The Assassin's Song (37 page)

“He's a truly wonderful guy,” I replied. “Not my idea of a jazz musician and poet, though …”

One of the poems he had read was called “Red River Buddha”—an evocation of India in Manitoba that was far in spirit from the poets I studied and admired. I had quibbles about it, yet it was memorable.

“What do you know of jazz anyway,” she said.

“Nothing. And your mother is nice too.”

We stopped to turn back; we looked at each other and smiled shyly. Spontaneously we gathered each other in a deep embrace, then walked back together holding hands, with the unspoken knowledge that we truly belonged together and would spend our lives as one. When we left, it was with the understanding that I could now be considered a part of the family. Marge had told her parents what I said during the walk. (“You know what he told me on our walk? You want to know? He said that he could live in a place like this and bring up a family of his own!”) Cathy was thrilled and gave me a warm, tearful hug. Dr. Padmanabh said, “Hear, hear!” And I prayed, to whatever entity that looked after me, to keep me on course.

The following spring, Marge and I got married in a chapel in Cambridge. It was a small ceremony, performed by a female Lutheran minister, famously one of the first in the country, and attended by a handful of our friends and acquaintances. My friends Russell, Bob, and Dick were present, the former acting as best man, the latter two having travelled long distances to be with me. Following the ceremony, they threw us a party at the local Howard Johnson, where we spent our first married night. The contrast of my nuptials to the village weddings of my childhood—colourful, noisy, and very public—couldn't have been greater. But I was now a private person. The vows we took we had composed ourselves. We gave the Padmanabhs the happy news after the event, thus avoiding a potential conflict with Cathy over the choice of church and ceremony. My father received the news by post, along with a photograph of myself with my bride, and he duly returned a note of congratulation, as did Mansoor. Marge and I agreed to a family reception in Winnipeg in the summer, and this was more of a celebratory occasion than the one in Cambridge, though not out of control. The Padmanabhs knew many people. Marge looked stunning in a red sari, this being the very first time that she wore one. Her grandparents from Iowa were present. The doctor read a moving poem to his daughter, in which he described her ragtag childhood camel, who had eventually come to life and carried her away. The oblique, humorous reference to her husband did not pass unnoticed.

When I finished my doctorate, I was fortunate in a job-scarce climate to find a teaching position at Prince Albert College in Burnaby, British Columbia. The fact that the English department of the college was run essentially by two counterculture radicals of the sixties worked in my favour, and it appeared that it was more my knowledge of Indian culture and mysticism than of Keats, Shelley, and Donne that had secured me the position. Here in an idyllic green suburb next to the ocean I became a beloved teacher of young people. I changed my name to Krishna Fazal, and I became the father of a boy, whom we named Julian. My happiness was complete.

British Columbia. 1980s.
My joy, my home.

I was determined to be happy. If there was the slightest shadow cast upon our home, it was this: that I would have liked to have fathered a brood, but we could have just this one child. He was the king of our world upon whom we doted; every moment of our lives was captive to our enormous devotion for him, this beautiful child-god, our offspring.

Marge had stayed home to care for Julian; on occasions when she had to be away by herself, he would accompany me to my office, and even to my classes, where he sat patiently at the back, his hands in his lap, staring with wide expressionless eyes at his father, and seemingly blind to the adoring eyes of the female students. In my small college department he was regarded as almost a member, and the library had assigned a special corner to him. Once, when he was still little, during a long afternoon seminar that seemed interminable even to me, he suddenly burst into tears. “Am I that bad today?” I asked the class with typical professorial humour. I knew the answer of course, which they all confirmed with something like, “Well, Professor, you haven't been all there!” I had had a quarrel with Marge that morning, which was why I was so distracted, had fumbled at reconciling greatness in art with bigotry—always a tricky subject when you judge the past by the standards of the present. It was when I uttered something like, “Were it not for Shakespeare we would not forgive Eliot,” which did not sound quite right, that my little angel finally broke into tears of protest. And yet he had managed to save the day.

Our squabbles could be defused simply by referring to “him,” the one irreducible between us. They were lovers' quarrels still, painful and debilitating and knotted up in egos, but there was this magician who watched over us, the child Julian. And so: “You want to hear what he did today?” Or, with the royal pronoun, “We had a tantrum today.” “Yeah? What happened? Is he all right?” “Of course he's all right. Listen …” Without even noticing, we would be free of our misery and back in love.

I could go on and on, the unstoppable parent.

Fatherhood had rendered me a new man, infused in me an exuberant sense of purpose, conquered my shyness. I would stop on the sidewalks to admire a baby or pet a dog; quarrel with people and huff and puff over the rights and safety of my child; tour the neighbourhood in a Halloween costume. I even volunteered to be the Santa Claus at Julian's kindergarten. Add to all that a growing perversion, an uncontrollable tic: the habit of singing to my son—in the car, while walking together, when putting him to bed. How to explain this silly joyfulness? Only as that. I had not sung much as a child, except for Master-ji, who would tell me that I had a good voice. Singing was all around me as a child. Now from this child-crazy father lines and melodies would come pouring out, some of which I had not even known I had in me. Old English nursery rhymes, where would I have learned them?
A farmer went trotting upon his grey mare, bumpety-bumpety-bump
; half-remembered popular songs in English and Hindi and my mother's lullabies; I would recite Blake (“Tiger Tiger”) and Eliot (“Macavity: The Mystery Cat”) to this gifted child who was surely on his way to great things; but to my astonishment when I unthinkingly recited to Julian a few simple ditties of Pir Bawa, the boy began to sing them with unswaying vigour.

Anand anand kariyo rikhisaro
… be happy, great souls, you have the guru. A lilting, happy melody that he could sing in a tremulous childish tone with a wonderful and sweet innocence to charm anyone in the vicinity. The ginans of my childhood, the happy ones at least, had become my son's nursery rhymes. Did this make me nervous, my darling child echoing the songs of Pirbaag? Sometimes. But I could take comfort in the fact that their words could not possibly mean anything to him; and of course they had lost their meaning for me. How far were we from ancient Pirbaag, what harm could they do in this unfettered, sunny existence …
the green mountains on one side of us, the blue sea on the other, the winding grey ribbon of road ahead, and that child's vibrato curling up from his throne at the back.

I never revealed to my own father the presence of this new fount of happiness in my life, his only grandson. I had considered a few times going back to Pirbaag to visit him. Marge was keen to come along and bring our son, and her parents encouraged us. It seemed so right. But every time, beyond the first suggestion of a brief return home, my legs would turn to jelly, my palms would sweat. I couldn't make myself go. I was jealous of my happiness; I was afraid for it. For even in the song lines that could go melodically and effortlessly through my head like a tape through a recorder, there were the rare but terrifying moments when I could sense their darker meanings—which I had thought were dead—reemerge, and Bapu-ji's message revive: I was living an illusion; Maya the wily sorceress of the material world had bewitched me; I had no right to be happy. But I had a right to my happiness, and I was determined to secure it. And I would not give my father my son even to contemplate as part of his pessimistic God-hood.

Was I afraid my son would grow up to reject me and the world I had given him—to turn towards his grandfather, return to those ancient roots?

I stopped writing to my father.

If Bapu-ji had been exiled to the farthest reach of my consciousness in this new world, the Padmanabhs were frequent visitors. I gradually began to appreciate the doctor's brand of the confessional poetry of wintry exile, in which elephants stomped unhappily on icy grounds and giraffes climbed ladders and Rama set off on his exile to the northern lands. He belonged to a growing literary movement in a new, multicultural Canada, and often I was invited to readings of poetry that contrasted images of the tropics with those of the winter to illustrate the clash of sensibilities. As an academic I was requested to bring legitimacy to this fringe-ish genre, and I obliged by interesting my students in it, organizing readings in my college, and publishing a couple of academic papers, albeit in small journals. I had come to a young country excited by its new identity, a condition which suited my own new existence very well.

The more intriguing aspect of the doctor's visits to us in Vancouver was when he set off on a Saturday afternoon with his saxophone case,
wearing his typical light grey suit. There was a somewhat seedy-looking pub at a strip mall called Sammy's Café on Kingsway, owned by a fellow Indian, where he and a few old friends met and played to a very modest mixed crowd as a prelude to the main fixture later that evening. For this appearance the doctor would have neatly slicked his hair and worn a garish tie, this being his concession to show business. Thus transformed, he was Doctor Paddy the saxophone player. There would be his tiny flickering smile when he played; and when time came for his solo, I liked to imagine he was more absorbed in the piece than he could ever be in his Buddhist meditations.

We were more friends than in-laws. We spoke in English usually, but alone by ourselves, the two of us often broke off into Hindi. His family was from Banaras and had been Buddhists for a few generations, ever since a group of monks had come to the city and converted a locality there. He had been brought up with Hindu practices also, but had relinquished most of them as an adult. He had come as a medical intern to Iowa City, and there met Cathy—who, as the family joke went, had initially taken him for a Native Indian.

Late one afternoon I picked him up from his session at Sammy's, and the two of us emerged onto a wet pavement, for it had rained. We had had a couple of drinks with a snack earlier and were deep in conversation as we headed for the car. It was a few weeks after Indira Gandhi's assassination by her bodyguards, in 1984. Mrs. Gandhi had not been popular, especially after her emergency measures of a few years before; still, the murder was ghastly news. More ghastly were the reports of the bloodbath brought upon the Sikhs of Delhi as a consequence. Our homeland was far away but its news still had an effect upon our thoughts and feelings, if not so much on our lives. Such were the ancient animosities there, and in Sri Lanka, and in Pakistan, that I was only too happy to be away from all that. I asked my father-in-law what was the point of the wistful elephant-and-ice poetry if the elephant had turned mad in the meantime.

Arguing strongly about this—he called me naive—we passed an old church, a dirty-yellow brick fortress with a square crenellated tower; the board outside indicated a Korean denomination. Suddenly our attention was caught. From far inside the building came what sounded like the strains of a very untrained chorus. But the high notes and the unusual
melody were strangely arresting so that, unconsciously, we had paused to listen.

“Strange singing,” I observed.

“Doesn't it sound like what you sing sometimes?” Paddy asked.

He could have been joking, it was his turn to pick up our banter where we had last left off. But my sense of humour had vanished.