The Assassin's Song (3 page)

c. A.D. 1260
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The intellectual life; and a query on the souls of women.

Months passed. The visitor was given quarters in a guest bungalow in a green suburb outside the palace gates, an area where many noble families lived. The Wanderer—such he came to be known, even among his followers—was called to the palace frequently to join the assemblies of learned men that gathered to lend prestige and dignity to the royal presence. A disputation on Hemachandra's grammar might take place; a mathematician might recite a new prime number and prove it; there were debates on subjects that philosophers everywhere split hairs over. A commentary on the Artha Shastra might be called for; the great mahakavi Somesvara might recite an elegy on the king, or the chief minister Rajpal, who was his patron. And every once in a while, with much fanfare, a great debate would take place, after which the winner would be paraded throughout the better parts of the city.

The king was much impressed by the sufi, who did not trumpet his skills but carried his knowledge within himself, exposing it only if asked or if he deemed it necessary for the benefit of the audience.

His fame spread, and learned men from other cities too came to hear him and satisfy their curiosity. He had brought rare knowledge with him,
from the lands of the Muslims. At first he had been taken as a mere child, an ignorant foreigner, for didn't all knowledge begin and end with the four Vedas? Weren't the secrets of the Atman explained in the Upanishads? Weren't all medicines described by the sages in the Ayurveda? Weren't the laws of behaviour written down by Manu? Wasn't Rama the embodiment of the perfect man, and his bride Sita that of the perfect woman? Wasn't the world completely described in the Puranas? Hadn't the pandits of the land cracked open the secrets of enumeration by their invention of the sacred zero, image of the great Om, the nothingness that was everything? But then as the stranger's foreign terms and ways of argument came to be understood, as his knowledge was realized to coincide with theirs, or supersede it in some matters, or lag behind it in others, he was given grudging respect; just enough, he realized, for his knowledge to be taken and incorporated into theirs. It surprised him that these rigid rule-abiders and fanatics of place and function and classification could also delve so deeply into the mysteries of the universe and develop aesthetics so wonderful, although alien to his eye and ear; and it amused him that they remained so happy in their ignorance of the wide world to the west—of the glories of Cordoba and Cairo, Baghdad and Bukhara; of the works of Avicenna and Galen, Omar Khayyam and Al-Tusi, Aristotle and Plato.

Sometimes in the evening the king would ask the sufi to accompany him on a walk of the palace grounds. The king, tall and lanky in stature, casually wearing a dhoti and a coloured shawl round his shoulders, would at first get ahead of the slower sufi, then pause and wait impatiently; but over time he learned to restrain himself. He was a restless but deeply intelligent man who seemed ever waiting for an omen or a happening in these uncertain times. The sufi walked slowly, as we have said, and he would stare down at the ground before him, until the king's tipped question or excited remark provoked him to look up with a smile and a thoughtful response.

The two of them gazed at the night sky, observed the positions of the planets, and discussed what they portended. How long would he rule, the raja wanted desperately to know; would his dynasty last another hundred years? He was in need, above all, of spiritual solace; but, said he, “I am like a nav in the ocean, buffeted by the forces of different philosophies. The Jain priests debate the Brahmin pandits, each wishing me to choose their
path and drive the others away; among the Jains some favour walking about in the nude and some do not; it is sinful, some say, to kill a louse that's made a home in your chest hair and a meal of your blood; and in the villages, oblivious to the learned men, the people go about their own ways with their customs and worship of the gods and goddesses.”

The sufi did not reply and the two walked together in silence, past the lake, which was peaceful at this hour, the children and maidens long gone, and the dancing god looked on in dark silence; a few points of yellow light flickered like fallen stars upon the surface of the water, these being candles placed there as supplications by the devoted. A crescent moon shone clear in the sky, sharp as a blade, as the warm air breathed queen-of-the-night and jasmine, though the fastidious and foreign holy man had to remind himself that the whiff of cow dung was but a sign of the closeness of nature, the unity of all life. Somewhere a lamb bleated as if to echo the idea. As they walked there would follow behind them the king's bodyguards and the holder of the royal canopy; the chief minister would follow at a greater distance, not to look conspicuous but not to lose sight of his patron either. With him walked a selection of pandits. This was not the first time their restless monarch had attached himself to a wandering ascetic; stories were still told of how, a hundred years before, the great Hemachandra and his monarch Kumarapala had both fallen under the spell of a Muslim magician not unlike this one.

“And the God of the Muslims,” went on the king one night, perhaps provoked by the sight of the moon, “is the weirdest and most vain of all. He is unknowable and yet commands you to kneel; with a sword he demands obeisance.”

“My Lord,” said the mystic, “the Turk general in Delhi or Ghor mouths ‘God is great’ and holds a sword in his hand. But that is not a man of the Musalman God. He is merely a fighter and a usurper. Of him even the simple Muslim faithful is terrified.”

The king smiled. “And what is your way to knowledge, Sufi? What path would you suggest for me?”

“All roads lead to the same destination,” advised the sufi, “only some may be longer than others. Stay close hugging the shore, Raja, follow the path you learned on the lap of your mother and at the feet of your teachers.”

Nur Fazal, the sufi, like all those who seek that inner truth of existence, had a spiritual guide, his beloved Master, whom he had left behind in his homeland. Every day before sunrise, he would go to the worship room of the house, and there, seated on the floor, meditate on the name of his teacher. Thereafter he would return to this room during the day and, facing west, kneel and prostrate in that humble gesture of prayer to God that bound him to his people. Sometimes, in the courtyard of the house on the other side of his wall, would come a handful of young women to play on the swings that hung from the trees. Singing, laughing, chattering, they swung to and fro, their dainty feet and ankles visible to the kneeling sufi as he looked up and out his window before getting up. He would smile, allowing his eyes to linger for a moment or two upon the sight of so much innocent joy. He learned that the house and the maidens belonged to a famed courtesan named Priyanti. The young women's games consisted of getting each other to utter the names of their husbands—which a woman was never supposed to do—using clever verbal ruses. The husbands, he presumed, were imaginary. Sometimes he heard them running about behind the wall, sounding angry; they were simply pretending to spank their lovers with branches.

One afternoon as he lifted his head from prayer he heard a sound behind him. He turned around to meet the gaze of a short, broad, sinewy fellow, evidently a guard of some sort.

“My mistress next door wishes to consult you,” spoke the man.

Warily Nur Fazal stood up and followed. He walked through the gate next door and the garden, where the young women were still about, and was taken inside the house and into an opulent reception room. There he saw, sitting stretched out on a carpet, leaning against a bolster, the most beautiful and sensuous woman. Her hair was long and wavy, her face oval, her eyes the shape of almonds; her glittering bright-coloured clothes clung to her flesh, an ample midriff showed, and the sheer white veil over her head was not there to hide the face.

“Does your lordship attend to the souls of women?” she asked with a smile, then added, “Welcome and sit.”

He sat before her utterly mesmerized, as a bolster was brought for him.

He understood roughly what she said, but a young woman came and sat behind him who spoke his language. Feeling nostalgic, he was tempted to ask her where she came from, but that would be impolite, so he desisted.

“What ails you?” he asked when her question was repeated to him.

“Can a woman attain union with the Brahman?” she asked.

A cup of sweet, coloured milk was provided for him, and the young translator came to dab his wrists and forehead with an attar.

Certainly, said the sufi, in answer to the lady's question, a woman could attain union with the Absolute, for which there were many names. In Arabia there had been a woman called Rabbia who had reached the highest spiritual status.

She eyed him a little doubtfully; twitched her bare toes at him. They were delightful mischief-makers. He had not seen a woman as beautiful, as powerful. And she had only begun her gambit. They made some small talk.

“Are the women of your country beautiful?” she asked.

“They are, and so are the women here in Gujarat,” he replied.

“You don't find us dark?” asked the dusky lady.

“Dark but beautiful …” and sensual enough to tempt the saints, he thought.

Were his senses dulled? Was it Nur who was talking? O My Master, he called out within himself.

“Tell me, Sufi,” the lady said, “why, in the stories that are told, are women the cause of temptation and fall of the great men of God?”

“But to reach union with God, a man has to become a woman in his soul,” he said.

He recited a poem to her. By this time the young translator had left and now the fan attendant departed softly.

“To be one with God, you have to be one with all his creation,” she replied. “That is what our great gurus have said.”

“That is also what the great sufis have said.”

“Even to love a woman is to love God?”

He agreed. “Some sufis have even said that.”

“Love is both art and meditation, wouldn't you agree, Sufi? It annihilates the self in a perfect bliss. What else is God?”

And so she seduced him.

That night he lay in the sweetest embrace in that heavenly abode; all his senses had been roused and satiated. As he awoke, a warm sunshine filtered through the gossamer drapes, a sound of singing came arbitrarily to increase his happiness.

The prayer hour had passed; the auspicious full moon had gone unheeded; the call of his Master, for surely there must have been one, was not heard.

“Come back this evening,” the lady Priyanti said softly as he left. And he replied, “But I will!”

As he reached his home, a window seemed to have opened in a corner of his mind to crack his composure. But the thought that lurked behind it he could not entertain. He longed to see her again. Even when he learned from his anxious servants that the previous night a disturbance had taken place in the coppersmiths' bazaar, where his followers lived and where he had boarded upon his arrival in the capital, he could think only of her. He spent an entire day dreaming of her, and waiting.

Finally there came the hour to visit her.

When he arrived at the gate of the house he was let in reluctantly. The young women displayed no familiarity, and even the girl who had spoken to him in his own language failed to acknowledge him. When he asked to see the mistress, the squat middle-aged woman who met him at the door was as different from his houri of the previous night as a hog from an antelope.

He spent the night in an agony of remorse. He had lost his way in this strange land; like the weakest of mortals he had succumbed to the simplest of temptations; his link with his beloved Master was broken. In his meditations he could no longer see or hear him. It was as if a wall had come between them, which he could not surmount; all he could do was to beat his head against it and weep.

The following day he went to the coppersmiths' bazaar and discovered that much of it had been burnt to the ground. There had been a riot, begun apparently during a quarrel over a cockfight or a game of dice, or someone playfully tying a bell to the backside of someone else, these being the pastimes of the humbler folk. But the quarrel had become communal. Some of his followers were killed, including his faithful interpreter and very first follower Arjun Dev.

In despair and sorrow, Nur Fazal left the great metropolis and travelled all across the land, often by himself but also at times in the company of yogis and mendicants who had renounced all their possessions to seek the truth and sing the praises of God. He spent eleven months and eleven days thus, pining for a blessing, filling the folds of his turban with lines describing his pangs of separation from his Master. Finally a sign came in the voice of an ascetic outside the great temple of Dwarka, the birthplace of the god Krishna. The wall of separation came tumbling down as the Master spoke to him. Nur Fazal wept, embraced the feet of the ascetic. He returned to Patan, where he lived in his house and fulfilled his obligations to the court. He gave solace to the monarch, who had been overjoyed to see him again. And he gave solace to his followers, using now the medium of song to impart his spiritual message.