The Assassin's Song (18 page)

What a horrid place the world was, how graphic and explicit and crude. I found myself, that day and others, avoiding my hero in school. He had become tainted by an innuendo I could neither completely appreciate nor resist in his defence. If I saw him walking towards me, I would rather ineptly pretend not to notice, taking refuge in some boyish mischief to distract me; I would abruptly change my route; I would say, “Good morning, sir,” and hasten away, avoiding his eye. I stopped going to his Christian lessons.

I was afraid, I think, of being contaminated and treated as a pariah like him. He was a doomed man, shunned by all but the Christian boys. During PT, when he called us together for a “real-life” session, we were all mostly silent; the snack he ordered was eaten grudgingly.

He seems okay, yaar, but we can't take a chance; people spread rumours … He is a Christian, it doesn't matter to him what they say, but we have to bear the repercussions … Family to think of … My dad is furious, yaar …

“Come on now, boys, what is bothering you? Let it out. Be men!”

“What, sir? Everything is fine.”

“Anything bothering you, sir?” A smart aleck.

“Me? No. Come on, boys, form your teams! Karsan—boxing practice today?”

“Sir—Ma says I can't come home late.”

And that face I loved so much clouding over in disappointment. How is it possible to betray and crush your favourite person?

That weekend, at the NAPYP exercises on the field, I decided to show my stuff as a boxer, taking on first an upstart, a boy from Dholka, a village a few miles away, and to great cheer from my friends I floored him with a left
only a couple of minutes into the bout. Drunk with arrogance and the simmering anger and guilt inside me of the miserable week that had just passed, I challenged Varun, Shastri's chela. Built like Johnny Weissmuller but handsomer. He came forward with a smirk that was a mixture of humility and the condescension of a superior person forced to teach an inferior being a lesson. He let me hop around him for a while, his eyes fixed on me, and then, before I knew it, my eye had looked away to some movement behind him and I felt a tremendous pain in my head and blacked out on the ground.

c. A.D. 1260
.

The lovesick bride.

How do we describe the love life of a spiritual man, a great mystic who can make the trees bend to his will? How does a man such as he make love to a virgin teenage princess? She was devoted to him as a wife, she knew the needs of his body and soul to a nuance; and no skill or understanding or even the roguishness of a younger groom was impossible for him.

He did not visit her in the night, nor allow her to come to him, this pure innocent who had waited for him since childhood, and perhaps from her previous birth; who had declined the pomp and riches of empires for his sake. For the first time now she knew unhappiness. In becoming a bride she had become a woman, though belatedly, with all the desires of a woman. She wanted her man to consume her, wanted to nourish his seed; to this desire he would not yield. Meanwhile a woman named Sarsati attended to the sufi, growing more resplendent in her successive pregnancies. The sufi took interest in her well-being, while Rupade's insides burnt with an envy alien to her being.

“Such is the lot of women,” said her mother when Rupade visited her. “They are hostage to their husbands' love. I have asked my Pandit Kamadeva to prepare a potion for you; acting through your skin and odour it will draw your man like a bull to a cow. Meanwhile fatten yourself.”

The girl declined potions. “I drew him to me across mountains and valleys, I will win his desire in my own way.”

“You drew him not with your body, silly girl, but with your mind and soul,” scolded the mother.

Rupade Rani became the virgin mother of Pirbaag. A community of devotees had formed here. Each day at dawn, at the hour called the first sandhya, the most devoted would gather to meditate and recite the ginans the sufi had composed for them. They were songs of love, expressing the desire of the devotee for union with the divine lover, just as Radha had longed for Krishna. And Rupade for her sufi? How precisely did her hus-band's compositions reflect her own desires! Why had he chosen to ignore her as a woman? Was she too pure? Had she, by her years of spiritual devotions, refined herself out of womanhood, the kind that Sarsati exuded every evening when she sprinkled the Master's bed with flowers and attar? Did Maya's lure finally defeat Nur the Wanderer as he lay on his pallet and that woman came to lie beside him and let him stroke her full belly?

The sufi spent long hours in meditation; he studied and he wrote. He gathered his followers around him to impart his teachings. He received visitors, who came for advice or discussion, for his fame had spread far. And sometimes, by himself, he sang his own devotions to an absent beloved. And the princess would pray, “Is it you I am jealous of, Lord, or is it another woman far away?”

Occasionally, when some voice seemed to call him deep within his soul, he would depart on his own, dressed as a mendicant. No one knew where he went; but after some weeks the followers would pray for his return, and inevitably he came back to them; and to her, but not as she would wish.

What would call Nur Fazal away? We only have hypotheses. But it was believed (and still is) that for those who meditated with complete abandon on his name, he had never departed.

The devotees grew to love Rupade, who tended to them like a spiritual
and worldly mother. In time she came to be known as Rupa Devi, the beautiful goddess.

One day a great debate took place in the presence of the king. This debate, on the nature of God, came to be known as the one in which “neither mullah nor pandit had tongue,” because the sufi had silenced the mullahs by his defence of the pandits' many gods, and in the process rendered the latter group speechless.

“You have done me proud,” his father-in-law the king told him. “You are truly one of my pandits. You have learned the sacred language, though some of my learned men think it is blasphemous and ugly on your tongue; they are only envious. You understand our beliefs. You understand our hearts. But you have failed to be the husband to my daughter that you vowed to be.”

“I am devoted to your daughter, my king and father, and we are man and wife; to our people we are mother and father.”

“And yet she has not begotten me a grandchild. I have it on good authority that while a certain low-caste in your presence continues to produce babies like a bitch, my daughter pines away for the attention of her husband. Does she repel you, the darling of this court? Admittedly, men's tastes in women are varied; but there are obligations and duties. We Rajputs easily service two or more women, young and not so young; is that beyond you?”

“My Lord, my action or inaction is due only to my love for Rupade. Of that you have my word.”

“If in twelve months she has not produced a child, you will not be welcome in this land and your home will be forfeit. Your followers will be outlawed and your name will be anathema.”

Spiritual lord to his followers, the “killer” whose mind was his sword, and an unfulfilling husband; a lustful debauchee at night? Definitely a disappointing son-in-law to an indulgent king. A shadow of doom hung over the retreat he had found after years of wandering. Outlawed, neither the pandits and the rajas nor the mullahs and their sultans in Delhi or Sindh or
Multan would accept him. And could he bear to be separated from his Rupade?

Not yet three months after his meeting with the king, a message arrived from the monarch: Remember my warning.

And so finally the sufi began to prepare for that blissful union; he would allow himself the consummation he had long dreaded.

“Rejoice and grieve,” he told his followers. “She whose debt was deferred is ready to pay. Kumari kanya, the virgin bride will come to my bed. Rupade, your mother, will enjoy her bliss.”

The queen's ladies and Rupade's former maids came to wait on her and to instruct, both from experience and from the sutras of love; silks were brought and perfumes, to render the matrimonial bed soft and fragrant for the happy ordeal. The best, most exotic foods were brought, conducive to endless and repeated couplings, a fruitful union. Wedding songs were sung lustily as if the marriage were new, not years old; not that of a sufi but of a debauched sultan or a merchant of the town.

Rupade became pregnant. Palace doctors, priests, and astrologers were in attendance. The queen came daily. The king came to visit, and he gave Nur Fazal a good, manly thump on the back.

Finally the day of delivery came: Rupade died in childbirth, giving up a dead child, her ultimate debt to the wheel of karma.

“You were right, Sufi,” said the king. “Aware of your wisdom and goodness, I misjudged you; aware that her time was short, in all my royal arrogance I forgot and thus hastened her death. Forgive a father his madness.”

Nur Fazal married several times in his long life. From these unions came many prominent descendants, including Jaffar Shah, who would become beloved to travellers, and Balak Shah, who would become the Child-imam of the Muslims. But the sufi continued to sing his passionate ginans, in which the lover ceaselessly pines for his beloved.

These love songs no doubt symbolize the longing of the human soul for union with the Universal Brahman, a condition desired by all mystics; some might contend that in these ginans Nur Fazal continued to address his sufi master, as Rumi did Shams Tabriz. But in those turbulent times
when Mongol hordes swept through the lands of the north and west where he came from, could he have left a woman behind? We in Gujarat preferred to believe that Nur Fazal had always pined for Rupade Rani, his beloved, both before and after her inevitable death. The sufi had been sent not only to relieve the people of Gujarat from the cycle of endless rebirth but also the princess Rupade of her last remaining debt to karma. And perhaps all these reasons are true.

War. Victory. The end of childhood.

September 1965. The Indian Army crossed the Wagah border into Pakistan, reaching almost to the outskirts of Lahore. The previous weeks our neighbour had attacked in the Rann of Cutch and Kashmir, but left its belly exposed between the two fronts. India had pushed through, and now—alarmingly and thrillingly—legendary Lahore lay in sight. A fullscale war was on.

Diminutive, unassuming Lal Bahadur Shastri was prime minister. He was so small that, according to the cartoons, he reached up only to the waist of that giant, the former American ambassador Galbraith. If that were not humbling enough, he wore the plain cotton whites of Gandhian times. Now his stature loomed large and his voice rang clear. Force will be met with force, he said famously, sending the army forth into Pakistan. And the Chinese can make their noises. If each of you forgoes one meal a week, he exhorted in the style of the Mahatma, think how much you will contribute to the nation. Therefore on Tuesdays, after the snack in the afternoon there was no supper at our home. Even the snack was frugal, stale chappati with jaggery or malai; but the milk at night had extra sugar in it, delivered with a conspiratorial smile by Ma, and it couldn't have been more welcome to two hungry mouths. To further assist the national effort, the playground outside Pirbaag became a public vegetable garden, and instead of playing cricket after school, I tended our little portion of it. We grew spinach and eggplant; others grew dhania and methi, doodhi and ghisola. One Sunday a Tata truck came around, preceded by a decorated elephant and a ragtag band, carrying our local politicians, who were out to collect
gold and cash for the war. “Mother India needs you, Mother India needs you …,” exhorted a woman's shrill voice on a megaphone. “Support our jawans … support our jawans … fight Pakistani aggression!” Every pause punctuated by patriotic songs by Rafi and Lata, and the little band tried haplessly and tinnily to be heard. “They say one Pakistani soldier is worth four of our Indian jawans … let's show them even an Indian woman is worth
ten
of them!” The women brought out their jewellery.