The Assassin's Song (26 page)

And Ginanpal became the Saheb of Pirbaag.

Cambridge, Mass. c. 1970
.

Free at last, and one among many
.

To walk the giddy streets of Boston-Cambridge, breathe deeply each morning the sheer exhilaration of freedom. Freedom from the iron bonds of history; freedom from the little shrine by the dusty roadside with its rituals and songs, in a little village in which my father was avatar, guru, and god; freedom from a country constantly lacerating itself, digging old wounds until the pus-blood stench was so overwhelming. The freedom, simply, to be and to become anew—among people your age, who would dare the old and cynical, to whom nothing was impossible and no thought inconceivable.

Don't trust anyone over thirty, they told you when you arrived. And would that I never got to that accursed age! Bapu-ji was old, old; Ma was a dear but old. India was a doddering ancient-old with confused memories.

Oh to be away! To be independent, to have fun; to brush aside all those restraints of the past and think clearly, for the first time, about your own life; to search for knowledge—naively and from the beginning, without presupposition; and at last, to be simply one among many, an ordinary
mortal, in this world clamouring all around you, with real people and their real concerns.

I let myself go.

I had come to the legendary city of knowledge and punditry; to its legendary ivy-covered university. For my American classmates, every moment of their existence was to be conscious of and exult in the fact that they were at Harvard. Unlike them I had arrived almost by accident; my friend Elias could well have pointed out Oklahoma in his guide to universities and that's where I would have applied. And so I had to learn, if not to exult in, at least to appreciate the glory and prestige of the place, and thank my sponsors, whose representatives I had had a chance to meet at a reception.

But I had arrived at a tumultuous period, a time of levity on one hand and rage on the other, at least among the young. True to its other tradition (the Tea Party), Boston-Cambridge (it's hard to think of one without the other) was once more a city of rebellion. Prophets, seekers, revolutionaries, anarchists exhorted from street and podia, with messages of political and spiritual malaise and a call to action: engage, seize the day, challenge and overturn the status quo in this mighty, materialistic, but blind America. It was a time like never before, so my generation said, and would continue to echo well into their middle age.

The Vietnam war ground on far away, but at home it was a throbbing open wound on the nation, hundreds of boys coming back dead every day; Richard Nixon, the president, seeking peace with honour, in those memorable words, had ordered the secret bombing of Cambodia. B-52s pummelled the forests. Protests erupted on campuses across America, there were riots in the cultured streets of Boston-Cambridge.

But this innocent abroad, unlike other foreigners, was unmoved by the protests, the daily flyers and teach-ins and marches; the excitement could not lure me; this rage of my age group left me curious, a little alienated, and even nervous. I did not understand their politics, I could not feel it with their passion. And it didn't become a guest to throw his opinions around, did it—or even to form them so quickly. How could I—trained in the distant school of Raja Singh's Kaleidoscope—tell the socialist-workers
apart from the pacifists, the committed intellectual from the anarchist seeking any cause, and any of these from a rich boy or girl seeking guilt or thrills or both? I was ignorant about the world. I was so far behind the times I had to catch up starting from the Mesopotamians.

I had quickly made one enemy: Time. There were clocks everywhere in this fast culture, mocking, teasing, reminding, admonishing, their two hands raised like whips to goad you. Run, run, you are late. I learned relativity in a way to make Einstein proud: not only were there too many clocks, they moved differently here than they did back home. In those first weeks I would be seen rushing down corridors, from class to class, dropping books, running into people, only to arrive late or at the wrong destination. Appointments were torment. Why did they have to be so exact, made in advance, written in stone? So used was I to a leisurely passage of time, proceeding not in irreversible minutes but from age to age in circles. What was the hurry? Cornered by a news vendor on the street or a panhandler inquiring casually where I came from, I would stop, to inform, to chat. Time ceased, when all around me was the frenzy of Harvard Square in perpetual motion. I come from a village called Haripir … my father is a guru, actually an avatar of a pir who himself was an avatar … The face before me would turn blank, the indulgent smile fade; I would walk away, reluctant Mariner. Professors had to gently show me the door—drop-in-anytime-for-a-chat wasn't to be taken literally either. (If you could, you wouldn't have to be told.) This wasn't India. Time ruled.

To my collegemates I was the genuine article, a prize asset—an absentminded, soft-spoken son of a guru with a delightful accent copyrighted recently by Peter Sellers and the Maharishi Mahesh Yogi. I was to show off; they took me around.

One day I saw a girl.

I had gone with my roommates to MIT, the other university down Mass Ave, on a Friday night to see a movie. If Harvard was ivy, MIT was shadowy grey stone, large columns. This was my first sight of that science mecca, its forbidding grey features partly covered by the shadows in the sinisterly quiet, windy side streets. All kinds of stories were told about this place: its denizens walked about with woolly strings of mathematical formulas
growing out of their heads instead of normal hair; they walked about twirling bombs and missiles round their fingers; they slept with moon rocks; they had developed radar, which had won the last war—well, almost. They were modelling human brains. They were weird, which did not mean they did not party.

The movie was
2001: A Space Odyssey
, a futuristic science-fiction adventure in which the heavens and the humans performed a dance to a waltzy music, to which the science geniuses of the Institute had come prepared to be stoned. The auditorium was packed up to the crowded aisle floors, and the audience was raucous as it settled down; they had seen the movie before, tonight was merely a repeated ritual. Suddenly a streaker ran down an aisle and across the front, female parts jiggling; laughter, and pray nobody looks at my red face. Lights went out in the midst of all this excitement, the crowd went still, the intergalactic waltz began. Furtive, twitchy glows in the dark, an odour of marijuana in the air. Sin. As the show progressed the fumes grew stronger, sweetly acrid; the audience lay back; laughed a lot. Halfway through, a bomb scare—a common occurrence—put a stop to the proceedings, and the lights came on. A move began for the doors, not too rushed, considering the scare. That was when I saw the girl. She had brown hair, large eyes, an almond face; she was fair but could have passed for an Indian. Was that what was so attractive, combined with her loose-limbed American mannerisms? She had turned to look behind her, and our eyes met. She made a face, to show her annoyance at the situation, then got up; the big guy beside her, in a laughable white afro, also stood up. And I quickly looked away. Too late. In that one momentary exchange, I had been struck, as though by a laser; life could not be the same again.

When I came out I noticed that I was alone; I had lost my friends, or maybe they had abandoned me. There had been talk of partying at a fraternity on Mem Drive by the river, and seeing girls, for which I was evidently unsuited. What experience did I have with girls? Shilpa, much older than I, had aroused in me a shame-filled lust; and there was Mallika, the girl whose presence at Pirbaag had tormented me for so long, who finally had spoken to me that once … and told me her name. I preferred to be alone now anyway, and I started walking along Mass Ave back to the heart of my new world, the Square.

That face … the girl's image from the auditorium haunted my long walk that night. Was she Indian? Spanish? What an apparition; what a diversity of people here. All sorts. But it would be nice to meet her … For what? To say what? Silly thought. To be friends, what was wrong with that? Some experience you have, talking to girls.

On the way, at Draper Labs, a dingy yellow-brick corner building, a night vigil was in progress to protest the research of missiles at these premises; some forty people standing or sitting quietly by the dim porch light, sporadically raising placards or calling out to passersby; beyond this, after the grimy, gothic chocolate factory silently pouring out enticing sweet vapours from its tall chimneys, the street became dark, cold, and deserted; empty buses waiting outside a moribund supermarket; then suddenly a flurry of lights, and Central Square with Dunkin' Donuts, more enticing aromas. I fought off the temptation, promising myself a hazelnut muffin and tea at Pewter Pot later. I began luxuriating in a kind of silence I had only lately discovered; the kind that my father would experience, perhaps, in his library or when he came out late at night among the graves and perused the sky. Pinpricks of light in a deep, mysterious blackness that he had once likened to a blanket covering the universe. What lay beyond it? he had asked. Here the stars were visible only if you squinted through the perpetual haze that seemed to veil them. I thought about my next letter to Bapu-ji. Thank you, Bapu-ji—I would tell him—for letting me come here. He had been wounded by my decision, his face had soured when he handed me my letter of admission, having read it first; but here I was, a few months later, dreamily walking along a street in Boston-Cambridge. I was happy, immensely so. What did he expect from me now? What did I expect from myself? Did I want to return and be a Saheb to my people? (But I must.) Silence …
like a cancer grows
, as the popular song on the radio said … so much, so much to learn and find out. Oh, where was I buried all these years?

I had crossed Central Square, into another dark patch of street across from the post office, when I was stopped by two rough-looking men my age.

“What money do you have?”

“What? Money?”

“What money you got, man, hand it over, quick.”

“I have seventy-five dollars … with which to buy books tomorrow.”

“You kiddin'?”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You from India, right? You from India.”

“Yes. From the state of Gujarat.”

“Right. No kiddin'. Good night. Take care.”

“I will. Good night.”

Only when they were out of earshot and I was alone did I realize that I had escaped getting “mugged.” A crazy word. I was learning a new English. I started hurrying, my heart beating fast, thanking my luck for seventy-five precious dollars saved.

When I told my friends about this adventure I became a day's celebrity. I had survived a mugging. At dinner the next evening in the dining hall a wild cheer went up for me as I entered. A cartoon appeared in the
Crimson
that week, titled, “From Gujarat, You Kiddin'? Welcome to America!”

A bitterly cold winter, the mercury in the nether regions of the scale, in the
teens
, they said; the nights, especially on weekends, bleak and desolate. Often by myself, I would stroll around the Square, visit the bookstore, which was, quite wonderfully, open late into the night, one person sitting at the cash register, looking quizzically up from his reading, recognizing perhaps a kindred soul—a fellow mystic of the book world. The basement was devoted entirely to philosophy, mysticism; Bapu would have loved it. And Pewter Pot, a tea shop on Mass Ave the other side of the Square that sold varieties of teas and muffins, where you could sit and read until past midnight and they actually left you alone. What a haven this city was, what a refuge, how accepting of the oddball. So your father is a guru?—a godman? Jeez, mine is a senator—from New York? I am Russell. How do you do? And I am Bob—from Ottawa. And I am Dick. Hi. These three were my suite mates at Philpotts House, and they easily took me, differences and all, as one of them.

And the girl? I hadn't seen her again, had no hopes of doing so; she remained a sweet thought as Mallika had once been.

I dreamed I saw Dada. I had been brought forward to be blessed by the stocky old former wrestler, who was seated on his gaadi, hunched forward, in the pavilion of the shrine. I knelt before Dada, kissed his hand. Dada, chubby in face, a halo of white hair on his head, put his hand on my shoulder.

“Beta, I free you from responsibility … you are absolutely free—”

“I don't want to be free, Dada, I will always do as you say!”

“I have freed you, Karsan, to seek out all the corners of the world.”

“I am here for you, Dada.”

As I turned to depart, he said, “Beta, can you spare five rupees?”

“Rupees or dollars, Dada?”

“Five …”