The Assassin's Song Read online

  ALSO BY M. G. VASSANJI

  The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

  When She Was Queen

  Amriika

  The Book of Secrets

  Uhuru Street

  No New Land

  The Gunny Sack

  And song is not desire; so you taught.

  Nor is it courtship, nor is it courtship's prize

  Song is being.

  RILKE

  Postmaster Flat, Shimla. April 14, 2002.

  After the calamity, a beginning.

  One night my father took me out for a stroll. This was a rare treat, for he was a reticent man, a great and divine presence in our village who hardly ever ventured out. But it was my birthday. And so my heart was full to bursting with his tall, looming presence beside me. We walked along the highway away from the village, and when we had gone sufficiently far, to where it was utterly quiet and dark, Bapu-ji stopped and stared momentarily at our broken, grey road blurring ahead into the night, then slowly turned around to go back. He looked up at the sky; I did likewise. “Look, Karsan,” said Bapu-ji. He pointed out the bright planets overhead, the speckle that was the North Star, at the constellations connected tenuously by their invisible threads. “When I was young,” he said, “I wished only to study the stars … But that was a long time ago, and a different world …

  “But what lies above the stars?” he asked, after the pause, his voice rising a bare nuance above my head. “That is the important question I had to learn. What lies beyond the sky? What do you see when you remove this dark speckled blanket covering our heads? Nothing? But what is nothing?”

  I was eleven years old that day. And my father had laid bare for me the essential condition of human existence.

  I gaped with my child's eyes at the blackness above my head, imagined it as a dark blanket dotted with little stars, imagined with a shiver what might lie beyond if you suddenly flung this drapery aside. Loneliness, big and terrifying enough to make you want to weep alone in the dark.

  We slowly started on our way back home.

  “There is no nothing,” Bapu-ji continued, as if to assuage my fears, his tremulous voice cutting like a saw the layers of darkness before us, “when you realize that everything is in the One …”

  My father was the Saheb—the lord and keeper—of Pirbaag, the Shrine of the Wanderer, in our village of Haripir, as was his father before him, as were all our ancestors for many centuries. People came to him for guidance, they put their lives in his hands, they bowed to him with reverence.

  As we walked back together towards the few modest lights of Haripir, father and first son, a certain fear, a heaviness of the heart came over me. It never left me, even when I was far away in a world of my own making. But at that time, although I had long suspected it, had received hints of it, I knew for certain that I was the gaadi-varas, the successor and avatar to come at Pirbaag after my father.

  I often wished my distinction would simply go away, that I would wake up one morning and it wouldn't be there. I did not want to be God, or His trustee, or His avatar—the distinctions often blurred in the realm of the mystical that was my inheritance. Growing up in the village all I wanted to be was ordinary, my ambition, like that of many another boy, to play cricket and break the world batting record for my country. But I had been chosen.

  When we returned home, instead of taking the direct path from the roadside gate to our house, which lay straight ahead across an empty yard, my father took me by the separate doorway on our left into the walled compound that was the shrine. This was Pirbaag: calm and cold as infinity. The night air suffused with a faint glow, and an even fainter trace of rose, all around us the raised graves of the saints and sufis of the past, and our ancestors, and others deserving respect and prayers. They were large and small, these graves, ancient and recent, some well tended and heaped with flowers and coloured cloth, others lying forlorn at the fringes among the thorns, neglected and anonymous. This hallowed ground was our trust; we looked after it for people of any creed from any place to come to be blessed and comforted.

  Overlooking everything here, towards the farther side of the compound was the grand mausoleum of a thirteenth-century mystic, a sufi called Nur Fazal, known to us belovedly as Pir Bawa and to the world around us as Mussafar Shah, the Wanderer. One day, centuries ago, he came wandering into our land, Gujarat, like a meteor from beyond, and settled here. He became our guide and guru, he showed us the path to liberation from the bonds of temporal existence. Little was known and few really cared about his historical identity: where exactly he came from, who he was, the name of his people. His mother tongue was Persian, perhaps, but he gave us his teachings in the form of songs he composed in our own language, Gujarati.

  He was sometimes called the Gardener, because he loved gardens, and he tended his followers like seedlings. He had yet another, curious name, Kaatil, or Killer, which thrilled us children no end. But its provenance was less exciting: he had a piercing look, it was said, sharp as an arrow, and an intellect keen as the blade of a rapier, using which he won many debates in the great courts of the kings.

  I would come to believe that my grandfather had an idea of his identity, and my Bapu-ji too, and that in due course when I took on the mantle I too would learn the secret of the sufi.

  But now the shrine lies in ruins, a victim of the violence that so gripped our state recently, an orgy of murder and destruction of the kind we euphemistically call “riots.” Only the rats visit the sufi now, to root among the ruins. My father is dead and so is my mother. And my brother militantly calls himself a Muslim and is wanted for questioning regarding a horrific crime. Perhaps such an end was a foregone conclusion—Kali Yuga, the Dark Age, was upon us, as Bapu-ji always warned, quoting our saints and the scriptures: an age when gold became black iron, the ruler betrayed his trust, justice threw aside its blindfold, and the son defied his father. Though Bapu-ji did not expect this last of his favoured first son.

  The thought will always remain with me: Was my betrayal a part of the prophecy; or could I have averted the calamity that befell us? My logical mind—our first casualty, according to Bapu-ji—has long refused to put faith in such prophecies. I believe simply that my sin, my abandonment and defiance of my inheritance, was a sign of the times. Call the times Kali Yuga if you like—and we can quibble over the question of whether there ever was a Golden Age in which all was good and the sacrificed horse stood up whole after being ritually quartered and eaten. Whatever the case, I was expected to rise above the dark times and be the new saviour.

  This role, which I once spurned, I must now assume. I, the last lord of the shrine of Pirbaag, must pick up the pieces of my trust and tell its story—and defy the destroyers, those who in their hatred would not only erase us from the ground of our forefathers but also attempt to write themselves upon it, make ink from our ashes.

  The story begins with the arrival in Gujarat of the sufi Nur Fazal. He was our origin, the word and the song, our mother and father and our lover. Forgive me if I must sing to you. The past was told to me always accompanied by song; and now, when memory falters and the pictures in the mind fade and tear and all seems lost, it is the song that prevails.

  From western lands to glorious Patan

  He came, of moon visage and arrow eyes.

  To the lake of a thousand gods he came

  Pranam! sang the gods, thirty-three crores of them.

  Saraswati, Vishnu, Brahma bade him inside

  Shiva Nataraja brought him water to drink.

  The god himself washed this Wanderer's feet

  How could beloved Patan's sorcerers compete?

  You are the true man, said the king, your wisdom great

  Be our guest, show us the truth. br />
  c. A.D. 1260.

  The arrival of the sufi; the contest of magics.

  It used to be said of Patan Anularra in the Gujarat kingdom of medieval India that there was not a city within a thousand miles to match its splendour, not a ruler in that vast region not subject to its king. The wealth of its many bazaars came from all corners of the world through the great ports of Cambay and Broach, and from all across Hindustan over land. It boasted the foremost linguists, mathematicians, philosophers, and poets; thousands of students came to study at the feet of its teachers. When the great scholar and priest Hemachandra completed his grammar of Sanskrit that was also a history of the land, it was launched in a grand procession through the avenues of the city, its pages carried on the backs of elephants and trailed by all the learned men. Great intellectual debates took place in the palace, but with dire consequences for the losers, who often had to seek a new city and another patron. In recent times, though, an uneasy air had come to hang over this capital, riding on rumours of doom and catastrophe that travelled with increasing frequency from the north.

  Into this once glorious but now a little nervous city there arrived one morning with the dawn a mysterious visitor. He was a man of such a striking visage that on the highways which he had recently travelled men would avert their faces when they crossed his path, then turned to stare long and hard at his back as he hastened on southward. He was medium in stature and extremely fair; he had an emaciated face with a small pointed goatee, his eyes were green; and he wore the robe and turban of a sufi. His name he gave as Nur Fazal, of no fixed abode. He entered the city's northern gate with a merchant caravan and was duly noted by his attire and language as a wandering Muslim mendicant and scholar originally from Afghanistan or Persia, and possibly a spy of the powerful sultanate of Delhi. Once inside, he put himself up at a small inn near the coppersmiths' market frequented by the lesser of the foreign merchants and travellers. Soon afterwards, one afternoon, in the company of a local follower, he proceeded to the citadel of the raja, Vishal Dev. The time for the raja's daily audience with the public was in the morning, but somehow the sufi, unseen at the gate—such were his powers—gained entrance and made his appearance inside.

  He stood with mild amazement beside a pale blue man-made lake, contained by banks of red stone painted with designs in pink and blue; in the middle was an ornate pavilion where played and relaxed royal women in bright clothes and long black hair, the tinkle of their pretty voices echoing off the water like birdsong. All around the water stood three-foot-high carvings that, the sufi confirmed as he approached closer to one, then another, depicted the god Shiva. He was standing on the bank of the sahasralinga talav, tank of a thousand Shiva shrines, whose fame had spread as far away north as Samarkand and Ghazna, whose sultans and generals always kept an eye open for opportunities to foray into Hindustan and plunder its legendary wealth. The mystic stood staring at the closest icon in wonder. Shiva's one leg was bent and raised in a gesture of dance, two hands poised in midair; the smile was mischievous and immediately infectious. Here was a god who liked to play. The sufi had been told during his long voyage, and often with a horrified look on the face of the informer, that the people of Hindustan worshipped not only idols of men and women, but also images of animals and, if that were not strange enough, the human procreative organs as well. (“And may God bring destruction on the infidels!”) Some would sacrifice humans and eat the flesh of the head, others mutter nonsense syllables or roar like a bull after bathing in sand. But Nur Fazal himself was an exile for his beliefs and did not take to judging others too easily. There are meanings within meanings, he had always been taught; the truth lies shrouded behind a thousand veils.

  He was reminded of a home in the north and west now being ground to dust under the hooves of Mongol horses, and drenched in the blood of his folk and his loved ones. He remembered his spiritual master whom he'd left there, at whose instigation he had taken on this long journey.

  He was brought around from his memories by approaching sounds— footsteps and human exclamations, accompanied by a sight that brought him a smile.

  A young pandit, a priest in a gleaming white dhoti, a tuft of hair collected into a topknot on his otherwise close-cropped head, was striding towards him with all the exaggerated sense of gravity that seems incumbent to a short stature. His chest was bare, and around one shoulder ran a ceremonial white thread. From the opposite side, the stranger noticed, approached two older, bald-headed priests draped around the whole body in white; a race was on for who would reach the interloper first. It was the young topknot who did so, as he exclaimed, “What are you doing in these premises, you Mleccha, impure Muslim? And you dare to cast eyes on the Lord Shiva himself—out with you!”

  The sufi had turned and now smiled at the pandit, as the companion he had brought with him translated the scolding.

  “And can't your Lord even speak for himself?” the sufi taunted.

  At this, the two white-robed ones, who had come to a stop and were staring, gave off a volley of titters. The topknot turned pink in the face.

  “Shiva does not speak to such as you, impure one!” he said angrily. No sooner had he uttered these words than he could have bitten off his tongue.

  The sufi threw no more than a casual gaze upon the red statue. To the young pandit's amazement, with a great big thump the Cosmic Dancer raised his already high stone foot, leaned forward, and jumped on the ground. In dancing steps, with the gait of a monkey, Shiva ran to the lake and returned bearing a jug of water. “Jadoo, jadoo!” cried the white-robed ones in a fret, having lost their humour. The young pandit gaped from the ground, where he had tripped himself. The sufi accepted the jug from Lord Shiva and washed his feet. The god meanwhile was back at his place. “There, I have even washed my feet now,” said the sufi to the young priest. All who were around noticed that the blue lake had emptied. Fish were wriggling in the mud, and the princesses and their maids were screaming frantically as they scrambled up the shore, their bright wet garments clinging desperately to their voluptuous bodies.

  By this time a few more people had appeared, and then some soldiers in armour came, flanking an eminence, at whose commanding sight all the men bowed and the young monks among them cowered but stood watching from a distance. He was a large muscular man, dark as polished blackwood. Unlike the priests and monks, the eminence was elaborately clothed in embroidered short trousers and jacket, the belt at his waist glittering with gold and precious stones; his muscular arms, wearing amulets and rings, were crossed, his legs stood apart. He was the chief minister, Rajpal—the sufi heard it whispered—and he glared at the stranger, pointed at him, then nodded at the soldiers; the visitor was escorted away to face the king.

  They approached a large hall open at the sides, its tiled roof supported by gilded posts, and on the top of which banners of various colours flapped in the wind. They passed a gauntlet of cavalry on fine Arabian horses, elephants bearing their mahouts, and a company of soldiers in armour bearing swords and long spears. The entrance doorway was ornately carved; inside, seated on the ground, were perhaps a couple of dozen people. And directly before him, in the distance, prominent like the sun, seated on a gold throne and surrounded by priests and officials, was the king of Gujarat, leaning forward curiously. The sufi bowed. He had still not been touched.

  It seemed that a discussion of some importance had been interrupted for his sake. The chief minister gestured, and he stepped forward along a blue runner in the company of his escorts.

  His Majesty Vishal Dev, self-styled King of Kings and Siddhraj the Second, then spoke.

  “You have performed a feat that has much impressed our priests,” said Vishal Dev to the sufi, with an amused, disarming smile. “You seem to have many talents. Tell us your name.”

  “The feat but performed itself, Great King,” said the sufi, through his interpreter. “My name is Nur and in my language it means ‘light.’ ”

  “Then tell me, O Light, what brings you
to Gujarat? I understand that men of your faith in the north would like nothing better than to break the statues of our gods and force us to worship your one God, who does not show his face yet makes many threats. Have you come to spy, then, on behalf of your Sultana Raziya of Delhi—or is she dead now?”

  “No, Great King, I am but a scholar and a man of God. My name means light, Your Majesty,” replied the sufi astutely, “but you truly are the sun itself in these realms. Your kingdom is known far and wide outside Hindustan as a haven of tolerance where differences in belief are not persecuted. There is but one Truth, one Universal Soul, of which we all are manifestations and whose mystery can be approached in diverse ways. That is my creed, and if called upon to advise or comfort, this is what I teach.”

  “You speak with a sweet tongue, like all your compatriots from the west—but they also forge a hard steel where you come from, as my people have learned to their dismay and terror,” said the king. “In Patan we have always welcomed poets and philosophers and we encourage conferences and debates. Perhaps during your stay you will grace us with your presence in the afternoons for discussions of a learned nature.”

  A ripple of excited murmuring ran rapidly through the hall at the king's proposition; for it was the practice in court that the strictest examination be passed in the knowledge of the holy Vedas and the poetics of the sacred language before a scholar could participate in debates and discussions.

  Vishal Dev leaned sideways to give ear to his chief priest, Nagada, a tall thin man with an obsequious smile but cold eyes, who had come forward to speak with him.

  The raja, having heard the priest out, clapped his hand once, then grinned at the sufi. “My guru Nagada suggests that perhaps you would like to compare your impressive stuff with the magic of our local practitioners. What a great opportunity to exchange knowledge! Perhaps you can then give us your views on how the human mind can affect inanimate matter.”