The Assassin's Song (5 page)

But those quarrels were forgettable. I would soon pick up bat and ball and stroll outside to join my friends, who would already be at play, Mansoor tailing me at a distance, doing his best not to be seen. I was fond of my brother. And now, after my long absence? I still care for him, though I am not able to express this to his satisfaction.

A dusty, broken slip road joining two busy highways serviced our village of Haripir, bisecting it. The shrine stood on this road, at the end of the village closer to the Ahmedabad junction. At the entrance, next to the gateless posts, a wooden signboard fixed on two legs carried a faded legend in roman script: Mussafar Shah Dargah—Pir no baag. The Shrine of the Wanderer—the Garden of the Pir. It was called Pirbaag for short, and also, affectionately, the Baag.

Straight ahead from the gateposts, at the top of a rise, stood our faded old house, attached to the shrine at its farther end, and built around a square courtyard that was mostly open to the sky. The front steps led into a short dim passageway that stepped down into the open square. A side gate here opened directly into the sacred space and was our private entrance into it. A high wall ran from the house to the road, the shrine to one side of it and our front yard to the other, empty except for a swing hanging from a tree. Early in the morning crows would congregate on the tree and create a racket; it was believed that they had been here as long as the shrine. Halfway down the wall was the arched doorway that was the public access to the shrine. Often we used this entrance to go to our house through the shrine and to the back.

Outside the gateposts at the road where I would emerge after my snack, trailed by little Mansoor, the village would be coming to life as the shopping hour approached. Next to Ramdas's flower and chaddar store, on the right, a peanut seller would have set up; and beside him a row of vegetable vendors; and so on up the hill. Across the street, next to the tire-repair shop, was a bus stand, where a torn Congress party poster staked claim to the area, beside a film poster depicting Raj Kapoor and Nargis in the film
Shri 420
. Chacha Nehru was at the helm of the nation; the country was poor but proudly looking ahead.

The two of us turned left at the entrance into the playground, where Harish, Utu, and others had gathered to play the daily cricket. “Eh Kaniyaa!”—that was my nickname—would come a cry. “Harry! Utuputu!” I would answer. “I am bowling from yesterday's game, don't you forget! Trueman has arrived!” As I threw off my slippers, to play barefoot, a high ball would come my way, which, laying down my bat, I caught expertly, with precisely the composure required. Losing this challenge would be to court laughter and lose face.

In the farther distance in the cultivated hinterland, a line of camels would stand up and slowly wend its way to wherever it was they retired for the night.

Two crates, stood one atop the other against the low wall that bounded our property on this side, substituted as the stumps for our games; an old monster of a banyan tree, known affectionately as Mister Six, and the radius it described formed the boundary to which a ball had to reach for a score of a four or a six. Some twenty yards beyond the banyan was a small, old, and usually deserted temple dedicated to Rupa Devi, wife of Pir Bawa and beloved to young, unmarried women and transvestites.

Why Rupa Devi's temple was not part of the Baag, no one could quite explain. But it was the women of the Baag who looked after it, and the girls of the town came here to tell the goddess their secrets. Bands of transvestites, the eunuch pavayas who were more alluring than the local women, would stop here periodically on their way to their own Kali shrine of Becharaji up north; and any boy who crossed their path would get teased no end.

The thin but persistent tinkle of a bell was the prelude to dawn in our garden of the saints. It echoed around the shrine as though intending to wake up not only the living but also the dead lying buried under their burdens of draped stone. I would open my eyes in the dark, follow the sound in my mind, as it moved in the aisles between graves, accompanied by a glowing brazier of smoking incense; now the morning azan might rise up from the nearby mosque, a long and sinuous and mysterious call; a cool breeze would waft in through the window beside me, from the open farmland, scented with animal dung and earth. I would shut my eyes again. In the other bed Mansoor would not have stirred. If it was Thursday or Saturday, there would soon come the sounds of singing from the temple, sweet, beautiful, and timeless; intermittently I would follow the tunes of these ginans, as our songs were called, and recall their words, which I had been taught. The percussion would start gently, then increase in its intensity. At some point the singing would have stopped; if I strained my ears perhaps I could hear my father speaking, or perhaps I imagined him, imparting his spiritual teaching to the initiates of the Garden—for it was only they who came to the temple at this hour, to meditate, to sing, and to listen. Some of them were local people, while others had come from various places to show their devotion to the Pir and his Saheb.

There would come the hoots of vehicle horns, people conversing, crows raucously crowing outside.

I would jump up abruptly from bed, immediately wide awake, go and brush my teeth at the kitchen tap, then come to wake up my brother with, “Uth havé nakama, wake up you useless!” The look on the little one's face, the most angelic innocence, the most fragile demeanour. His eyes would open: the most beautiful smile, the body motionless, the full day's energy coiled inside, awaiting release.

At seven o'clock, almost to the dot, after breakfast, I walked out through the side door of the house and into the shrine. Passing the mausoleum, with joined hands I would quickly say my pranaams and salaams to the Pir. I silently prayed to him to bring me success not only in cricket but also in my studies. And as I walked towards the gate and the road, at my own unhurried pace, confident I had time and time, I would be
conscious of the gaze of my father upon my back—all his pride and confidence, all his hopes and fears on me.

At the gate, finally, and I would look around, await a ride to school. A rickshaw might be around, having dropped off devotees at the shrine, ready to pick up a paying passenger; but if I was lucky, a truck would stop in a cloud of diesel and dust, in all its garish glory, horn blaring, saving me the fare. The driver might lean out the passenger side and call—“Eh Baba, school time! Let's go, get in.” And when I was inside his cabin, the truck picking up speed, he might ask conversationally, “So—did you finish homework? Khub kiriket khela, nai?” Too much cricket—but you must work hard, make Nehru Chacha proud!

One morning as I emerged from our gate into the glare of sun there appeared before me a magical sight.

A green and orange truck, covered all over with pithy sayings—“Jai Mata Di!” “Horn Please OK!” “Oh Evil-Eyed One, Your Face Black with Shame!” “My India Great!”—and Om signs, in gold and silver script of a glittering florid font. It could have dropped from the heavens, a gift from the gods. My face broke into a grin. Leaning stylishly against the door, beaming, arms crossed, stood a short stocky Sikh with a paunch and a bushy unkempt beard. According to the name on the driver's door: Raja Singh of Bhatinda, Punjab.

“School time!” he said, as though he knew me.

He was waiting for me, having just worshipped at the shrine for the first time; in a manner typical of his nature he had chatted up Ma and learned that I went to a Christian school up the road in the town of Goshala. He called his truck Kaleidoscope, but I called it Air India, because he so reminded me of the genial, turbaned maharaja symbol of that airline.

Every two or three weeks he would be waiting for me at the gate, having come from Bombay, Baroda, Ahmedabad, Rajkot—the names of these cities painted clearly on the back of his truck. The passenger door would fly open as I emerged.

“Hop in!”

Saying “Sasrikal, Ji” in the Sikh greeting, I would clamber up, and Raja Singh with a chuckle of approval would race off.

This was my own vahan, and it flew me not only to school and sometimes back but also to the greater world out there that I could only imagine. Everyone in the village knew that when Raja Singh was stopping over in the area, only he could take the gaadi-varas to his English-medium school in Goshala. In an interior smelling of puri and bhaji, sweat and motor oil, decorated with Ganesh and Guru Nanak on the dashboard and a tiny Sai Baba on his sun visor, I would be regaled with a song or two, hear choice Punjabi curses flung at fellow vehicles or lazy pedestrians or an oblivious cow or dog or pig or camel on the road, and listen to the latest news of the world, with commentary. In Raja Singh's truck I kept up with the latest war in Africa or Asia, what America's Kennedy said and what Russia's Khrushchev replied, what Nehru or Nasser or Sukarno said, India's cricket tour of England, or vice versa. How the godless Russians had sent a satellite to orbit round the earth.

“These Russians, yaar, a dog in the sky … going round and round … what next? Moon they want to go to, and the stars … to the end of the sky … is there an end to the sky? Ask your papaji the Saheb to give us his wisdom on this matter.”

And if I turned reflective, as we stopped for the camel carts outside the cloth-dyeing factory on the way, Raja would show his concern.

“Ay!—what are you staring like that for? Henh? Fancy going up there yourself in your own
Sputnik
?”

“I would be afraid to go up there, Singh-ji.”

“What is there to be afraid of?”

“If an accident were to happen up there, I would be lost in the darkness—and not be able to come back home.”

Raja Singh, the man who was always on the roads of Gujarat, who seemed never to have returned to his home in Punjab, stared at me and acknowledged, “Back home to mother and father and your Pir Bawa … don't worry, the Americans or the Russians would rescue you.” And as if to highlight his own predicament, he launched into his favourite ditty, “My shoes are Japanee / my pantaloons Englistanee / my red topee may be Russee / but fear not, the heart is Hindustanee!”

Raj Kapoor, in the film
Shri 420
, the hero of all nomadic souls.

“No doubt, to Hindustan you must definitely return, wherever you go,” Raja Singh concluded, rotating his turbaned head to drive home his point.

I have often wondered about his special attachment to me. He told my parents he saw an aura over me. That pleased my father, especially. But perhaps Raja only felt sorry for me, for the burden I carried, and thought to bring a little of the fun and joy of the world into my life. This much is certain, though: he was the first to know that one day I would leave.

“Raja Singh, tumhara ghar kahan hai?” Where is your home?—my favourite question, a joke between us two, to elicit the expected, the explosive answer: “Bhatinda!”

Smiles and chuckles.

Such a name for a place!

“What do you pray to Jaffar Shah for?” I once asked him.

Jaffar Shah was the patron saint of travellers. He was a son of our Pir Bawa and had the largest grave in the Garden, two feet high and, intriguingly, seven feet long. There were many stories about the journeys of Jaffar Shah, during which he acquired followers to the path of Pirbaag.

Raja Singh would approach the grave with a large basket of flowers, which he spread carefully over its length. Putting aside the empty basket he would lie flat on his stomach in obeisance before it. Asking for what, I now asked.

Red with embarrassment and surprise at my question, he did not say a word at first; then he responded with a smile, “I pray that I win a lottery, so I don't have to drive this laarri around the country any more.”

“Tum idhar nahin ayega, phir?” You wouldn't come here, then?

He smiled, sang, cursed at an animate object on the road.

Every time he came he would bring a gift for our family: a specialty item from the town he had last visited—gathia from Bhavnagar, chevdo from Baroda, burfi from Rajkot, a kerchief from Bhuj. And most important, he would drop off for me a bundle of newspapers and magazines he had collected on the road. Sometimes, disappointingly, it would be a small package rolled up, meagre pickings from the world; and then there were the times when to my great joy a large stack would be dropped off with a thump at our doorstep, tied with twine, so heavy that I could not lift it. And thus I found out what they thought and did in Bombay and Madras, Ahmedabad and Delhi, and even in New York and London and Moscow.

My princedom before me
.

Saturday was moto diwas, the “big day” at our shrine, and people came in droves. I say “our” though it was not really quite so, the shrine had been entrusted to our care, and at some point in the past it had been converted legally into a public trust. An institution does not last seven hundred years without conflict. What these conflicts were perhaps only the Sahebs knew, and so perhaps I would know in due time. But fortunately for our family, the British administration had been friendly to us—ours was the unthreatening world of the spirit, and the freedom we desired was only from the tyranny of the eighty-four hundred rebirths that a careless human has to suffer—and it ensured that the charge of the shrine, which had stayed in our family from the beginning, could not be contested.