The Assassin's Song (14 page)

With some reservation I resolved to go to Mr. David's Christian class in the science lab one Friday, imposing the condition on myself that if there was wine-blood business or any other nonsense in the session, I would walk out, even if I faced expulsion from this Christian-founded school.
But it turned out to be safe. Mr. David only told stories. There were five of us in his class.

Mr. David could tell movingly the tragic story of Jesus. I had heard it before from Bapu-ji, who called Jesus “Issa”; but Mr. David told it with such animation and feeling that we could imagine vividly the frail figure of Jesus walking barefoot in Galilee. He described the Pharisees and the priests at the temple; he spoke candidly of Jesus' doubts, so that we understood, and his loneliness when he told his disciples they would all betray him; how he waited for Judas to bring the Roman soldiers and betray him with a kiss. Tears formed in Mr. David's eyes, tears formed in our eyes. It was like listening to the story of a film—Nargis in
Mother India
, surely she suffered! Except for the last scene, the crucifixion. That was the problem with the Christian teaching. There was no final joy and triumph when good defeated evil, and Dilip Kumar walked away with song and girl. There was no humour.

Said Mr. David, trying to sound like one of us: “You know how Ganesh is the son of Shiva? In the same way, Jesus is the son of God!”

“How so?” we asked, and were told.

But Ganesh was a happy god; he always smiled. Jesus wept.

When the teacher told us that Jesus had come with his mother to India to learn from its great sages and mystics, that fact made sense. We were a country of sages. They were all over the place, sometimes clogging the streets and roadways.

“Karsan's Bapu-ji is a great guru,” said one of the students. “He has disciples.”

“Yes?” Mr. David turned to me, disappointment shading his face. “Tell me about your father,” he said.

Proudly I told him about Pirbaag, the Garden of the Great Pir, who also had come a long distance into India. How he too and some of his descendants had suffered because of their beliefs.

Mr. David said he very much wished to see the shrine of this great pir.

When Mr. David arrived at Pirbaag one Saturday afternoon, he performed all the rituals—having bought a green and gold Muslim chaddar, a basket of flowers, and a packet of prasad from Ramdas at the gate—and paid his
respects at the more prominent graves at the shrine. My father, who was always informed of unusual visitors, was told about this Christian teacher. He had covered his head, he had circumambulated the grave of Pir Bawa, and he had stood before it, holding his two palms open in front of him in prayer. Even as the report was being made, the teacher appeared in the pavilion, having requested to see the Saheb. He came in, bowed respectfully, and sat down before my father. He introduced himself as my teacher and sang my praises.

Ma was delighted to meet him, especially when he praised me and told her that he happened to come from Jamnagar, her hometown. Mr. David was invited to eat with us.

But she couldn't help asking, “What is your naati?”

Ma liked to know people's naati, their community, which term often translated as caste. It helped her to locate people.

Mr. David smiled politely, “Mari naati Issai.” It is simply Christian. Then he added quietly, “I am also a Sidi—you must have heard of them.”

“Sidi—” Ma shrieked, her hand flying to her open mouth in shock. Mr. David's naati had now been fully revealed.

“The very same. My ancestors came to India from Africa,” Mr. David said to her. “They arrived some centuries ago, but no one knows exactly when.”

His people, Mr. David said, had been brought to Junagadh by one of the nawabs to work as palace guards. When the last nawab went to Pakistan after independence, many of them were without work, all their prestige gone. Through his father's palace contacts John obtained admission to a mission school in Jamnagar.

Bapu-ji asked him quietly: “Were your people always Christian?”

To my astonishment, Mr. David replied, “My family have always been Muslims. I accepted Yesu at the school.”

Mr. David's name at birth had been Yohanna, and his father's name was Dawood.

“Sidis were good soldiers, it used to be said,” my father added.

“Are you a soldier? Can you fight?” Mansoor asked, having come over with a few children to gawk at the teacher.

Mr. David grinned and reached out and fondly ran a hand over my brother's hair.

“There was a brave general called Malik Ambar, and another called—”

“You are negro, then?” I asked.

“The term ‘negro’ is used for Africans of America, Karsan,” he said.

“Like Cassius Clay?”

“Yes. Like Cassius Clay. And Patterson, and Liston, and Satchmo …”

There came a dreamy wistfulness to his demeanour as we all stared at him.

We sat down in a circle on a mat in the pavilion. In front of Mr. David was placed a shiny new aluminum plate. He looked surprised, then turned it on its edge, watched his reflection in it.

“It's your lucky day, John Bhai,” Shilpa, Bapu's new volunteer, who had sat down with us, teased, “you get a shiny new thaali, and the humble folk have to do with these old brass ones.”

Bapu-ji looked indulgently at Shilpa.

Mr. David laughed and said, “I will be only too happy to exchange my shiny new one for your old brass one, Shilpa-ji, if you like.”

Shilpa agreed; the plates were exchanged. My mother's face turned red.

Shilpa needled Ma. The two were so entirely different. My mother was simple and caring, plump and motherly. Shilpa was the glamorous city girl, the voluptuous torment who haunted my nocturnal readings of the Old Testament. She was a recent widow and a former teacher. While walking along a busy street in Ahmedabad, she said, she had come across a pavement shrine and put a few coins in the donation box. The sadhu in charge had divined her unhappiness and told her to go and serve the Saheb of Pirbaag. And so here she was, devoted to the Saheb. She arrived alternate Fridays, staying at one of the guest rooms, and departed on Sunday. Immediately upon her arrival, she went about sweeping the shrine; to have a sweeper do it was fine, but to do it oneself, lovingly tend the hallowed ground, gave one the humility that was a prerequisite for spiritual advancement. Few women from the higher castes would stoop to such a lowly chore, whatever the rewards. Afterwards she would attend to my father's needs—bring water or milk for him, run any errand he had—then sit moony-eyed at his feet to learn from him. It was enough to make me jealous of my father.

Early mornings, whenever she was around, I woke up to the pure joy of her thin clear voice rising from the temple, giving the devotional shape to a ginan. It was a beautiful sound at the most beautiful, holy hour before dawn, the first sandhya: the air cool and flavoured with incense, trembling ever so slightly with the rhythms of a bell.

That time when Mr. David first visited us, he stayed the night, and the following day he and Shilpa took the bus together. They made a handsome pair, and as Ma and I watched them walk towards the gate, she remarked, “Wouldn't it be wonderful if these two got together.” I now know there was only bite to the remark; the two couldn't have been more unsuited to each other.

Marching for Mother India; and the facts of life.

Bapu-ji and Pradhan Shastri appeared to be in agreement. But my father was a polite man; he did not believe in unnecessary argument.

Our sanskriti—our traditional ways—were being corrupted, Pradhan Shastri declared, sitting with my father in the pavilion. He listed the evils that had befallen us, one by one. Films and their loose morality; rock 'n' roll, the twist, and Elvis-belvis; immoral books.

“And one more thing.” He eyed my father warily.

“Yes?” Bapu-ji inquired.

“Spineless politicians!”

“The Kali Yuga is upon us,” my father said noncommittally.

“We have to bring back the Golden Age, Saheb-ji!” exhorted Shastri.

My father of course knew that the golden Krta Yuga would come only after the complete destruction of the present age. Looking at his impassive face from where I sat close by, having served the two men glasses of sweet milk, I could see that Bapu-ji was not ready yet for that great dissolution.

Pradhan Shastri would have been in his late or middle twenties. He was a local man who had disappeared a few years before and now reappeared, reborn as the regional agent of the National Patriotic Youth Party, or NAPYP, which had set itself up in a house at the fork up the road, next to the school and across from the shop. About him was the urgency of a man who would save India from herself, though he spoke with an easy sincerity and deference, the fire in his message revealed only by a glint in his dark black eyes and a slightly heightened tone to his voice.

He was of compact build and wore a crisp orange dhoti round his waist, his bare chest smooth, dusky, and hairless. His hair was cropped short and the tilak on his forehead indicated that he had recently done his devotions to the gods. Ever since his arrival some weeks before, Haripir had become a louder, indeed a little raucous place. At dawn, just as the ultimate notes of the Muslim azan and the Pirbaag ginans had vanished into the thin air, there would come from a crackling loudspeaker the recitation of Sanskrit slokas, as if to welcome by their hard, formal sounds the actual bustle of the day. They were repeated in the evening. During the day passersby might catch parts of a patriotic speech on tape or receive a political pamphlet.

This day Pradhan Shastri had come on a mission. He wanted something from Bapu-ji: an endorsement, in the form of my participation in his pet project.

“Women appear in the filims in knickers,” continued Shastri enthusiastically, condemning the west, “and their books are even more dangerous—I know what I am talking about, Saheb-ji, in the cities boys and girls pass them around in secret to each other and learn all sorts of dirty habits. Have you heard of the infamous book
Lady Chatterley's Lover
?”

Bapu-ji: “What does it say?”

“Chi-chi-chi—don't even ask. But everything. What does it not say? The morality of this Lady Chatterley is despicable. Instead of serving her husband, who is wounded in a war, she becomes the whore of a lower caste. What can such a book teach us? And I wonder if it is a mere coincidence that the Britisher author used a Bengali-type name—Chatterley?”

My father did not inquire into what Shastri was implying.

“That is why I need your son—your elder baba—for our NAPYP activities here. We intend to make men out of the boys—by teaching them good sanskriti, good values and discipline, and devotion to our country. We will make them march in uniforms and salute the flag, and we will teach them to use lathis to defend themselves!”

Bapu-ji smiled. “But Pradhan … I mean, Shastri-ji,” he began, and the man glowed with pleasure at my father's revision, though I gleaned from that slip that Bapu-ji had known Pradhan as a boy. “Shastri-ji,” my father continued, “what's the need for martial training in this land of Gandhi-ji?”

Pradhan Shastri's face lost its expression and he briefly cast a cold, hard look at my father. Then he proceeded to explain patiently and sincerely, to reputedly the highest spiritual authority of our parts, that just as the mind needed to be sharp to ward off lazy and corrupt thinking, so did the body need to be in training to protect itself from attack. He concluded, “Sahebji, the humiliating war with China—in which we were betrayed by our leaders—I will be open in my condemnation, don't take it badly—showed us that our beloved nation too needs protection. Our soil is our mother.”

In the silence that followed, the two men looked at each other, acknowledging the chasm between them. Shastri backed down a little, saying, “But it is only exercise, this martial training, it will keep them fit.” And my father met him halfway and said all right, his son would attend; exercise and discipline would do him no harm.

Satisfied, Shastri asked to take a look at Bapu-ji's famed library. He was interested in the English books, and went around reading their titles on the upper shelves, dismissing with a casual wave of the hand all the precious manuscripts that lay bound in leather in piles of twos and threes lower down. “We have to compete against the Americans and Russians, Saheb,” he explained. “We must understand them, then using our own ancient science and technology as a ladder or a pole, we must top these westerners.”

His eyes fell upon a volume of Wordsworth, whose “Daffodils” he had apparently studied in school. He adored poetry, he said. He asked ijazat, a formal permission, to recite a poem he had written in English. When my father assented with a gesture, Shastri, standing in the middle of the room, solemnly declaimed,

Mother to tender infant
Earth to budding peepal
India my nation pure and simple …

At this point he made a discreet personal gesture, not quickly enough, and I broke into a giggle—and earned that cold look from him. My father threw me only the barest glance; it was reprimand enough.

“Very good,” Bapu-ji responded to the recitation. “You should consider publishing it.”