The Assassin's Song (7 page)

c. A.D. 1260
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The Story of Arjun Dev.

In the city of Patan Anularra a certain temple priest resident in the metal workers' bazaar named Arjun Dev had a strange, persistent dream. In that dream he saw a lamp suspended in the darkness; every time he saw it it seemed to have moved closer. Arjun Dev knew that he was expected to await some momentous event.

Arjun Dev was a member of a community of refugees from Afghanistan, Shiva worshippers who had thrived in that land, especially during the reign of the Shahiyas, the Hindu kings Jayapala, Anandapala, and others. That reign had ended at the hands of the infamous Sultan Mahmud of Ghazna, destroyer of temples. More than a century later when the Mongols began sweeping through Asia, Arjun Dev's father, whose name is forgotten, decided to join a caravan of refugees headed south. It is said that the father had received instructions, for the family also took guidance from a sufi school in Samarkand or Bukhara.

And so Arjun Dev, who had been taught by his elders to expect a sign, now saw one in his dream. A maha guru, a mighty teacher, was approaching.

One night Arjun Dev's entire being was suffused with light. He woke up in a sweat, aware that the time was now, he was being beckoned. Exclaiming invocations in Persian and Sanskrit, he left the house and went to the city's north gate to await the arrival of the guru.

When Nur Fazal the sufi came through the gate, and the leader of the caravan unloaded his two packages off a mule, Arjun Dev stepped forward, heading off the porters who began clamouring for custom, and went down on his knees and kissed the ground. “Swamirajo,” he said, “Lord, you truly are the saviour.” Tum tariye taranahaar. And so he became the sufi's first follower and his interpreter.

Arjun Dev was fortunate among men. He saw Shiva Nataraja step off his pedestal and fetch water for the sufi; he saw the three great miracles performed in Vishal Dev's court; and he became the deputy of the sufi in the new community of followers that began to grow. His karmic debt paid, his time on earth was now over. While the sufi lost his way momentarily, caught in an embrace of carnal bliss when the riot flared up in the metal workers' market of Patan, Arjun Dev was among his followers who was killed.

Nur Fazal nominated Arjun Dev's son Ginanpal as his representative. Then he disappeared for eleven months and eleven days in a self-imposed exile, to do penance.

The Garden of the Pir. My family
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Sometimes when I watched him sitting before a bunch of white-clad devotees in the pavilion, imparting spiritual wisdom in his high, tremulous voice, or acting out a ritual as Saheb of the shrine, I would wonder who my father was. And who was I, then? Was I different, deep inside me, from what I seemed to myself?

We were descended, according to legend, from that first disciple of the sufi, his interpreter Arjun Dev of Afghanistan. This was our connection to history, to the larger world in time and space. It gave greater meaning to our life in this little village, and because of this special provenance we believed we had been endowed with the responsibility to give meaning and comfort to other lives.

Bapu-ji's given name was Tejpal. One picture, tucked away inside the family album, revealed him as a teenager, a lanky, athletic youth with slicked hair, a cricket ball gripped in one partly raised hand, wearing the sportsman's light duck trousers and V-neck sweater. The hair had been touched up by some artist to look brown. So he too had been a boy once, with a store of vanity and a winning smile; not the musing, distant look of Bapu, not the kindly, beaming Buddha face of the Saheb, but a humorous demeanour revealing a young man with a precious sense of fun, so that watching that face you too broke into a smile. And you wondered, what is he thinking, standing there at the entrance gate by the road, looking in? For several years after my discovery of it, this photo was my secret friend, confessor to my desires. I would quietly go to our sitting room when no
one was around, kneel beside the corner stool at the foot shelf on which the album was kept, and stare at that vision of the father I did not have; search in that sportsman's grin for traces of the Bapu I did have. Sometimes Ma would hover at the edges of my vision, clanking a pan or humming a tune, pretending to ignore me. Where had that boy gone? Where the fun? He had left his childhood behind, buried it like Gautama to become, like his forebears, the Saheb and uphold truth during this trying Kali Yuga, the Dark Age.

There was a time when he had played cricket with me, when I was very young, outside on the pavilion; he would hold my hand and walk with me; he would sing to me. But then the mask had fallen. There were moments of closeness still between us, as when he had taken me out on the walk, or when he explained a problem in geometry to me—a moment that drew a broad smile from Ma and a typical diversionary tactic from Mansoor. But that mask never left him, even then. He belonged to that history, to ancient Pirbaag and all the dead; to Pir Bawa and to the great unknowable Brahman. But not to me as I wanted him.

One day in 1942, the collector of our area, Mr. Andrew Ross, paid a visit to my grandfather. He brought with him a Russian professor, a stocky, bearded man called Ivanow who happened to be travelling in the area, to have a peek at Pirbaag's famous library. But Dada was a crafty man and did not reveal much of the library's contents beyond the obvious. The two white men asked him a lot of questions, and were bold and perhaps concerned enough to ask Dada if he had considered taking up the cause of the Muslim League, the political party led by Muhammadali Jinnah, a fellow Gujarati. Professor Ivanow suggested that Dada steer his people towards the larger Muslim community or, being small and insignificant, they would disappear altogether.

Dada was polite to the two men, whom he had received on the pavilion, which in those days had a pressed earth floor and a ramshackle corrugated roof. My father stood close by, watching and listening, having dutifully brought tea from the kitchen. My grandfather told the visitors that the welfare of the shrine and its devotees were what he lived for. And so he would reflect upon their suggestion. As they were leaving, Mr. Ross suggested
that my father find a place in Bombay's St. Xavier's College when he was finished at St. Arnold's in Goshala. My father was overjoyed at the suggestion.

After decades of struggle India had arrived finally at the threshold of independence, yet in a state of turmoil and far from unity, for the unthinkable was about to happen. Unless Mr. Jinnah could be charmed or otherwise placated, it was certain that the nation would be broken, with a separate country called Pakistan carved out up north for Muslims. Although Pirbaag harboured the precious memory and the grave of a Muslim Pir, the question of Hindu or Muslim had never arisen before for its followers. Now they were forced to confront it, but many waited for the Saheb to give the lead. It is said that my Dada spent many hours over several days meditating inside the mausoleum before the grave of the sufi, as was the wont of the Sahebs at moments of crises. Finally he emerged from these consultations with the decision to go and see Mahatma Gandhi in his ashram. Upon his return from this journey Dada made a declaration to a gathering at Pirbaag, reminding those assembled that the path of the Pir was spiritual, it did not give importance to outward forms of worship. Therefore Hindus and Muslims were the same, and the Saheb would not abandon this ancient site, granted to the Wanderer centuries before by the kings of Gujarat, for some place called Pakistan. He was bound to its soil, it was the trust of his family. And so he would put his political faith in the faith of Gandhi and the vision and promise of Nehru.

With great enthusiasm my father Tejpal went to college in Bombay. He stayed two years, studying science, and according to Ma he did remarkably well, winning a silver medal his first year. But after two years, and before finishing his degree, he was abruptly called back by Dada. He was married within weeks to Madhvi, the daughter of a family from Jamnagar.

In Haripir there had recently arrived men in thick black beards, white caps, and long white shirts, clutching copies of the Quran and preaching the tenets of Islam; other men in white homespun cotton and two-cornered pandit caps came, preaching a purer Hinduism. Purity—shuddhi—was the key word. Cease blasphemous cow and idol worship, said the Muslims; abandon carnality and return to the basics of the ancient Vedas, retorted the Hindus. Two fundamentalisms sought the heart of the sufi's followers. Swayed by these imprecations to become part of something bigger, some
of them began to call themselves Muslims; they altered their names to sound more Arabic and prepared to go to Pakistan. Others called themselves Hindus, but not many needed to alter their names. In secret, however, when in dire need these purified souls still came to the gates of the Baag, bowed before the Saheb and beseeched Pir Bawa in his tomb to grant them a favour.

Independence came in August 1947; a mass cross-migration of people had already begun between our now two countries, India and Pakistan. For months and into the new year riots and massacres continued wherever the two communities had lived together; there were hate killings in Ahmedabad, Bombay, Baroda, Kalol, even our neighbour Goshala.

My father's younger brother Rajpal now called himself Iqbal after the great Muslim poet. He too had recently got married, and one day he announced his decision to go to Pakistan. Gandhi was on a hunger strike in Delhi to protest against the violence between the communities. Because he also spoke out against the violence against Muslims, there were calls of “Let him die!” and a bomb was thrown in his vicinity.

According to my mother, my uncle was not an overly excitable personality; but having recently declared his faith, he was much affected by the news of the hate killings. His wife Rehana was expecting a child. It was on the pavilion late one afternoon that Rajpal-Iqbal revealed his decision to Dada; there were people with my grandfather, standing or sitting, listening raptly to his every word, as was usual, therefore it was a deeply embarrassing moment. My Dada is said to have taken a long pause, during which no one spoke and there lay the utmost silence upon Pirbaag. Then Dada declared softly, “Very well.”

“But you will find arrogance and bigotry wherever you go,” my grandfather said to my uncle. “There will be one kind of Musalman against another kind. Our path is spiritual, we do not believe in outward appearance and names. Rajpal, Iqbal, or Birbal, what does it matter? Go and see for yourself, but remember your home is here with Pir Bawa.”

One morning a small procession of bullock carts gathered from Haripir and neighbouring villages and headed towards Goshala, from where they would proceed in hired buses to Bombay and thence to Karachi by boat. There were reports of stones thrown and scuffles, but nobody was seriously hurt. It was also said that just as the caravan of new Pakistanis
from our village topped the rise on the road, it suddenly halted. A child— or woman—wailed. A little later one of the covered carts returned, bearing three people. A man and a woman first came out and returned to their home. The third person proceeded to the mausoleum of Pir Bawa. Having paid her final respects, she departed once more; but before she left she took a pinch of soil in her mouth and ingested it. This story from the Partition days would be told long afterwards; exactly what point was being made I could never be sure.

In due time a letter arrived from Pakistan with the “khush khabar” that my uncle and his family were safely in Karachi and had been looked after.

A few weeks after my uncle departed, Gandhi-ji was shot dead in Delhi.

My father had an elder sister, Meera, who had died in childbirth in Junagadh. I never saw my grandfather; I knew that he had been a wrestler in his youth, and remember the portrait of a stocky man seated on a chair, with a white flowing beard and a large smile, hanging in our sitting room. There was another photo of him, taken in the pavilion with my father and the two eminent visitors, Mr. Ross and Professor Ivanow, who stood at the two ends in the foursome, one extremely tall, the other stocky. But it was a faded snapshot and the faces were not clear. Dada died soon after my uncle left. Dadi lived a few more years. She was a thin sharp lady with a peculiar smell, and I remember her pouring hot ghee down my nose when it got blocked; and on Sundays, my head in her lap, my mouth firmly pried open with her fingers, administering the repulsive, grainy, laxative mixture called phuki down my throat.

There was a revolution in Zanzibar and a field marshall called John was warning all capitalists in his country to beware; an American spy-plane pilot called Powers was shot down by the Russians; Nehru was in Lagos; and Ken Barrington had saved the English cricket team in their match against South Africa …

Thus the world according to Raja Singh, and the newspapers and magazines he brought. It seemed so exciting, exotic, and far far away, would I be able even to touch it? In the central courtyard of our home, under the sky, sitting at a table by the light of a small wick lamp (and the moon, if it was
around), I would pore over the news. All would be quiet. At some point Bapu-ji would leave his library to go to the bedroom, telling me to do the same; or the light in the library would go off, and I knew that he had decided to sleep there tonight among his precious books and the past.