous laughter; shifty looks around.

The reason for the introduction of this subject was that a boy had been caught in the staff bathroom pleasuring himself, as Mr. David put it. He had been suspended.

There is nothing
physically
wrong with “it,” our teacher said, waving the soda bottle in his hand. Your bodies are changing; you have fuzz over your lips and chins; your voices are changing—your voice box, Vasudev, cannot decide between a growl and a bilari's meow; and other things are surely happening to you. “It” will not make you blind, as
our
teachers used to say. But it is a waste of energy, mental and physical. You are pouring out your vital fluid, your precious amiras, into the toilet. He poured soda onto the ground. And it gives you dirty, sinful thoughts—in that way it does harm you. It is better to wait until you marry. Meanwhile, you can take a jog; think of Jesus Christ, or whatever god is your favourite. “It” is the devil's enticement, it catches you unaware, it doesn't know night or day. Beware of “it.”

But I was tormented by
it
and by
thoughts.
They would not leave me alone.

Oh,
mara angada mahe utthi chhe laher
… my body throbs in expectation of you, Nur Fazal wrote. Such potent words, sung by men and women in the prayer hall, rendered so rapturously by Shilpa.
I rose up to open to my beloved
… The Bible. If the holy could think such thoughts, what hope had a mere mortal boy? But then, was I a mere mortal boy?

There was a book in Bapu's library, standing innocently between a thin
Hamlet
and a fat Hegel, called
A Handbook for Nurses.
And what a book to hold. In the chapter titled “Reproductive System,” there was a full-page drawing of that thing, that monstrous, that mysterious, hairy “female pudenda” as the caption would have it. No entry for “pudenda” in the dictionary. But the boys' lexicography had all kinds of names for this dark terror. I would choke simply staring at its sketch.

Pir Bawa, make this thing, these uncontrollable thoughts, go away from my head …

Pir Bawa's answer. One day I found the nurses' handbook missing from its place. Bapu-ji must have noticed that it had been disturbed. It was an old book; had he consulted it too when he was younger? His shelves did not have a copy of
Lady Chatterley
, made noteworthy in my eyes by Shas-tri's outrage against it.

Another time during Current Affairs, one of the boys picked up courage to ask the teacher, “Sir … tell us about pleasuring—”

“What—you want to hear it again?”

Laughter.

“He means—with … with the wife.” Baidio ne saath.

Laughter, red faces, the most red, however, that of the teacher, even if he was a negro.

Mr. David thought for a long minute, a thin smile on his face. Then he said, “You have a pencil. The wife has a sharpener. You put your pencil into the sharpener …”

The boys smiled with relief. Elegantly put. That was exactly what they wanted to hear. And no messy details.

Mr. David was our friend. In response to our open admiration, he confided to us earnestly that his teaching methods were new; he had learned them from an American teacher and American books. One boy in our class
became a Christian; his name was Vasudev Sharma, though he was not a Brahmin, as his name implied; he was often teased because of that. He developed a close relationship with Mr. David and was seen running errands for him. Early every morning he would go to the church down the road and sweep it before the service. In this, it was cruelly remarked, he was only performing his caste function.

Imagine for a moment that a new destiny has come to call.

Forget the village, it says, and the God-ness, and the soul of the little people; come out into the bright, beautiful world. You can become a Sobers, a Hanif, a Kanhai. A Bradman? That too.

A tempter came and said, Forget everything, come with me and the world could be yours!

And so:

Bapu-ji, please!

Bapu-ji, please!

Bapu-ji, please!

Each time my father replied, No, Karsan, think of who you are.

In the past several months I had played for the Goshala combined schools cricket team in the annual T.T. Rustomji Cup regional junior tournament. All our matches except one we played locally, in Goshala and other towns in the area; the one exception was a match in Baroda, the former Maharaja Sayaji Rao's city. We performed modestly overall, and lost the match in the metropolis to a team from Godhra; but there I had bagged three wickets for thirty-seven runs, and also batted a half century. The pitch was excellent and a treat to play on, the kind I had never trod on in the small towns of my experience. How big a day had dawned for me became evident when the mighty (though physically diminutive) R.D. Patel of the Sayaji Cricket Academy and former captain and all-rounder of the Gujarat Lions came over and spoke to me.

“Come to Sayaji Academy every Saturday and I will coach you. You can spend the night with one of my other pupils or at my house. There will be no charge.”