The Assassin's Song (23 page)

Time passes; the world beckons.

Raja Singh had disappeared for a year; this was the longest he had stayed away, and it seemed as if something essential in the composition of my life had dropped away; still, there would be that quickness of breath on a morning sometimes as I came out the gate, almost expecting to see him standing like the Air India maharaja beside the dazzling Kaleidoscope. Shilpa too had not been seen in a while, having gone to her village to tend to her widowed mother. Her devotion to Pirbaag remained ceaseless; she had even started a women's group of truth-seekers. Occasionally one or two of these would come to spend a few weeks to serve and learn from my father. Her letters to him, robustly announced by the wily postman, brought the expected dark look to Ma's face. I had entered my last year in school and become prey to nagging thoughts about my future. My childhood friends Harish and Utu were already set on their life paths. Harish helped his father in the tire shop; he would soon marry. Utu had found a job in a barbershop in Baroda, and I heard from his father, Ramdas, that he expected to join his maternal uncle in Dar es Salaam, East Africa, where he would drive a taxi. A younger generation of boys were lords of the crumpled playing field beside the shrine. My own dreams of playing for India were long over.

And finally I had learned the name of my Rabari heartthrob: Mallika.

One afternoon upon returning from school, instead of turning into our gate, I walked around to the playing field. I don't know what I expected to see there, the game had not started; was it instinct or prior knowledge, a
fleeting glimpse from the tempo, which had brought me home?—but there she was, sitting with her back against the wall fence.

“Ay, chhokra,” she called, looking up as I blushed. “What's in your bag?”

“Books,” I said. “Do you want to see them?”

“Can you write?”

There was invitation in the voice, and I sat down beside her and showed her my English composition book. “Yes—look.”

She looked at the open page, then at me, with a half-smile of grudging respect. She was barefoot, twitching her toes, and her coin-sized nose stud drew my stares; her head was covered loosely; her teeth were white and large; and her eyes … they pried into my heart. I showed her a library book about space travel, told her the Americans would soon go to the moon.

“What will they do there? Kick it around like a ball?”

It was then that I asked: “Taru naam shoon chhe?” Her name.

“Mallika,” she said slowly in a husky voice.

She moved ever so closer to peek at the book which lay open between our laps; our knees touched, our heads knocked. We looked at each other and smiled.

Voices approached, a few boys appeared, by which time she was up and away. I never spoke to her again. Enough times I came to look for her at the spot where we'd sat together, behind the wall; I had bought two Gujarati readers in Goshala and wanted very much to teach her to read. She was never there, and when I waited it was in vain. A few times I did see her eye me across a distance, once from outside Rupa Devi's temple. Was her reticence due to innate modesty, or had she been warned to stay away from me? The memory of her still catches my breath.

For many months the stacks of newspapers and magazines that Raja brought for me from his sojourns had been my window to a bustling world outside the still point that was Pirbaag; compared to their enchantment, the
Gujarat Times
, which now I read every day, was but a skimpy and dreary local broth that left me craving something more. I was bored. Every afternoon as I got off my ride and turned into that familiar gate, the same
oppressive feeling would descend upon me. Was this my future? What could I make of this garden of graves? Wasn't there a way to escape it, find a new destiny? And yet, sometimes, early at dawn, listening first to the rising pure tones of Sheikh-ji's azan from his mosque and then the tinkling of the bell and the beautiful ginans from our temple, I would become aware of the tears streaming down my cheeks. I so belonged here, to this ancient and still mysterious place that spoke to something deep and permanent within the soul. But then that moment would pass and there was still that world outside, beckoning.

That world could be reached from my little garden: I only had to discover the door and walk through it.

On a few occasions during the last holidays three of my school friends and I had stolen away by bus to the big city, Ahmedabad. We idled up and down its busy streets, eyed the girls, window-shopped at the clothing and radio shops, and went to the cinema; then we did our best to beat out the smell of air-conditioned cigarette smoke that clung to our shirts. Ma of course discovered from the residual stink I brought home on my clothes that I had visited the cinema, and I had to swear that I did not smoke, had not taken that first step on the quick road to dissipation.

These adventures inevitably came to an end, once school resumed, but now I felt the urge to set forth on my own, to satisfy which urge I skipped school the occasional Saturday. Was disloyalty also my inheritance? Ma didn't report my jaunts to Bapu-ji, pretended not to know just as I had done about her own escapades to the movies. These had for the most part stopped, it seemed, for Zainab had moved away. But once, however, I had seen a plump woman in burqa all by herself outside our gate, waiting fretfully for a tempo. It must have been a rare, desperate getaway. I quickly walked past her.

The bus stop in Goshala was not far from the school, and as I waited for my conveyance there I had to be careful not to be seen by student or teacher; when the bus passed by the school, where boys would be out at PT, I would duck my head shamelessly, well aware of the amusing sight I presented to my fellow passengers. On my previous visits to the city I had discovered the Daya Punja Library on Relief Road, in the busy Teen Darwaja area, where you could walk in from the street and, if you found a place, sit at the large rectangular table in the long room, under the hanging
fluorescent lights, and quietly and importantly flip through a newspaper or magazine. It was bliss to be there, absorbed in, surrounded by pages of print, news about the whole world; every rustle of paper annoying in its mild way and yet so satisfying an accompaniment. I read everything I could lay my hands on, waiting eagerly and sometimes rudely for others to finish. I even read
Filmfare
, from which I would glean tidbits about the movie stars for my mother's delectation. The current favourite among actors was Rajesh Khanna, and anything about him, or a good horoscope, was sure to make Ma's day. After reading for a few hours I would conclude my visit to the old city with an aimless walk along its streets—Gandhi Road, Relief Road, and the little side streets. Invariably I would end up outside the grand Jama Mosque; each time I would hesitate, before finally yielding to its pull and going up the steps, taking off my shoes, and stepping into the vast courtyard. There in fascination I would watch the men wash their hands and feet in the large tank in the centre and then go up to the front—a dark, open hall of numerous pillars—to say their prayers. All this in utter silence; I had never looked upon anything so sheerly Islamic in my life. The people prayed not together but separately, some distance apart. Some would look up at me as I arrived to watch them. My world was so different, so dependent on personality; so closely packed. And yet our founding spirit, our god, if you will, came from a culture that prayed in such mosques. And so I felt connected to this place and these people in some vague, mysterious fashion I could not quite understand or define.

There was a row of bookstores on Relief Road that I would visit one after another. I would stand at the door and look inside longingly, the proverbial beggar outside a sweetmeat shop. Before my time was up I would have dared to venture into one or another of them, well aware that their enticements stood wrapped in cellophane or were kept in cruelly unreachable cabinets. Sometimes, marked as a repeated loiterer, I would briskly be led back out the door. But one secondhand bookstore, owned by a Mr. Hemani, kept its books wonderfully, entirely accessible—on shelves, on carts, on tables—where just anyone could walk in from the street and pick them up, thumb through them. The owner, a tall thin man with a white beard, would discreetly look away as I strolled inside among the shelves, paused to read book titles, picked up one or two to inspect, turned the pages and read a bit. I would ask the price of a book, he would look up and answer with a gentle smile, and I would put it down.

I was aware even then that my love of books reflected my father's devotion to them. I had dreams of possessing my own private library one day. Instead of standing in Mr. Hemani's store I could as well have browsed through Bapu-ji's books. But there was the incomparable thrill of dawdling inside a public book place, on Relief Road in Ahmedabad, smelling the age and dust on them, noticing with a sinking heart how one had suddenly vanished from its place since my last visit, having been purchased by some lucky soul.

One day there was a box of discarded books just inside the door that the owner had put out for passersby to pick up for free and perhaps be enticed to come in. They were all in Gujarati, cheaply made paperbacks— recipe books, joke books, books on ayurvedic medicine—and one whose title leapt at me like a sudden scare: the green text on plain yellow cover read, baldly, in Gujarati, “Pir Mussafar Shah no mrutyu”; Nur Fazal's death. Inside the book, in its curling faded pages, was a poem in couplets describing his final days. Of course I knew about the book, the story it told.

Mr. Hemani, seated behind his little table at the back, must have sensed my excitement. “What have you got there?” he asked. I took the book to him. He glanced at it, returned it, eyeing me curiously, and explained, “They have a dargah somewhere here, where the pir is buried.” I nodded dumbly. “Here,” he said, getting up, and I followed him to a shelf against the back wall. “All kinds of books on sufism …” He picked out a paperback and handed it to me. “You should start with this.” I took it, looked at it, then handed it back. “I'll buy it when I have saved some money.” “Keep it,” he said. “My present to you.” The book was
A Conference of the Birds
, a canonical title, as I would learn in due time.

That was the most I had spoken with Mr. Hemani. Did he realize that I was from Pirbaag? How little it meant to him—“a dargah somewhere here.” I knew that in spite of the thousands who came to visit us every year, to most people outside Haripir, Pirbaag meant very little. And now this book, discarded, of so little value here.

I did not carry much money on me. When I bought my daily newspaper after school, I would keep back what change I received, with Ma's knowledge. The meagre hoard I collected was pocket money, from which came
the luxury of my bus fares to visit the big city; there remained then usually a pittance to spare. I would sometimes eat a snack from a street vendor, or, sitting on the steps of the great mosque, eat a packet of peanuts. One day, however, I had enough to go to the tea shop standing prominently at the hectic Teen Darwaja intersection, across the road from the library. It turned out to be a marvellously bizarre place, for it was also a cemetery. The eating tables were spread among a dozen or more old unmarked graves, which were built up with cement and painted olive green. Upon each grave had been placed a fresh red rose towards the head; waiters raced past the buried dead, balancing trays of tea, bhajias, idlies, paying them not the slightest heed. Most customers too seemed quite used to sitting and eating among graves. I was directed to a table next to a baby's grave where a well-dressed boy of about my age was already seated. I had seen him a few times at the library, noted that he always seemed rather too confident of himself. We nodded, then after a while, noticing that I had ordered nothing to eat, he pushed his plate of bhajias towards me. His name was George Elias, he said, but I should call him Elias or Eliahu. Are you Christian, I asked. No, Yahudi—Jew. His family ran a chemist shop nearby, but they lived in the Astodia area. He wanted to be a scientist and planned to go to the IIT or to America. That day he was filling an application form for an American university.

“What course do you want to study in college?” he asked.

“I don't know,” I replied, embarrassed that I was sounding like the rustic that I was. “I want to learn everything … history, philosophy, science …”

“Don't you have to choose between arts and science in your school?”

“No,” I replied.

“Strange school. Why don't you go to America, then?” he said.

“Is it possible? To America?”

“Just write to them. It's easy. They want people like us. One of my uncles is already there.” He gave me what seemed like a purposeless wink.

As I stared at him, excited, uncertain, suddenly the world had altered. To go away from here? Thousands of miles away? Into the beating heart of the world? It was possible. But over there the illusions of Maya ruled supreme, and Kali Yuga was way advanced … But that was also where Mr. David had wanted to go, what Balak Shah the Child-imam had promised
him on the miraculous grey stone. You can be anything you want in America, Mr. David had said, that was why he had wanted to go there. Perhaps he was there already. But what about me, I was the future Saheb of Pirbaag. I could still go, couldn't I?

“I will bring my book which has a list of all the universities in America—the top ones only,” Elias said, “and you can pick one from there.”

I nodded dumbly, only half believing him.

But the following Saturday he had brought the book, which apparently his uncle had sent from America. It was a large-sized volume with pictures and was titled
The University or College of Your Choice.
We sat together on the steps of the Daya Punja Library and pored over the luxurious, glossy pages, each of us supporting on his thigh one half of the massive tome. It was a confusing catalogue of wonderland, everything inside exciting and beautiful. Elias showed me a list of institutions at the back, with their addresses. He had circled one of them for me: Harvard University. That same day, with his assistance, and as instructed by the book, I wrote a letter to the university inquiring about admissions and posted it.