The Assassin's Song (32 page)

“I will pick you up and bring you to the prayers,” Premji said to me over the phone one night, having conveyed all the good wishes and blessings he had brought. “But this time you must spend the night in Worcester!”

India had raised his spirits, he sounded cheerful. And so I was loath to bring them down.

“Premji Chacha, I don't wish to come for the prayers—”

“Why ever not?” Shock, the words ending almost in a yell.

“I want to … I really have to be alone these years in my life. I need to be alone, Premji Chacha.”

“Alone with your American friends. I see. Well, if you need anything, call me. Goodbye.”

“Thank you. Goodbye.”

A few days later a package was dropped off for me at residence. There was no message with it and no letter inside, but it was obviously from Ma, delivered by Premji. She had sent varieties of Gujarati snacks, and to my intense delight also included a copy of the movie magazine
Filmfare.
The feel of that magazine in my hand, its pages against my cheeks, with a faint aroma of spices, was like being touched by her, so many memories it carried of our moments together. She had gazed at the same photos of the stars, run her hands over their glossy feel, held them to her cheeks. But the world of Hindi cinema was now far from my mind, though I was not averse to watching a Bollywood (a term not in use then) movie once in a while when shown by Indian student groups. I was not familiar with the recent hit movies, or the current favourites among the actors and actresses. And, much more grievously, I had lost touch with the world of cricket, which came represented in the newsprint she must deliberately have chosen to wrap the foods.

During the first week of the new academic year, in September, a box of savouries was waiting for me one day outside my room. It was giftwrapped in beautiful red, green, and silver paper and bore the name of a store in New Delhi. There was no sender's name, but I could guess from whom it had come. I saw Neeta on campus only once after that, from afar, and wisely we avoided each other.

The call of the shrine, cont'd.

“Once more I remind you, my son, of the story of Azazel, who had the knowledge of books but failed to understand the meaning of his life.”

My father thanked me for my gift of a shirt; but this maxim about the fallen angel was his only nod towards my other gift, the Donne book. Books are not everything, remember Azazel from the Bible and the Quran. He did not understand what was truly important; he lost all.

But for me books opened the hidden doors to my mind; they were everything.

I had come to the university to learn about everything I possibly could. That is what I had very blithely written in the application for admission that I had mailed from Ahmedabad; and that is what, flashing a cheerful smile, my big, lanky academic adviser had confronted me with in his office soon after I arrived.

“Everything, eh?” he said. “We wondered who this applicant was with a fantastic appetite for learning. But your Mr. Hemani convinced us you were genuine! A good friend you have in him.”

I described to him at perhaps too great length the kindly bookseller in his shop, whom I would visit during my stolen bus journeys to the city, to which he listened patiently and with bemusement.

“Well, we 've had sons of rajas and presidents here but never an heir to a medieval saint!” he said. “Let's see what Harvard can teach you!”

The two of us bent over the catalogue, he guided me through the plethora—his word—of choices that were available to me. The courses we selected required vast quantities of reading, and I complied voraciously. Over the months every book and every subject became a thrilling voyage of discovery; every author, every professor a guide into the unknown. Where others complained about assignments, did them at the very last moment and forgot Dante or Homer the moment they handed in their papers, this boy from a village in India revelled in the new knowledge. With a deep breath of excitement I would pick up a fresh book, read the blurb at the back, leaf through the preliminary pages; savour the moment, before I plunged in and spent a good part of my evening. Outside, the streets were in turmoil; incessantly, the media discussed the war in Asia; its unpopularity on campus was evident everywhere, from flyers and picket lines and teach-ins to the heckling of unpopular professors and stormings of unpopular departments. There were bombings of public places; there were shootings by police. All these were but a mere curiosity to me.

I was called a nerd, though not offensively; I was an alien after all, and due certain allowances. But I was not bothered by the description. You are a book jock, they said in exasperation, as I walked down the corridor with more books from the library or the bookstores on the Square. I would grin, I would smile my Indian signature smile. Yes, I am that, I would say. Shiva has opened his eye and revealed the light of a thousand suns … and I am going to soak it up. In my culture we respect knowledge and learning, we worship our teachers.

Do you know what Thucydides says about the writing of history? Or Ibn Khaldun? Have you felt the excitement of reading “Gerontion” aloud, or the Chandogya Upanishad, or the Rig Veda? Have Freud and Jung kept you up at night? Or Dostoevsky? Camus and Nietzsche? Heisenberg and Bohr? You cannot deny that the plight of Hector in the
Iliad
doesn't absolutely move you to tears.

How could such a clamorous, exciting universe of the mind, how could so much of the world have been hidden from me previously?

But according to my father, all this was illusion, a fever of the brain, because all true knowledge lay within oneself. It came from meditation and introspection; the germ of truth was awakened inside you when you went
to your guru, touched his feet, and he bent and whispered a mantra in your ear. Bapu-ji had all sorts of books in his famous library, but the only ones I had known him to care about were those relating to Pirbaag, especially the leather-covered manuscripts that he constantly read and copied and preserved—because they contained our sacred knowledge, our special history. The rest stood quiet and dormant on his shelves. He must have loved them once, paid heed to them. And later rejected them.

How much did my hunger for all the knowledge in the world mean to me—what price would I pay for it? To bring Azazel down from his high horse, to teach him humility and the proper perspective, God his father made a statue of dirt and asked the arrogant scholar to bow down in the dust before it. Azazel refused, “Why should the son of fire fall down before a son of clay?” and Azazel was exiled from heaven, bitter, angry, and vengeful.

My father had his own way of bringing me down to earth, showing me the steep price of freedom.

Almost to the year after I met Premji, a telegram arrived for me, read over the phone by an exquisitely neutral voice belonging to Western Union. “Your mother gravely sick; return immediately; ticket will be sent. Bapu-ji.”

I had been sitting on the edge of my bed when I heard this news. The phone returned to its cradle, I found myself having shifted back towards the cold hard comfort of the brick wall behind me, my feet drawn up close, staring ahead; a stone in the pit of my stomach. Gravely sick, your mother gravely sick, your mother … A self-contained world suddenly shattered to reveal its illusion. And tender memory among the ruins.

Plump and fair, nose stud glittering, and always that wan smile of greeting as I came in the back gate after school. A smile to say, All is well, then. And the wonderfully warm mother smell of her embrace, partly the coconut oil and jasmine of her hair, partly the chappati she baked; it was the smell on her pillow, which I liked periodically to exchange with mine. When Mansoor grew older we would fight over who got to take Ma's pillow. She was our busy quartermaster of the courtyard who kept us fed and clothed on our meagre budget. And she had that private existence outside of the spiritual world of Pirbaag—the magical movies. The two of us sitting
on the front step of the house on a Sunday evening, she would relate a story from one of them; she would wipe back a tear, a flood of tears might then burst out, for the best movies were invariably the tragic sagas. I would squeeze her fat arm. I loved her intensely. I kept her secret, understood the need that made her sneak away to the cinema disguised in a burqa. Then why did I leave her? Would my brother have done the same?

Early the next morning a travel agent at the Square called, asking me to pick up my ticket.

“So you are not planning to return, Mr. Darga—” he said, looking it over before handing it to me later that day.

“Of course I am returning,” I replied, but unable to control the tapering confidence in my voice. Something was wrong.

“Your ticket is not negotiable, Mr. Darga,” the man challenged, ready to take on an argument. Business was slow.

“We 'll see,” I smiled, and hurried out of his shop.

At Pewter Pot, where I was so known by now that my tea arrived immediately I was seated and a fresh hazelnut muffin placed before me, I read the ticket carefully. It was for a one-way fare to Bombay.

He did not want me to return to America. My life of freedom and learning was to be aborted. This was what his own father had done to him when he recalled him from the University of Bombay, St. Xavier's College, and got him married. He had acquiesced; he expected me to do the same. Did he actually think he could erase the last two years of my life and lead me to walk another path? Did he not realize that I was not quite the same Karsan he had known?

It was what he feared, of course.

But I should be beside my mother, whatever else may be true. Had I become so callous and selfish as to need convincing of that duty? “Gravely sick”: how ominous that sounded; my family cremated their dead and then buried them. Your world lies at the feet of your mother, every boy is taught that. Nothing is as precious, nothing deserving more respect, not even the gods. You can have a second of anything else, but there is only one mother who bore you in her womb and gave you birth. Ma. Like Kunti: to whom all her five boys meant so much that she asked them to share everything, including a wife. Like Yashoda: to whom her beloved Krishna, her Karsan—our names were the same—could do no wrong.

I had to go to Ma … and not return?

Bapu-ji from his little shrine in the middle of nowhere in the world had with one stroke, one telegram, checkmated me. Whichever way I turned, I would lose.

There was one tiny recourse left. I tried that.

“Send return ticket,” I cabled twice that same day.

There was no reply, and that was that. Sickening silence; contemptuous, cruel disregard. My own father? Meanwhile the departure date was approaching. Five days to takeoff. Why, Bapu-ji, why do you do this to me? Don't you trust your own Karsan—your gaadi-varas? I would sit up nights, stare at my room by the light outside the window, take in the sight, wall to wall, corner to corner—my bookshelf, my desk and my telephone, my cheeky posters; my own little kingdom. I would go outside and walk about the Yard, sit at the foot of the Puritan's statue, contemplate the hushed intellectuality that lay draped over the scene with so much delicacy … broken occasionally, aesthetically, by a string of tentative piano notes, a riff from a saxophone. And then, outside, the Square thrumming with activity, the inexhaustible heart of Cambridge.

How could I give all this up? I had become a part of it now.

“I cannot come unless by return ticket. Please.”

Ma, don't die.

I did something I hadn't done since my arrival: I prayed to Pir Bawa. And I repeated my secret bol countless times. It will come to your aid during difficulty, Bapu-ji had said. But don't abuse it. It did nothing for me.

On the night of my scheduled departure I lay in my bed in darkness, quietly crying. The phone rang several times; I didn't pick it up, knowing it could be Premji calling to remind me to be on my way. It was even likely that he was booked on the same flight. I was aware of every airplane flying overhead then … east towards the Atlantic, to London, to Paris, south to Rio; one of them passed over me at 9:25 by my watch … the PanAm I had missed, surely, droning away angry and disappointed, Premji looking out the cabin window, devising sentences to say to my father.

Ma, don't die.

Was there a greater sin than not going to a mother's deathbed?

“Please keep me informed of Ma's health.”

I would no doubt hear the news if the unthinkable happened. But there was nothing, no cable, no letter for a whole month. I called Premji's number in Worcester, but it was out of service.

Six more weeks passed. Should I go to Worcester to look for Premji, or the devotees I had met there on a Saturday last spring? They might have news from home. Premji lived in a bungalow off Pleasant Street, and the meeting to which he had taken me had been in a building not far from there; it had housed the offices of a company called Engineers Mutual. That shouldn't be too hard to find, I figured.

Early on a Saturday morning I took a Greyhound bus for the town of Worcester. I had twenty dollars with me, not insubstantial, but still too little for my adventure, as I was to discover. It was bright but cold, the wind biting as I stepped off the bus at the depot and started walking. I had come expecting to identify Premji's quiet suburban street soon enough once I was on Pleasant Street. But the road was long and the side streets all looked similar; I was the only person on foot. Fortunately a taxi stopped for me and I got in. The driver was kindly and drove me into a couple of neighbourhoods, where I came out and asked people if they knew a Mr. Premji, or if there lived any Indians in the area, dark-haired people who looked like me. No luck.