The Assassin's Song (40 page)

“I have come to accept your wishes, my son. And since, spiritually, I have always believed I was in touch with you, I also came to accept that you would not write to me. But I am not young any more, and I desire to communicate with you as your father before my time comes. There are some matters that a father has to communicate to his son; there are some matters a Saheb has to tell his successor.

“Fortunately, through Pir Bawa's miracle, Dervesh came to town, bringing news of you, and sadly, also of your tragedy. Some time ago, during a previous visit, he had told me of the miracle you had performed for him.

“My son, I have this one wish of you: that you return to Pirbaag once and let your father set his eyes on you again. Will you come? Let me know. But right now is not a good time to come; we are going through bestial times yet again; demons are on the roam feeding on blood and the screams of the innocent. But here in Haripir and Pirbaag, we will manage, as we have always done; our people can be made to see reason. This madness will soon be over, and I will inform you when it is safe to return.

“Accept best wishes from

“Your father,

“who longs for you.”

I was in tears.

I heard the voice of an old man, who had been my father, whom I had rejected and consciously kept away. I believed I had no choice, but there it was. And now he had come pleading.

I wrote to my father that I too wished dearly for a reunion. I would be able to come in the summer, by which time the violence in Gujarat would surely be over. And I would then be able to stay a few months with him. Meanwhile he should take care of himself.

I sent my best wishes to Mansoor, whom he had not mentioned at all. What could he be up to, now, near middle age? Was he close enough to be of assistance to Bapu-ji, should he need it?

At the last minute, suppressing my qualms, I inserted a short note to Mansoor.

The situation in Gujarat had been worrying since long before Bapu-ji's letter. News of the riots ravaging our state had been all over the Internet in recent months, on the websites of the Indian newspapers and elsewhere. In January a train full of Hindu pilgrims and activists was returning from contentious Ayodhya, where ten years before a fifteenth-century mosque had been destroyed by extremists claiming it to be the birthplace of the god Rama. A compartment of the train, the Sabarmati Express, was set on fire outside the town of Godhra, and some sixty people, including women and children, were trapped inside and burnt to death. Presumably Muslim extremists were responsible for this grisly deed, though no charges had been laid, and there were those who believed that the fire was started inside the compartment. Whatever the case, there followed an orgy of retaliation, a so-called riot, in which masses of extremists and their henchmen went about Muslim areas of Gujarat armed with swords, maces, knives, and petrol bombs, maiming, killing, raping, and burning people. In mixed areas they systematically picked out the Muslim households. In response to the situation, the populist chief minister of Gujarat had famously paraphrased Newton's third law of motion, to every action there is a reaction, thus apparently fuelling the carnage.

Our village of Haripir had been spared such violence in the past, because its shrine of Pirbaag lent it an aura of sanctity, having over the centuries drawn countless souls to its gate and comforted them, without regard to caste or creed; and if that sanctity were not enough, the Sahebs had been ready with words of wisdom and caution whenever conflagration threatened. During the time of India's Partition, my Dada had been the voice of reason, and we had been spared the bloodshed which had afflicted nearby towns. In my father's reign, however, there had been one terrifying day in my childhood when we had come to the brink of bloodshed, and the pushcart vendor Salim Buckle had paid a savage price for the peace that ultimately prevailed. That death had always troubled me, but I could never pick up the nerve to question Bapu-ji about it. It had affected him deeply, for he had been involved in negotiating the devil's bargain that maintained that peace. Still, he had preserved us.

And so I had little cause to doubt my father's certainty that Haripir would be preserved yet again from the madness. Of the inviolability of Pirbaag and its Saheb there was not even a question.

How wrong I was.

Six weeks after writing to my father, this telegram from India: “Bapu-ji dead. Come at once. Mansoor.”

Postmaster Flat, Shimla
.

Communal killings (“riots”); some thoughts on a concept hard to accept
.

So troubling, so heartbreaking is this phenomenon we call the “riot” in India that I find myself caught up in a need to understand, to grasp and comprehend the pure hatred for a fellow human being that lies behind the quality of violence that is inflicted on the innocent each time. Perhaps there is no answer. We are too complex as a nation, too raw as a people, etc. But perhaps this madness to try to grasp the ungraspable is an affliction incurred from having lived away so long, in a culture where a rational answer is only a matter of effort. I have become naive, forgotten the skill of blinking at the right moment, letting the unspeakable pass away. Still, this is what I am.

One of the earliest recorded instances of communal violence is reported in the reign of Raja Jayasingh Siddhraj (1094–1143) of Gujarat. An altercation among Parsis, Muslims, and Hindus in the port city of Cambay apparently resulted in the destruction of a mosque; a complaint in the form of a long poem was brought to Gujarat's greatest king, who compensated the Muslims for the mosque.

In 1714, a bloody riot occurred in Ahmedabad during Holi celebrations; the city was under control of the Mogul dynasty of Delhi. There were subsequent riots in 1715, 1716, and 1750. The list goes on, through to the Partition of India, to the butchery in Ahmedabad in 1969 shortly after I left, about which I learned not from my family but from my friend Elias. I wonder if Mr. Hemani the bookseller perished in this last riot, for I never heard from him.

A depressing thought: are we doomed then to these perpetually recurring communal conflagrations we call “riots”?

The reasons given for them are varied: economical; the past atrocities of Muslim armies; manipulation and instigation by the colonizing power, Britain; ditto by cynical Indian politicians; etc. The riots have not been exclusively between Hindus and Muslims, but sometimes have involved Sikhs, Dalits, and Tamils. But how to explain slicing a child's body in two with a sword; inserting a rod up a woman's vagina; removing an eightmonth foetus from a mother and killing it before her eyes; electrocuting an entire family inside a room?

Descriptions of the personal violence make the blood curdle, make one wonder what it means to be human after all. That the most ghastly violence imaginable, perpetrated on women and children, could occur in the state of Gandhi makes one wonder too how aberrant was the Mahatma; was he real, after all?

The “riot” is a euphemism for intercommunal murder; it allows the perpetrators to go free, for rioters need not be charged, murderers must. And so they are back again during the next conflict with their swords and their knives to feed once more on the blood of the innocents.

Postmaster Flat, Shimla.
Happily, he is not armed.

Is this the same brother who once quarrelled with me about wanting his turn to clean Rupa Devi's temple? Look at him now, praying to Allah, backside in the air, hands to his ears the way he would put them there to tease me and make me laugh and chase him—but now it is his seriousness behind the posture, the ritual, that teases and mocks me. We never prayed like that; we were never taught this Arabic prayer, this namaz; it was not our custom, it was not in our language.

But why does this abstract, geometric form of worship—this ballet on the floor—repel me so? Is it because it also is a part of me (Pir Bawa was a Muslim, wasn't he), and I fear it, fear that it will swallow me up, that I will be pushed and fall irrevocably on that other side, become them, become it—a Muslim—when Bapu-ji had always told me that our path was the middle one, between the two? Our path was spiritual; outward forms of prayers and rituals didn't matter. (Though we had a few of our own, they were only ceremony and tradition, reminders of our fraternity.) It always troubled me, this ideal of Pirbaag; it made us so different from the rest of the world, which required clean spiritual boundaries. But if you chose one or the other, you were compelled to lose something of yourself, let it go— those were the rules.

—But we should choose, nai, Bapu-ji—between Hindu and Muslim? Everybody chooses.

—There's nothing to choose, Karsan, we have been shown our path, in
which there is neither Hindu nor Muslim, nor Christian nor Sikh, just the One. Brahman, the Absolute. Ishvar. Allah. God.

And Ogun, Adonai, Mungu, I know. Except that, dear Bapu-ji, we will not be left alone until we choose; the choice will be made for us—as it was, recently, wasn't it, Bapu-ji. A choice was made for us and we paid a price. You paid with your life. Now I sit here amidst the mountains recalling what I am and, if I can, what we were; and this fellow here who was our Mansoor is an angry, arrogant stranger called Omar, and denies you.

At least he did not bring a weapon; a belt of explosives.

Unless they are hidden somewhere.

It was in Ahmedabad three months ago, as I was sitting by myself at the café of the graves, at the place that I had always preferred, beside the tiny grave of a child, that I saw Mansoor for the first time in thirty years.

I had already been to Pirbaag and seen its devastation, and had come to the city at the suggestion of Neeta Kapur after the remarkable coincidence of our meeting on the road outside the shrine. I had put up in a hotel in teeming Teen Darwaja, an area I had got to know well during my excursions there as a teenager. Right across from the three-storey Hotel Azure, next to an overly lit shop with a sleek mannequin in shades and a business suit standing outside its door, stood the desultory, boarded-up building that once was the Daya Punja Library, my window into the world. On the steps of this library George Elias and I had sat down with an oversized, glossy-paged guide to American universities and picked the one that would suit me best. The area was at the edge of the old city, which had been savagely afflicted by the recent violence, and it was where I expected to find Mansoor. Neeta had dropped me off here with some qualms. Take care, she said, you can still smell the tension that's in the air. Her own suburban Ahmedabad was safely across the river, with its coffee bars and shopping strips. In my nostalgic meanderings I had already been to the site of the chemist shop which had belonged to Elias's family and saw that the building had been demolished, and in its place stood a small shopping complex; coincidentally or not, there was a chemist
shop in it, but it was not owned by Jews. Across the street was the site of Mr. Hemani's used-book store; it was now occupied by a modern bookstore.

I had no idea what to do with Pirbaag. I could surrender it to the authorities, who would seal it off, and it would join the ranks of the ruins of bygone eras, an overgrown home to snakes, scorpions, and monkeys. But there were those people to consider for whom Pirbaag still meant something; among them, those from Haripir were already busy cleaning the shrine and restoring it. There were many such devotees in various other places, as I well knew. And there was Neeta who, in spite of her class and education, had drawn comfort from it; who had said, You can't abandon your heritage so easily. When I argued, she told me in a pert manner that I had no right. She spoke for them all now, who still found comfort in Pirbaag, and we had become familiar enough for her to make her point forcefully. Then what do you suggest, I asked in exasperation, to which she said nothing but gave me an odd, quizzical look. I did not even want to think about the implication.