The Assassin's Song (8 page)

There was a place called Nyasaland, and another called Katanga with plenty of gold, where a civil war had erupted; there was a man called Ben Bella in Algeria, another called Hammarskjöld in the United Nations …

But the news that seemed to shake the world, though not ours at Pirbaag, was the assassination of President Kennedy.

“The headlines were as big when Gandhi-ji was murdered,” Bapu-ji said, having come to stand behind me, and there was a musing, wistful quality in his voice. He read briefly over my shoulder. It was Sunday, we had just eaten.

I turned to look up at him. At this hour his face had lost some of its serenity, his eyes looked shaded. But perhaps it was the lighting here in the dark courtyard; his manner was as controlled as ever.

“Do you think the world war will happen, Bapu-ji?” I anxiously asked before he could quite get started to depart. Anything to detain him, keep my father with me.

He paused, briefly ran a hand over his cropped head, as though contemplating whether I was old enough for his conclusion. Then slowly he nodded: “It surely will, one day.”

“And all will be destroyed—this whole world?”

He nodded.

“Isn't that good then, Bapu, Kali Age will end and the gold Krta Age will return?”

My father gave me his musing look. “While we are human, we have human worries,” he told me.

He ruffled my hair briefly and left for the sanctuary of his library.

The mask. And my mother coming over sympathetically, as I watched him disappear. Sitting across the table, and saying, “Come on, explain to me: who was this Kennedy?”

To which, perking up, changing the subject to one she liked, I asked: “When will you go see
Mughal-e-Azam
?”

And she, half guilty, totally happy: “Ja-ja havé.” Go on now.

She adored the movies like nothing else.

My youth, cont'd. The mystic in his library; and the woman in burqa
.

My father's library occupied a quiet room in a hallowed corner of our square house. The entrance from the central courtyard he liked to keep closed, but there was a second door which led out into the pavilion that he sometimes kept open.

I remember standing quietly here, watching him seated on the floor on a small red and blue Persian carpet, his portable desk over his lap, a naked light bulb in the ceiling above him. Bursting his eyes, as Ma would put it, poring over some old print or copying away, his old-fashioned nib in its holder scratching at the foolscap paper. Around him, three walls lined with books and manuscripts. Against the fourth stood a throne, an ancient chair of finely wrought black silver, on its seat a red mulmul pillow on which lay a large handwritten book: precious as pearls, the songs of Nur Fazal. On the wall above the throne hung a bright painting of the Pir, copies of which Ramdas sold lucratively in his stall outside the gate. It had been painted early in the century and presented to Dada by an inspired devotee who saw the Pir in a dream. Perched on a stool next to the throne, an oil lamp threw a flickering aura upon all that was represented here. Unlike the eternal lamp in the shrine, this one was lighted every morning and added a sweet smell of oil to the fragrance of incense pervading the room.

Ma would send me with a glass of sweet milk with almonds for him, which were supposed to be good for the brain. And yet, he was the avatar, I would think, with his powers surely he was beyond such elementary aids. Having presented him with the milk, I would withdraw towards the
doorway, silent as a shadow, watching him, straining to read the more distant titles on the shelves. A pungent odour of old book dust would drift towards me, stronger than the incense or the oil. I imagined all his books talking at him in his solitude, a cerebral cacophony that only he could pay attention to and make sense of in his inspired wisdom. I admired his utmost concentration, I would unconsciously emulate it in years to come. Glasses on his nose, how vulnerably human he looked, so unlike the beaming Saheb receiving homage on the pavilion. In his books and manuscripts, in history, he seemed to meet his match.

The higher shelves in the room were packed with neat rows of variously titled books. Histories of India; books on science and philosophy—
Nine Scientists Prove the Existence of God
always seemed to stand out; the works of the mystics Kabir, Nanak, Dadu, Mira; stories of the sufis; volumes of Shakespeare; holy books of all the religions; a nurses' handbook on anatomy whose sketchings, as the years proceeded, would have the drawing power to bend the will of any saint, let alone a teenager; and green Penguin editions of crime novels.

In contrast, the lower shelves, filled with long irregular folios lying flat on their sides like basking reptiles, couldn't have looked more drab. But these were the pith of the library, the precious written records of Pirbaag: all our songs and stories, copied and recopied by hand over the years to preserve them from the ravages of time. The pages were stitched and loosely bound into books using smooth dark brown animal hide or snakeskin with raised patterns that felt like goose pimples to the touch. Only my father would know the contents of them all.

Then there was the timeless, hidden treasure, consisting of the oldest remaining manuscripts, some in the Wanderer's own writing—he had touched them with his hands; perhaps he had kissed them, raised them to his brow; shed a tear over them? These and other mementoes were preserved in a trunk covered with red mulmul next to the throne on the other side of the lamp. The trunk could not be opened or moved without the word of the Saheb; stories thrilled us of soldiers and spies who in bygone days had come to remove its secrets, only to fail miserably, foiled by the power and mystery of Pirbaag.

In the past, during Dada's time, foreign scholars would visit the shrine, arriving on bullock cart or muleback, sent by the local British collector in
Ahmedabad or the Oriental Institute in Bombay. And because the collectors had been kind to the reign of the Sahebs of Pirbaag, Dada welcomed these red-faced visitors wiping their dripping brows with handkerchiefs. But he was suspicious of them and did not like them greedily pawing his precious heritage. However, a small brass plate on a doorpost acknowledged gifts from the Royal Asiatic Society and a Mr. Cranston Paul, Collector of Ahmedabad.

One day, sensing my presence at the door, Bapu-ji looked towards me, then gave a rare smile and said, “Come and have a look.” He was examining an extraordinary length of paper across his lap and there was a magnifying lens on the portable desk beside him.

I had never been invited inside, except to hand him his glass of milk. If anything, I recalled admonitions from my mother not to enter the library on my own. Therefore no word would escape my lips and I stared in disbelief.

“Come now,” he beckoned with a gesture of the head.

Slowly I stepped forward, bent down on my knees in front of his desk, and looked.

On the long sheet of ancient paper danced and skipped a kind of writing in red and black ink that I had never seen before. Not like the stolid Devanagari I had learned in school, dangling from a bar as if from a clothesline, or the slightly less controlled letters of Gujarati; these before me, faded unevenly but still clear, curled and raced crazily, taking their unreadable message across the page as if it had no end, and indeed it did not have one, the lines falling like rain down the side.

My father saw me grappling mentally to read the writing, attempting to steal even a bit of its message, and said, “It's in a secret script—which Master-ji or someone else will teach you one day. It was used to hide our message from our enemies.”

“Which enemies, Bapu-ji?”

“Rulers … fanatics …”

Master-ji had indeed taught us that rulers in the past had persecuted the shrine, sometimes killed our holy men, burnt down precious Pirbaag; in each case through a miracle the tomb with its eternal light had stood intact, resplendent and without a blemish. Sometimes the remorseful persecutor had gone down on his belly before the Pir and become a devotee.

“This page is six feet long,” Bapu-ji said, watching me follow the writing down its length. “It contains ginans written both horizontally and vertically—like a crossword.”

I was just conscious enough to stare in wonder at the exhibits he was showing me, in this bewildering, unexpected act of confidence. In an open, more modern book beside him was a printed picture of a king seated on a throne under a canopy, surrounded by robed priests and guarded by soldiers in armour. An ordinary-looking dhoti-clad fellow in front of the king was evidently receiving a royal scolding.

“Raja Vishal Dev in his court,” Bapu-ji declared, his voice wavering, a thin smile on his lips.

Then he pointed to two coins lying on the desk, black, with glimmers of gold. “Coins,” he declared, “bearing the seal of Siddhraj. One day we will have a museum at Pirbaag, where all the artifacts and books from our past can be displayed.”

“That's a good idea, Bapu-ji,” I said.

“Go now,” he said, and shakily I stood up, for I had been on my knees a long time.

“One day I will introduce you to this entire collection,” he said with a smile. “It will all be yours to look after.”

He was watching me; and I was then looking, I would think later, not at the human father I craved, nor the lofty Saheb of Pirbaag, but a third, different entity altogether. Who was speaking to me then? Pir Bawa himself?

“Can I come and dust your books for you, Bapu-ji?” I asked.

“Yes … you could do that once a week.”

I nodded. He nodded. I left through the back door into the courtyard, closed it, feeling his eyes all the time upon me.

Ma was sitting on the front step of the house, watching Mansoor playing on the swing outside. She was a plump woman in the way mothers were, and to me beautiful, with creamy skin and long soft hair that was often oiled and smelled of coconut and jasmine, and much given to smiles and giggles and warm fleshy embraces. I went and sat down close beside her. Mansoor was scolding a stray dog that wandered in and out through the gate.

“I don't want to be the Saheb, Ma,” I said to her softly. “I just want to be ordinary.”

“Ordinary? You are not ordinary. You are the successor, the gaadivaras. How can you refuse? Can you imagine your brother succeeding your father?”

She giggled briefly. The question did not need an answer, and we both watched my brother imprecating the dog. “Ay—bhaag!”

“You are gifted,” she murmured. “You are meant to be gaadi-varas. Everything you touch turns to gold … your father is right.”

“What do you mean? What has he told you, Ma?”

She said, “When a boy is to become Saheb there are signs he shows.”

“What signs? I have not shown any signs! What has he seen?”

“How should I know?”

She blushed and looked away.

Then impulsively, suddenly, she pulled me towards her breast and squeezed me, and I struggled to wipe away a tear.

I released myself from that embrace and asked her mischievously, “How was the filim? You went, didn't you?”

When she smiled her guilty assent, I said, “You saw …?”

Again the smile.

“
Mughal-e-Azam!
You saw it?”

She broke into a peal of laughter.

It was the biggest box office hit ever, advertised screamingly on full pages of the papers. “42nd record-breaking week! Dilip Kumar! Madhubala! A love match made in the heavens, no kingly power can tear asunder!”

“I will tell you the story later,” she promised.

But like the rest of the country I already knew it.

How did you marry Bapu, I would ask her. She had replied once, “He won me with his magic!”

“What magic?”

“No magic!”

Then a peal of laughter at my surprised, annoyed face.

The usual story was that she was introduced to my Dada and Dadi and shown a photo of my father. This young man would be her husband, she was told. Bapu was recalled from his studies without explanation, and the
wedding was sprung on him as soon as he arrived. She had been afraid of him, she said. He was tall and handsome, but he was the future Saheb. And Sahebs could see through the seven earths and seven heavens into eternity; the thirty-three crore gods bowed before them.

She lived with her fantasies. Sometimes I would see her smiling or chuckling by herself; once I came across her wiping copious tears from her eyes, seated on her bed, and to my anxious inquiry, she simply answered, “I was remembering that filim—bichara Guru Dutt had to die—why did they have to kill him?”

Sitting together at the table in the open courtyard at night, or standing behind her in the cooking area while she prepared something, I would read to her accounts of the films and their stars from the publications dropped off by Raja Singh. She waited breathlessly for every new movie release, kept track of its success or failure, could tell you how many weeks it had played at the Shan in Goshala or the Rex in Bombay. It would not become the Saheb's wife to be seen at the cinema, but she did manage to steal away occasionally on a Wednesday or a Sunday afternoon to a ladies' zenana show in town. Ma had a Muslim friend called Zainab with whom she went, who was from Jamnagar like her and with whom she spoke in Cutchi. Ma took a small package with her every time, which seemed to be the snack they would eat together at the cinema.