The Assassin's Song (35 page)

“No, Saheb,” the people before me replied to my advice that they should go to somewhere less defunct. “Allow us to clean this place.”

They brought out brooms, covered their mouths and noses with rags, guided me out of the compound so I wouldn't breathe in the dust they would raise. I came to stand out on the road. Saddhus in orange robes waited outside the gates of the new temple, partly inside the area which had been our front yard. Across the road, the old tire shop had become a full garage; the man inside was sizing me up—was that Harish? I took a step forward, stopped. No longer could I dare to presume, so much had changed. And to its left, further up, the Muslim shrine and settlement, also utterly destroyed; only a gaping hole where once stood the massive door. Who remained to tell its tale?

A white Ambassador drove up and parked sharply a short distance down the road. Before the dust had settled, the driver had jumped out and opened a passenger door, to let out a graceful sari-clad woman as out of place on this wasted road as a mermaid. She looked around briefly and started walking purposefully in my direction, avoiding roadside debris, perhaps on her way to the temple. It seemed the car had driven past its objective.

The lady saw me staring, paused and smiled briefly, then turned towards the gate behind me.

“Hello—namasté,” I said instinctively. “This is the wrong gate—the temple is further down.”

“No, this is the right one.”

She had joined her hands in greeting, and for a moment we peered at each other almost indiscreetly.

“Saheb?” she said.

“I am sorry—” I attempted to deny the title that I had rejected once, then stopped, frozen by her look.

“Karsan Dargawalla?” she asked.

“It can't be—”

But it was she. The name had escaped me, but not the memory.

“Neeta—Neeta Kapur,” she offered. “Boston?”

Of course. That long face, the cheekbones. Only older, leaner. It was hard not to stare, recall through a haze what she had been. Beautiful. Enough to intimidate. And wise. But now here, in the sticks? It seemed incredible.

“Yes, I remember,” I said in English. “At least I think I do.”

There was a quiver of a smile on her lips. It was only a single evening we had spent together, ultimately embarrassing, but the memory surely brought back in her a warm feeling for those youthful times, as it did in me, despite my condition.

“Do you come to this temple regularly?” I asked, though she had already told me she had come to the old shrine.

“No, I come to Pirbaag—your place. I used to come from Ahmedabad when your father was alive. I would bring my son here, when he was sick and there was no hope.”

“What happened?”

“He died. But I was comforted.”

“But Pirbaag is no more now, it is finished,” I told her.

Two chairs had been brought for us to sit on the pavilion, which had been made passably clean, though the stench lingered; shit and carnage. Across from me the mausoleum, distinct only in its deprivation; in front of it the Jaffar Shah grave. A memory returned, nagged at the mind's edges … Mansoor playing the bandit among the graves, bow and arrow in hand, Ma's little Arjun. Nobody I had asked seemed to know where he was now, or whether he was alive. That was one matter I had to attend to.

But who would come to this place now? What miracle or solace could it offer?

“But you can keep it alive,” the woman beside me said with a soft emphasis.

I shook my head. “It's gone.” The body destroyed, the heart cut out, I said to myself, though that sounded too purple, I thought, aware of the sophisticate before me.

“Do you know what happened here?”

She nodded. “Nobody could stop the madness.”

“Nobody wanted to.”

She nodded again, abstractly. We had been served steaming hot sweet tea from the stall outside, and she balanced her cup and saucer on her lap.

“Why don't you stay in Ahmedabad for a few days?” she asked after a while. “You can't sleep here—there's no place to—and you need time to collect yourself. And you can come to Pirbaag when you want to.”

Our eyes met, and she blushed profusely.

“There are decent hotels close to where I live,” she added.

She had a house in the city, from the period when her husband was governor of the state. She saw me glance at her forehead, without a bindi, and gave the slightest nod. Her husband had died. She lived in Delhi now but came to Ahmedabad occasionally, when she would visit Pirbaag.

It seemed a reasonable suggestion. Pirbaag, what was left of it, was safe for the time being, there was a police guard on constant duty. I could stay in the city while I decided on a course of action and waited for Mansoor to contact me.

I hoped he was all right. From him I expected to find out what had happened here, why this ancient place that was a neutral haven got attacked, how our father died. Nobody here had the heart to tell me that.

Meanwhile, another brainwave:

“Why don't you spend a few weeks in Shimla afterwards, at the Advanced Studies Institute? My sister is married to the director there, Professor Barua—I could talk to him about you. It would be an excellent place to gather yourself—that is, if you are not planning on returning to America immediately.”

“Canada … I come from there.”

“Oh. Well? …”

I had heard of the Institute in Shimla, reputedly a perfect retreat for study and research, with an excellent library. I said I would think about her suggestion. To myself I had to admit that the idea seemed attractive, though I would be putting myself further into her hands, and I hardly knew her. Her being a widow made the situation more awkward. But I
needed time to recover and to think. Whether I liked it or not, and whatever I decided to do with the status, I was now the inheritor of this ancient refuge, its Saheb. By now a defiance had also welled up in me, a strong desire to gather something from the debris and ashes, and construct a monument to Pirbaag. The precious library was gone, with the Saheb who had embodied its tradition, who had painstakingly and often in his own hand preserved its records, but I still carried some of that heritage in my memory, and on my tongue.

And so, yes, I decided right there, I would stay awhile in this retreat in the hills. And sing and recall. Sing and recall.

I would like to say then that Pirbaag never left me; and I, it. There is a partial truth to that; I only wish it were the entire truth, for it would pull the curtain over my personal life, obliterate its ache. But the truth is that I did find another life there, in North America, one of personal happiness and freedom; a second birth in which I managed to leave behind the manacle that had been Pirbaag, forget the sacred bol given to me by my father that tied me to my heritage and succession. But what did the Pir say, and my father reiterate?—every flower withers; and where's the cheek that does not fade, says the poet. It seems that Bapu-ji always won; but his was the cosmic truth of transience, therefore a truism, mine that of the small and personal joys that defy the grand design, but inevitably must confirm it.

c. 1970s
.

The joys, the love. Cambridge, Mass., to begin with
.

English became my field of specialization in university. It seemed the obvious choice, given my enthusiasm for its poetry, which had begun with the Metaphysicals of seventeenth-century England and not abated. Vainly for a mere freshman, though not without a little validity, I believed that I had fully grasped the much-trumpeted concept of the “undissociated sensibility,” how through clever, extended use of imagery a poet like John Donne could compose a poem that was simultaneously a spiritual idea. Poetry and philosophy had coincided, in one Metaphysical sensibility. I then asked, brashly to some, didn't the ginans of my childhood achieve the same? To my disappointment, neither my father nor my teacher had been impressed by this immodest proposal, for their own reasons. I was not discouraged, but I had to admit with humility that the poets of my interest were steeped in a tradition of European and Christian learning, while the ginans of my childhood were written mainly for simple folk. Nevertheless the similarities were there, and I was convinced that the best of the ginans were as beautiful and satisfying as the best of Keats, who had become, for a while, my passion. Thus I had discovered for myself a mystical strain in English poetry that seemed amazingly familiar to my Indian mind. The dying young Keats wrote of death and transience in the same unflinching manner as I had heard from my elders, and which from my own mouth now so often shocked my American friends.

How similar was the well-known line of William Blake, “To see a
world in a grain of sand,” to the one in the
Bhagavad Gita
, enjoining Arjuna to see the One “in all beings, undivided in the divided”; and how close the lines “I saw Him, and sought Him, I had Him and I wanted Him,” of the medieval anchorite Lady Julian to the erotic mysticism of Mira or Kabir or Nur Fazal? The conceits of Donne's
Holy Sonnets
, the thoughts of Keats or Blake, lay scattered throughout the songs of my childhood. Were the connections historical or psychological? What would a map of influences look like? And so on.

I was well immersed in my subject, then. I had discovered a vein that I could mine to my heart's content through the long process of a doctoral thesis. Of course, this choice of specialization and career was inspired by the spirit of the world I grew up in, the spiritual sensibility that had formed me. I could hardly deny its presence in my life; it was a given, like DNA, and both my strength and my limitation, and I had to make of it what I could. What I had rejected was the expectation and demand that world placed on me, and its fear—and perhaps contempt—of the larger world of which I felt so much a part now. My father had seen immediately the implications of my new enthusiasm: in reading the poetry I did not become the poet but the critic, one remove from the mystical experience and devotion that produced the thrill, the union with the Divine. Saffron Lion was not a mere conceit to him but his own son and successor straying away.

A Ph.D., I was happy to discover, was a convenient shelter for the alien who knew not the ropes of living in the new country, providing him a world within a world in which to function, to be acceptably eccentric. It was an exhilarating existence of the mind in an elite university where my physical needs were modest but taken care of, in an era of intellectual freedom and experimentation. I had an apartment now in a converted house on Banks Street, close to the university, and I had an assorted group of acquaintances, none very close. Of my undergraduate friends, only Russell remained in Cambridge, at law school; Bob and Dick had gone away to other professional schools.

My father continued to write his brief, dutiful missives, and I could not but reply in kind. There ran a silent current of mutual hurt in our muted correspondence, filling the spaces between words with a tension I could
almost touch in the crispness of the paper I held within my fingers. What I heard from Ma was through him; Mansoor wrote occasional notes to request jeans, shirts, and the like, nothing else. There was no news as such from home, and after my loud assertion of freedom I could not even pick up the requisite tone to inquire of my father about matters relating to the minutiae of life at home. I felt shut out. And yet, what did I expect from him?

My grievance was based on a contradiction, a double vision of myself. I imagined for myself a life free of the burden and expectation of tradition, to be and think as I wished without my father's advice or admonition; and at the same time, in some vague, illogical, and dreamlike manner, I saw myself at “home” with my family. It was as though I had let go of Pirbaag, but not home. This illusion had to find a resolution, and it did, but not in a manner I could have expected.

There came a prolonged period of weeks without any correspondence from Bapu-ji. This is it, I thought, he has finally cut me off completely. Then one day, two years after that season of my filial rebellion, my declaration of independence from him, Bapu-ji wrote to me that Ma had died a few months before. I had never previously been told what she had suffered from, and he told me nothing about her illness now. She had been cremated without notice to me; I had not been given the option of a visit home. I felt terribly wounded and angry. He had no right to deny me my mother yet again.