The Assassin's Song (27 page)

“Rupees or dollars, Dada?”

My mother believed that a dead person came in your dream because he (or she) wanted something—if not you (thank God for that), then some tribute. And even if he wanted you, the tribute might just do the trick.

I opened my eyes to the sight of a strange bright room, warm sunshine pouring through the glass and curtains of a large shut window. A male orderly was silently sweeping near the door. The metal bed was high and firm, the sheets crisp and white. I was evidently an inmate of the infirmary.

A nurse breezed in, a stout middle-aged woman grinning friendly concern in answer to my bewilderment.

“Hi! You're awake. Nice morning out there, isn't it? Do you recall what happened last night—how you got here?” She helped me to sit up.

“Yes, I think so …”

“Good, tell me.”

I couldn't, actually, but she helped me. I had gotten off the subway at the Square. And then, blank. With patient prompting I recalled briefly Moses the panhandler at the Yard gate. “Hey bro, will you spare a quarter?” I slipped, reached out for a hand. Not Moses, somebody else …

“It was your friend Russell,” the nurse said. “He was with you. And did you give him a fright!”

“Did he bring me here?”

“With some help.”

Thus my winter experience, a common enough initiation to the icy season, though not always to the extent of being knocked out on the road and
seeing your grandfather in a dream. I was allowed to go to my room later that afternoon.

What did the dream mean? Going along with Ma's explanation, Dada desired something from me. Usually the dead asked for a favourite food, and that could be arranged by feeding it to a priest or a beggar. But Dada, leaning forward on his throne, had asked for cash. Five rupees, not much. What would he do with money, where he was, I asked myself sardonically, he being a spiritual man. Well, if he demanded cash, he would get it. The next time I saw old Moses at the gate, hand stretched out, “Buddy, can you spare—” I presented him with an extravagant five-dollar bill that drew a howl of pleasure. He disappeared for a few days.

Ma would have gone to a temple and fed the priests. She would have pestered Bapu-ji for a prognosis; and for a second or third opinion she would have cornered some other pandit, paid out more of our precious rupees.

When I saw the girl again, it was early spring, and she was part of a large antiwar protest march that had come to a raucous stop outside the Coop on Harvard Square. The police came, hulking, frightening aliens in riot gear, and my friends and I disappeared. We were not political. We watched from our windows, towels to our faces, as tear gas filled the Square, and the screaming protesters dispersed in all directions. A week later, there she was again, in another demo, this one on the front steps of MIT, with her friend the blond afro. There was a group of about forty, going around in a circle, chanting slogans, handing out leaflets. I had come to listen to a lecture by the physicist Dirac, knowing that I would understand nothing; but for the senior science students at Philpotts, a god had arrived, and so I decided to go for the darshana as well.

On the steps, I tried to get a flyer from her, but it was someone else who put it in my hand.

“No to the War in Vietnam!” “No to the Military Industrial Complex!” “No to Weapons Research on Campus!”

She was among the loudest there, thrusting out flyers at the steady stream of passersby, most of whom would politely take one, smile at her pleadings, and walk on. A few jeered; the odd one joined the group. But
she did not convince, she did not belong here, as I stared wistfully at her, having missed her attention. She was too pretty, she looked too clean. Her clothes were intact, their dishevelment too mannered. The hair seemed only loosened somewhat. The peace patch on the full right bum I could have sworn was new. And those shoes and socks! Beside her walked pants worn to shreds; shoes probably stinking; eyes bloodshot; and—I would have added, with more experience, something I could only sense—bodies wasted by LSD and sex.

I was right about Dirac's lecture, though; I understood nothing, except that he had predicted the antiparticle of the electron while not much older than me, and now in old age was searching for the source of life. I saw adulation among the audience of the kind I had only known at our shrine back home, directed at my father or the grave of Pir Bawa. Men like that had altered the course of the world, and how little did we know about them in the part I came from. How could I spurn knowledge and education the way those radicals on the steps of MIT demanded?

Some weeks later, one drizzly Saturday morning at eleven, while I was having breakfast at Pewter Pot—hazelnut muffin was my favourite, with plenty of butter, and tea—and somewhat idly perusing the pages of the weekly
Phoenix
, a shadow swept across my page. A cartoon was on it, I must have been smiling. When I looked up, there she stood before me in a green army jacket too big for her, too attractive on her; and a red beret, for my benefit, so I have always believed. Both the jacket and the beret were wet with rain. She took them off and sat down across the wobbly oak table as my face reddened, my bladder called.

The Girl.
Ask and you shall receive. Was I dreaming yet again? I stared.

Her arms crossed in front of her, she demanded, with a nod at my reading, “Funny?”

There was a surprising soft edge to the voice that rather took me aback. It was the first time I'd heard her up close, not shouting a slogan or a chant on the street.

“Oh … yes.” I didn't offer to show her the page. But I introduced myself: “I'm Karsan Dargawalla—I've seen you around.”

“You sure have. I'm Marge.”

Marge
kewa
, the thought came naturally—Marge
what
?—and even as I opened my mouth to inquire after the surname, she came out brusquely with:

“Why've you been gawking at me?”

I gaped, like a guilty child, and she glared back. “You have been staring at me. There—outside—on the street. Why? It's embarrassing.”

How I came out with what I did, I could hardly believe afterwards.

“I am so sorry … You are so beautiful, your good self.”

Inept, surely; yet how authentic and innocent. How could it go wrong?

A delicious giggle burst forth from her lips as two dimples made their appearance on her cheeks. She stifled the laugh, and I looked away in a hurry.

“ ‘Your good self '!” she exclaimed. “Far out!” She laughed again, then abruptly stopped, blushed profusely, and said sharply, “You keep your eyes to yourself ! My boyfriend played football in high school, I'll have you know.”

I was not sure what that was supposed to mean. But to my relief she did not seem
very
angry. “I will, I promise. I'm very sorry. I did not mean to offend you.”

She nodded and ordered coffee.

“What are you doing tonight?” she demanded over her mug and to my astonishment.

A lonely evening at the library was what I looked forward to; an assignment on Plato was due anyway, and some Keats had to be scanned, a daunting task not helped at all by the odd rhythms of my accent. But I was alert. I did not want to sound like a loser. And so: “I may go out with my friends.”

She sniffed. “Why don't you come out to the coffeehouse at MIT— you'll meet better types than your millionaire preppy friends.”

She told me exactly where to go.

It was a dimly lit room on the third floor of the MIT Student Center on Mass Ave; you could find it from outside simply by following the music, a solo voice accompanied by the strum of a guitar. There was free coffee, cider, and doughnuts; what more could a poor student want. A girlfriend—most of the audience were couples—but I had come to meet a girl I had promised not to harass; to be precise, not to stare at. The lights were dim, the music was enjoyable, the singer improvising on Beatles songs and other current tunes. I sat down at the only vacant table, at the
very front. Would Marge come, or had she made a fool of me? It appeared that the singer was explaining his improvisations only to me, and I would nod, pretending to understand, and shoot my eye towards the door. Finally she appeared, wove herself in between tables and sat beside me.

Afterwards we strolled outside on the lawn, the walkways lit by large spherical lamps on posts, and finally we sat down on a stone bench. Her full name was Marge Thompson, she told me. “In case you are wondering about my dark features, I have Scottish as well as Spanish blood. I am American. You too can become American, you know.”

She paused for me to acknowledge, and I nodded humbly.

She had gone to MIT intending to study chemical engineering, but she wasn't sure any more. She was an atheist and a Marxist, she said proudly. “And what are you?” she asked. “What kind of Indian are you—or is there only one variety? You worship cows, don't you? I must say all you Indians here sound the same.”

Not discouraged, and not quite catching at once all the profusion of her words, I told her as much about myself as I could. Later I often asked myself, Why? Couldn't I tell that
that
would be a sure turnoff? Perhaps there was the need to explain myself, bring my world out as just another experience. How wrong I was.

We both fell silent and watched the student traffic go by. Even at this hour on a weekend, they still scurried about with their books in their hands.

At long last she said, “You are a very complicated guy. You frighten me, you know. You scare the shit out of me.”

“Why—what? I mean—” I spluttered, utterly crushed.

She looked at me wide-eyed. “Why? … Why? It's like … wow! … You stare into a well and you don't know what mysterious thing lies at the bottom waiting to jump out and pounce on you?”

What did she know of wells?
I
came from rural India. We had a well at the back of our house … at the bottom of which, to be honest, a cobra had lived. I looked sheepish.

How uncanny of her to have seen something dangerous deep inside me. The dark stain of history.

We parted, she to the main building of the Institute, I to wait for the bus to Harvard Square—the Dudley bus, Marlboro Man on the side, telling me from his horse that I was in America.

I saw Marge Thompson again a couple of times before the summer break. She was always with people, and usually with the blond afro, her boyfriend, who—as she had warned me—had played high school football. I understood now what she had meant.

I wished I could take her aside and tell her, “Trust me, please. I am not a complicated person. I am ordinary. Give me a chance to be ordinary. Just be my friend.”

America of those days is a blurry experience now; it's narratives interweaving, shifting perspectives. So much happened so fast. It's a complex painting that invites you to look close and relate the parts, make out the stories—all about me, Karsan Dargawalla, God-designate from an Indian village, struggling to be just ordinary.

Epistles.

“Dear Bapu-ji,

“Pir Bawa protect your health and well-being, and that of Ma and my brother Mansoor, with which blessing I write that I am settling down here in Cambridge …”

[The form of address was a formality, it was our way to begin a letter. This always nagged me a little: since my father was an avatar of the Pir, I was calling on him to bless or protect himself. But of course he was to me first a father, for whom I asked protection. And so perhaps there was a logic there somewhere.]

“… Everything is new to me but the people here are very friendly and kind. I eat at the college so you should not worry whether I am fed well or not. It is not hard to be a vegetarian here. There is a thing called ‘pizza’ which is a naan with cheese and tomato sauce on top and can be completely veg. And tell Ma that in Amriika (as she calls it) it is impossible to starve, even if you tried! There are mountains of food and people eat all the time. They eat even while walking, or when they are in a class and the professor is speaking! You may find it hard to believe this, but some of them walk barefoot!—when they can so easily afford shoes. Even when they come from a good home, their manners sometimes seem very crude and they appear to revel in filth. Often they express themselves by swearing. But Bapu-ji, I seriously believe that this is a free society and forward-looking; perhaps freedom comes with the choice to be crude.