The Assassin's Song (47 page)

Did Mansoor know those two men? Could one of them be his old friend Mukhtiar? Was he, busy on his cellphone, the contact in Shimla? Was the police report of a plot against the Institute true, or could it be a fabrication of the sort he had once described so derisively? Was he capable
of wanton destruction to a place that gave a home to his brother? How innocent, relaxed he had looked when he left me; how little I knew him.

Neeta Kapur is here. Imagine my pleasure when I see her at breakfast, busy over her puri and potato curry. “I've come to check on you,” she says half facetiously, and adds, “It's so hot on the plains—I never got used to the heat after my time in Boston.” She spends the day with Mrs. Barua, shopping at the Mall, but has dinner with me at the Guest House.

Later, we walk outside on the grounds. The night is clear, dark, deep; town lights flickering dimly behind us across the valley; a flashlight meandering by itself down a track towards the local shopping area and bus stand of Boileau Ganj, named after an official of the Raj.

She takes a deep breath beside me, and says, “I love this place. It brings me closer to God, and myself.”

“Thank you for sending me here,” I tell her, “it's also brought me closer to myself.”

“And God?”

When I tell her about my eureka moment, the discovery of Nur Fazal's identity, her excitement cannot match mine, of course, and that's a sobering thought. What I could describe as the secret behind my historical existence is for most people another event in our already crowded past. We speak about Mansoor, my anxiety about him. I am reminded primly that my brother is a mature man, fully formed in his personality. She tells me about her son who died, and I tell her about mine. Then the inevitable long silence, during which thoughtlessly we walk down the steep driveway towards the main gate and guard house. The paving is loose and slippery, and we hold on to each other part of the way. Outside, past the radio station, we come to stand at the ridge, a sheer drop protected only by a pipe fencing, across from which the twinkling lights of Shimla reappear in all their glory, spread out on the hills. It's like suddenly coming close upon a galaxy, I think. “When the children were little,” she tells me, “it would scare me when they ran around here.” She has a daughter, I recall, living somewhere in the States.

“Oh, let's be cheerful,” she says after we 've stood there awhile in contemplation. “How did we get into this mood?”

“You brought up God, I think. Yes, let's be cheerful.”

“I'm sorry I brought up God then.”

We walk on towards the new hotel, not far away. All is dark and quiet outside, but surprisingly the bar is open, though also quiet, and we are brought coffee, in the western style, and apricot pies. Sitting across a low table we talk about all kinds of subjects, earnestly, like young people. And suddenly surprised at ourselves we are staring at each other, smiling, laughing. A gem of a moment.

And so finally we come to it, confront together that blind date in Cambridge, Mass., when she spent what seemed an innocent night in my room. An unthinkable act, sign of the times. What else? When we last met, in Ahmedabad, it had been an embarrassing thought, a weight on the mind for us both, I think, and we never brought it up.

“What would you have done if I—” I begin.

“If you had tried to seduce me that night?”

“I suppose that's what I mean.”

She laughs. “I knew you would never do it. I felt perfectly safe.”

“I was like a brother, then?”

“Not quite … but I felt safe. You were so transparent, so earnest.”

“And naive.”

“Oh, very.”

The night had not been so innocent after all; it was the beginning of all the trauma that followed, for it was its wide-eyed boldness that goaded Russell and Bob and the others to play the prank, hang a brassiere on the back of my chair. The shock, the distaste on Premji's face when he saw it; to him I was a goner for sure. He reported to Bapu-ji, and the rest is history. And the bra—black and intriguing—perhaps belonged to the woman now walking next to me? That thought never occurred to me, until now. Silly old me.

“I remember the namkeens you sent afterwards—” I tell her, “at the end of that summer, when you returned from Delhi. I never thanked you.”

“Did you like them?”

“Yes, I'm sure I did.”

And then, after a long pause, she says what she has come here to say in the first place: “You can't hide here forever, Karsan. Or anywhere else. It's time to think of the future. It's time to go back home and claim what is yours. Your heritage.”

“I don't have a home and I don't have a heritage any more … except perhaps what I have recalled and written down here, at the Institute.”

“That's too easy, isn't it?”

“What do you mean? I haven't lived in Pirbaag for thirty years. I am a different person now.”

“You have to decide what to do with it, then. But are you really so very different?”

Yes, yes. I am different. I took off, I escaped, and for years I have walked my own path, away from that ancient place.

If out of defiance at Mansoor I had not made myself recall the bol, I would not have connected so hard to Pirbaag. But who am I fooling. The connection and the defiance were already there when I stood outside the ruins of Pirbaag and resolved to construct something, my own memorial, out of the ashes. And it was there surely when I tried so intensely to break away, but looked back all the time in panic to see if I was being followed. Can you never escape your destiny? Am I too much of an Indian, despite my three decades spent in the west? Is that what Marge always knew?

“You have a people, and they are waiting for you,” Neeta says. “They have nothing else.” She puts a hand on my arm. “They have cleaned and rebuilt what they could, and they have prepared a surprise for you.”

“As what shall I go to them?” I ask her desperately. “What can I offer them?”

I will not repeat what she says, for she flatters me.

Pirbaag, Gujarat. August 10, 2002.
The call of the shrine.

We had decided to bury Julian, instead of cremating him, this being Marge's desire. And so he lies, appropriately, in that generous, still untainted soil that gave him birth; but I have brought his teddy bear with me, the one he called Rough, and a lock of his soft brown hair that I have always carried in my wallet. These I now place beside the remains of my father in the soil of Pirbaag. Oh, but how this shrine looks like a bandaged old man who's had a terrible fall.

A cheeky phone call made to Neeta's mobile number: Mansoor is now in Pakistan, having reached there after a six-week journey. It's not clear who made the call and from where.

Do we always end up where we really belong?

Do I belong here?

When I returned to Pirbaag, in Neeta's Ambassador—she refused to let me take an auto, which would have been pretentiously modest, I admit—it seemed as if the entire population of Haripir (now Haripur) had lined up on the road to see me. Garland upon garland was thrown upon me, and I was visibly overcome with emotion. How unlike my father.

I chided Neeta for having announced my arrival.

“They have suffered,” she said. “Now they need you.”

The house has been done up and smells of paint. Typically (but I note
this with affection) one of the new windows does not close; it will be fixed. The broken marble of the mausoleum will take substantial funds to replace. I have some of my own, and there is a donor ready with more; but better to let it stay there awhile with its wounds while other work gets done. Many of the graves are broken, though they have been cleaned. My first repair job, however, will be the ornately designed tomb of Deval Devi, the little princess of Gujarat, for which I always had a special fondness. She too had come to seek refuge at Pirbaag, but it couldn't save her.

I have already paid a visit next door to the new temple of Rupa Devi, Pir Bawa's bride, who for so long was deprived the bliss of the conjugal bed. It is truly impressive and—if one were inclined to think that way— she surely deserves the homage that comes her way. However, the stories the resident priests tell there are different from what I know: in them Rupa is the principal, and Nur Fazal a disciple; moreover, he was a Brahmin orphan brought up by an anonymous Muslim couple. The blatancy of these inventions is quite astounding, reflecting no doubt the political currency of the times. But I have reasserted the rights of Pirbaag to our front yard and the old gate, adjacent to the temple, which my father, perhaps to avoid conflict, had stopped using in favour of a new entrance.

I also paid a visit to my old friend Harish, at his thriving garage across the road. We had tea and chatted some, in between long uncomfortable silences. He lives in a new house up the road with his married son. I dared not ask him about the recent violence in the village, from which he has apparently come out quite unscathed. He is, I learned, a patron of the Rupa Devi temple. As also is, this he informed me proudly, Premji Chacha of America, whose guardianship I had once rejected.

Now my surprise. In the rebuilt Pirbaag library, on a table, a short row of tattered books, in various stages of damage, and some loose pages. That's all, though every page worth its weight in gold. After that night of terror, some of the survivors had gone around diligently collecting all the loose pages among the debris. And later, while cleaning the site, under some of the stones which had been loosened, they found books packed inside newsprint, hidden by my father. And in a corner of the ruined house they found a bundle of old newspapers from the sixties—Raja Singh's contribution to my education.

Before I left the Institute I had my final interview with the director,
when I gave him my Assassin theory of the sufi. He was convinced I must be right but has undertaken more research on the subject. Meanwhile he had for me a provisional report on the two manuscript pages I had given him. The Nagari contains a love poem to Hari, a name for Krishna; the Arabic seems to be a fragment from a discussion on plane triangles. Both pages could be dated by their contents. But what did Bapu-ji expect me to make of them?

I have concluded that it is time to make every little item that has survived from the library open to the world. There will be no more secrets in Pirbaag.

It is an eerie feeling to be back. At the Postmaster Flat, I knew I was a guest; here, I now accept that I have come to stay.

Every once in a while I think about that other life that I left behind, the home I made and the happiness I enjoyed with my young family. Had it been a fool's world that I made? Had it been real at all? Ah yes; real as a baby's soft cheek, a woman's thrilling scent, young people's burst of laughter in a classroom. Perhaps I had never been equipped to handle that kind of engagement; how quickly it had unravelled. But now I don't have to choose any more.

The first few nights here I hardly slept, spent much of the time sitting out on the pavilion. Hearing and rehearing the echoes of the savagery that was let loose in this village. There are numerous stories of woe, from the survivors—if one can call them that—who come trickling back from the relief camps, and they don't sit easy on the heart. There is much to rebuild. Last night I slept, finally, as I should, and was awakened by the tinkle of a bell; then came the singing of ginans—sweet vindication, subtle welcome, for these songs ever held on to me.

But something was still missing. There was no prayer call from the mosque. It, with the entire Balak Shah settlement, was destroyed. To go there to look now is to feel sick to the stomach. I recall how Bapu-ji, Ma, and I had taken a comatose Mansoor to spend the night with the Childimam at the mosque, and how old Sheikh-ji had brought my brother back the next morning, completely recovered. Happily a charitable foundation from Baroda has now surveyed the area and has undertaken to rebuild it.

I am the caretaker of Pirbaag. I do advise people on their worldly affairs when called upon and supervise some projects in the town. The local school needs revamping, working parents want a daycare, the potters need new tools, and so on. And the mausoleum remains a place for worship for those who need it. There are many who do, and they come in numbers on Saturday.