The Assassin's Song (46 page)

“How did Bapu-ji die?”

He turned away. Then he picked up his book and went inside to his room.

A little later his mobile rang. He identified himself as Professor Bhalla and spoke for a good length of time and sounded cheered up when he finished.

Last night my favourite kitchen hand Ajay brought our dinner for us. Having put the tray down, he tarried to tell me that Professor Bhalla had arrived, and the police were all over the Institute asking about the man who had been posing as Professor Bhalla. There was the faintest smile on his face at the evident humour in the situation. I thanked him, more profusely than usual. He could so easily have reported on my brother. But ever since my first visit to his church, he has been my quiet guardian angel.

“It's time for me to leave, Bhai,” said Mansoor as the door closed behind Ajay. “Now you will be rid of me.”

He went inside to pack his things, and I heard him make two calls on his mobile.

“I'll miss you, Mansoor,” I said to him with emotion when he came out. “We never got to know each other well.” We never had time to laugh together, I've worried and you've been defensive.

He smiled. “Some other time.”

“Where do you plan to go?”

“The less you know the better, Bhai,” he said.

We embraced, and I opened the back door for him. He carried a tray with him so he could pass as a kitchen hand part of the way. I saw him walk nervously in the shadows, then disappear. His first stop, I knew, would be the church behind the Guest House. He would presumably change there and be off somewhere else. What was he up to, where was he headed? Who were those friends who could comfort him more than I could? How little I knew him. We had arrived at the verge of closeness, now I had the depressing feeling that I would never see him again.

I prayed he would not do anything foolhardy and risky, though I had long stopped asking myself what my sporadic prayers mean.

The next morning I collected the books I had borrowed for him to return to the library. They were all about Islam: its history and past glory, its meaning and philosophy, its great personalities. Again the unjacketed white hardback caught my eye: why would my brother want to read about the Assassins? And how ironical, wasn't one of Pir Bawa's many epithets
Kaatil, Killer—though his sword had been his acumen and use of words. It occurred to me that my father might have had a copy of the book on his top shelf.

And then something happened, I don't know exactly how, or exactly when. Absently flipping the pages of the book, reading bits, once putting it down and picking something else up, and later returning to it, and finally unable to let it go, staring at that single entry in one of the back pages, I realized that I had in my hands the answer to the secret of the bol. For there was this familiar name, extensively referenced, in the index of Hodg-son's book: W. Ivanow.

Professor Ivanow's passion evidently was the study of the medieval, controversial Muslim sect of the Assassins, who had occupied a number of fortresses in western Persia. He had written books about them and visited the ruins of their castles. And this Russian during his researches had also come to Pirbaag to speak with my Dada and have a look at its ancient manuscripts. I recalled the faded snapshot of him in our family album, taken in our pavilion with Dada, Bapu-ji, and Mr. Ross, the remarkably tall collector of Ahmedabad who had brought him.

Nur Fazal the sufi, I concluded, had been an Assassin. Everything I read in the book in my hand seemed to confirm this.

Could it be so easy?

The secret of the bol. Massacre of the heretics.

The Assassins, also called the Ismailis, were a mystical Shia sect who disdained the outer forms of worship and the Muslim laws of Sharia for inner spiritual truths. They operated from well-defended, hard-to-access mountain fortresses in western Iran, and they were loathed for their heresy and feared for their penchant for murdering their enemies with impudent and terrifying facility, either as defence against persecution or to intimidate through terror, depending on your viewpoint. The great Saladin is said to have checked for hidden Assassins under his bed before lying down to sleep. They were secretive but had an extensive network of followers, and are believed to have sent their dais, or missionaries, all the way to India to teach their esoteric brand of the Islamic faith.

One of these spiritual teachers, the Russian professor must have concluded, as I am convinced now too, was Nur Fazal the Sufi.

It is as if pieces of the puzzle, lost among myriad childhood impressions floating like unwanted debris in the recesses of the mind, now begin to find themselves and collect and cohere to form the certainty of this knowledge.

From all the stories about him which I heard from my teacher Master-ji and my father, Nur Fazal was a Muslim mystic who had escaped persecution in a war-torn Near East and was given refuge by the Gujarati king Vishal Dev, whose reign coincided with the Mongol destruction of the Assassin strongholds. He invoked Indian gods and mystical ideas freely in his teachings, and according to legend he had once sided with Hindu Brahmins against orthodox Muslim mullahs during a debate at a royal court. Not one Arabic prayer had he prescribed for his followers. These ways could only characterize an extremely nonconforming Muslim sectarian, a heretic. An Assassin.

If only the bol in my mouth would confirm this. But it cannot, and I must imagine.

In 1256 the castles of the Assassins were overrun by the armies of the Mongol Hulagu Khan, after which followed a typical Mongol massacre, as described in detail by the much-biased Persian historian Juvaini, who took special satisfaction in the burning of the famous Assassin library. Shortly before this destruction, a prominent denizen of the Assassin strongholds, Nur Fazal, had arrived in the kingdom of Gujarat and was welcomed by its ruler, Vishal Dev. Nur became a legend for his knowledge and mystical powers and came to be called Sufi, Wanderer, Gardener, and Kaatil— Killer: an ancient stand-in, perhaps, for Assassin? But to his followers he was always the beloved Pir Bawa.

The sufi must have heard of the deluge in his home when he was in Gujarat. In my childhood, and especially in my teenage years, I had imagined from his pithy love poems that he had left a lover back home in “the north,” or uttara khanda, as we called it. According to Bapu-ji's teachings this love was mystical, and the lover was the sufi's spiritual master. But I had preferred a woman in the picture: for whom else would he have written the words,
My body shudders out of desire for you
?

The historian Juvaini writes, further, of that destruction,

And now to the havocking of Nur's Indian garden, Pirbaag.

The attack on Pirbaag.

This is what I have gathered.

March 9, 2002. By sunset, some hundred souls and more had come through the gate of Pirbaag, seeking refuge. Huddled like ghosts among the graves, they could only pray that the rumours were false, that this fearful night would pass like others without incident. But they knew otherwise, which was why they had come. In the darkness they ate what they had brought, or were given, and water was passed around. Gradually they began to nod off; the children had settled down and silence fell. But then suddenly they were awake and there was the slow murmur of an approaching human swarm outside on the road, accompanied by an inexplicable background music, and the sounds of gears crunching. The smell of oily smoke. The air was warm. There came an enormous explosion, as a gas-tank bomb was hurled at the massive gate of the Balak Shah commune. This of course the refugees in Pirbaag could not see, but amidst their confusion and terror, they could hear the screams that pierced this now endless night, imagine tableaux of slaughter to rack the mind.

Still, Pirbaag would be safe, they hoped. And they beseeched its lord, Pray for us, Saheb; tell them we are not Muslims, Saheb.

With a few attendants the old Saheb stood some feet from the gate, prevented by his young devotees from stepping out further.

And then, inevitably, a phalanx of torches appeared outside the gate, yellow lights quivering in the night, radiating heat and menace, the promise
of mayhem; the smell of burning, the screams in the background; and drunk faces gradually discernible in the warm smoky darkness …

Perhaps if the Saheb had stayed put, had not come out in all his outdated elderly and spiritual authority to plead with and cajole and scold the men drugged on blood and red wine and bhang all evening … all he did was feed their wrath. But it would have made little difference, the rioters had arrived with intent. This centuries-old neutral sanctuary had now been marked as a Muslim abode to wreak vengeance on.

It was typical of Bapu-ji that he came out with an assistant and started speaking. A thin young man of medium height, a red bandana tied rakishly across his forehead, growth of beard on his face, made as if to listen, his sword held up poised. “Let go this silliness, for Bhagwan's sake”— the Saheb began, when the thin, long sword flashed and went straight through him. He fell and they cut him. Details don't matter. And then the rampage began inside. Violence to curdle the blood, as Bapu-ji had already written.

This is all I can muster about the massacre. Accounts of such violence fill the newspapers every time, eventually make their way into the archives. India is an ancient country, we say. We recover. Do we.

Two days after Mansoor left, a piece of unsettling news in the papers: two terrorists were killed in an encounter with police on the Kalka highway to Shimla. Letters (in Urdu) and maps were found on them; the two were apparently planning to bomb the Institute of Advanced Study, formerly the viceregal and presidential summer residence.

Neither of these two could have been my brother. Ajay has informed me that Mansoor had departed in the opposite direction, higher up in the mountains, made over as a Tibetan monk. But the comfort this information brings is only fragmentary. Only the flurry of questions remains, each one with a sting to its tail.