The Assassin's Song (34 page)

Yes, Dr. Goldstein's searching look seemed to say to me, as though he had followed my reasoning. He was a man in his late thirties, and I imagined him to have fought battles of his own. He sat back; he smiled at me. For the first time I saw sympathy in his eyes.

This was a time in the seventies when many people, involved in a currently trendy form of group therapy, went about revealing to their friends and acquaintances exactly what they thought of them and why they had been troubled or offended by them for these many months or years, as the case may be. One day my friend Russell came back from a weekend spent at a retreat. He cornered me in my room in the evening, and as I sat crosslegged on my bed with a book on my lap, he told me rather brashly how he had always hated my supercilious Maharishi smile and my ego and my bookishness; and how one day he had seen me picking my crotch and could not, for many months whenever he peed, get the image out of his mind; and so on, a litany of irritations he had detailed in a long letter addressed to me, which he now put in my hands without a care for my feelings.

I let Russell have his say, while keeping my composure, because he was so desperately sincere, and I agreed to consider for myself the crash therapy he had undergone. Of course I had no intention of following that fad. If anything, I had to convince him at some point to come to his senses and stop going about offending his friends. But this incident prompted me finally to follow Dr. Goldstein's advice to write frankly to my father and tell him what I wanted for myself.

“Dear Bapu-ji
,

“[How many times have I begun this letter, Father, attempting to tell you the simple truth about myself, without offending or hurting you, and asking your forgiveness, your indulgence, your understanding—for you are wise and thoughtful, and above all my father. But all my attempts at niceties have failed, sounding hypocritical, if not false. In the end, all I can come out with is this blunt declaration.]

“I herewith renounce my status as gaadi-varas of Pirbaag, successor to the Saheb-ship of the shrine. I no longer believe in our path, the sat-panth as you called it, the true-path of the ancient sufi; to me it is nothing but a faith and blind like all the other faiths. By this I mean no disrespect to those who believe in it; I accept that to them and to you I have simply lost my way. They are my people, I cannot deny that, just as you are my father and elder. If I have a say, I would like the successorship to go to my brother, Mansoor, who deserves it more than I do, because he is still there with you. But you know better, Bapu-ji.

“I never wanted this status, as Ma will surely tell you if you were to ask her. It always terrified me to think of such a responsibility on my head; to be God to my people (at least to some of them), a keeper of souls, guardian of graves, preserver of the past; to always think of Brahman and Atman and the terrifying eternity behind the dark sky at night. I was not made for that. Where was the joy in it? But I could not tell you this, I was afraid to disappoint you because I respected you and loved you. I always wanted to be an ordinary Indian boy, Bapu. My ambition was to play firstclass
cricket, you will recall that. I might not have succeeded at it, but I never had a chance to give it a try. Bapu-ji, forgive me for being honest, you were never there to listen to or notice what your children or even your wife desired. You lived in your own world. Did you know that Ma went to see films in secret for fear of offending you? That she had to wear a burqa to disguise herself? Perhaps you did; but why did she have to do things in secret? You made plans for me and Mansoor without taking into account what we wanted. So rarely did you pause to speak to me like a father that when you did so, it was a Diwali for me. I would revel in that moment for days. How I missed having a real father!

“And finally, Bapu-ji, how can I ever forget—or forgive—how you tried to coerce and mislead me into returning to Pirbaag. Why? Because you were afraid of all the things I would learn that would make me see things in perspective, including our own backward, primitive tradition— yes, I do believe that!—in which a mere man is treated like God and even believes himself to be an avatar of God. I still don't know if Ma was really sick. If she was sick, wasn't it your duty to tell me what she suffered from? Did you realize how much you hurt me, what suffering you caused me? For I love Ma, like any son loves his mother, but you put an inhuman price on my being able to come and see her.

“What do I desire from life? Simply to be an ordinary person. Can you understand that, Bapu? Someone who likes to find out about new things, marry the girl he wants, follow cricket and baseball. (Yes, I do like baseball now, and occasionally even American football.) Someone who likes to read for pleasure; for whom this world is not a miserable prison but a place in which to seek personal fulfillment and happiness, full of other ordinary people like me.

“I have told you in all honesty, Bapu-ji, what I have become; what I think of my life and what I desire from it. Pirbaag is not for me. There must have been someone called Nur Fazal, the Wanderer and sufi. But he lived hundreds of years ago and was a mere mortal. I am simply an ordinary, secular Indian studying in America. Please forgive me, Bapu-ji, if I have offended you, but this is my truth.

“Your loving son,

“Karsan.”

Truth as it was then; in some respects unfair and naive—what is an ordinary, secular Indian, after all? Is such an entity possible? Haven't recent events in my home state disproved even the ideal of such a notion? And harsh, too, my judgement of my father—how much choice did he have in his life?

I realized only gradually that I had in effect banished myself from home.

March 15, 2002
.

Kali Yuga. The Destruction. Pirbaag, Gujarat
.

I had called him preserver of the past, almost in contempt; and now it was gone.

Thirty years later I was back in the old grounds, the prodigal returned. I would have wanted to cremate my father, but he was gone and cremated days before; and I stood in the midst of a destruction so absolute—result of the recent communal riot or pogrom or mass revenge, call it what you will—a catastrophe so complete, I could only gasp, and then gasp, and staggered towards the edge of the old pavilion and sat down.

The smell of burnt flesh and bone and garbage; filth desecrating the graves, stray dogs rooting in the periphery, two bullocks carelessly feeding off the overgrowth; the marble mausoleum—once the centre of my existence—grey with dust, pockmarked by the impact of angry missiles. Dare I go inside? I must pay my respects. Here I am, Pir Bawa. I stood up and walked wearily towards it; went up the steps and over the threshold, to be greeted by a sharp dusty wind from the darkness. Gradually my eyes began to see in the dark. An angry storm had passed here: shreds of cotton chaddar, dry petals in the dust, the lattice barrier broken and fallen, the grave naked and soiled, bereft of its crown … the tang of ammonia … and two rats scurrying about in the corners, among the rags.

Back outside, the glare of destruction. The clamour of disbelief. This could still be a dream, this wrecking ground. Visions swimming before me of the heyday that had passed … the hopes and prayers brought here by the hundreds on Saturdays, the music of the ginans, the whiff of incense
early at dawn, and the tinkle of bells … and all the history and legend and permanence of Pirbaag. I had denied its charge, but surely not to see it thus, pulverized, testimony only to the death and agony of those who had come to hide in it, or to protect it from the havocking mobs.

I sat down on the steps, before me this ruined kingdom that I had once rejected. It was too late for tears, for by now I had lived and lost already, far away in a life of my own devising, and wrought a stoic armour around me that gave me my semblance of composure. But to see
this
? So grotesquely complete in its destruction as only my native land could make it. So beyond the redemption and forgiveness that I thought I had earned as the privilege of my age and its experience, the reward of its mellowness and moderation. Was I being laughed at or only being commanded to laugh?

Pir Bawa, is this your final lesson. The impermanence of everything. Do I see here the stamp of Kali Yuga, the Dark Age that Bapu often described, and awaited? Or is this a symbol of a cynical political system that seasonally lubricates itself with the blood of victims?

“Karsan Saheb …”

I came to with a start. A boy stood shyly before me, barefoot, grimy. I gaped at him, astonished.

“Karsan Saheb …”

This form of address … so unequivocal, from this stripling in singlet and shorts born years after I left here. How does he know me, does he know what he's saying? I have not even announced myself in this town. Can the face reveal so much?

“Your Bapu said he left instructions for you.”

“Instructions? Where?”

“He left them with Pir Jaffar Shah.”

“Jaffar Shah?”

He ran off to his mother waiting in the distance, and the two stood staring at me.

And I couldn't help but smile, just a trace. Jaffar Shah was often the gateway to the heart of Pir Bawa. I remembered. The kindly saint of the sojourner, beloved to truck and bus drivers. Under the curious gaze of boy and mother, I stood up and went to his grave, its massiveness having stood up to the attacks. Here, seated beside it, Master-ji had taught us lessons in the tradition; and Bapu-ji had a hiding place in the ground known only
to the two of us. Except for stains on the sides and a few chips off its concrete, the grave lay clean and calm, with already a cheery aspect from the few red flowers upon it.

The boy returned curiously to watch. I knelt down at the foot of the grave, swept off with one hand the sand on the warm paving, looked for the loose stone I knew must be there. A faint reek came off the ground. The boy's small fingers helped me to find a gap, and together we prised the brick out to reveal a brown envelope, intact and still glossy; below it, scraps of paper and cardboard apparently hidden long ago, perhaps the same ones Bapu-ji and I had buried here, against the eventuality of a Chinese invasion.

The envelope was addressed:

How determined, how uncompromising, even in desperation. He would not let me off easily.

I went back to sit on the steps. There would be the business aspects to attend to, regarding the property. I had no interest in it. And this envelope: should I open it? I blanked my mind, willed the syllables of the bol to appear; they wouldn't, of course. Over the years I had willed myself to forget them, breaking off my sacred connection to the shrine, to my father and the succession.

A ginan came to mind instead, a song of destruction:
Be aware, my brothers, the Daitya will come and destroy the world …

And then another, a song of death:
You hero, going after “me” and “mine,” your life was wasted …

A group of men and women approached respectfully, joined their hands in greeting. “Saheb, allow us to clean this place up.”

I gazed up at them in absolute wonderment. I was touched too by this show of loyalty. The humility, the respect and sympathy. Why? What did they seek here now, from this place of the saviour who could not save himself?

“But that is impossible now, it is all gone … Go to the temple next door—it's all right to do so … it is open, after all.”

While on my way here in the car, fearful expectations in my head, though what I imagined was nothing compared to what I later saw, and speculation about time's inevitable toll on the old home, and nostalgia the bittersweet palliative lulling the mind, the driver proudly pointed out on my right the new temple of Haripur. It was an impressive white structure, walled and gated, standing on the site of the old temple to Rupa Devi and covering the old ground where I used to play cricket. There was a dome from which pennants of various colours flew. A little further up came a dilapidated wooden gate, almost at the edge of the road, between a tea and a flower stall. “Pirbaag,” announced the driver, and stopped. “Nothing there now.” This was not the gate I had known, and in my anxiety I ran inside to look at the place which had been my childhood home.