The Assassin's Song (12 page)

Early the next morning, before school, I again accompanied my father, this time to the old banyan tree outside the main gate that my friends and I had dubbed Mister Six. This old ped had a mangled trunk; a canopy of
leaves drooped down from it. At the head of the trunk was a dark shapeless hole, into which Bapu instructed me to drop another wrapped package. I balked. “There may be a cobra inside, Bapu-ji.”

“If there is a cobra inside,” he murmured, “all the better.”

But he took the package from me and inserted it into the recess, pushing his hand completely inside. I gazed at him in admiration.

“This tree is sacred,” he said, still in that low voice. “Like the crows, it has borne witness to our history. It will be here when we are gone.”

Almost exactly a month after their attack, having occupied some territory, the Chinese declared a ceasefire.

Just as the Kauravas humiliated Draupadi, people said, these Chinese took our shame; our warriors could do nothing. Where was Krishna, where Arjun? But the second inning has yet to be played, the match is not over. Mahabharata is yet to happen. The next time we will match them gun for gun, jawan for jawan. We will have an atom bomb.

Meanwhile we hang our heads in shame. And we blame each other.

… and the outer reaches of communal madness.

Diagonally across the street from us was the local Muslim settlement, behind a gate so immense and strong it could once have belonged to a fort. Here in a mosque was buried the Child-imam Balak Shah, believed to be a grandson of our own Pir Bawa, the Wanderer. The Balakshahis, as his followers were called, awaited the resurrection of their Imam on Judgement Day; meanwhile he performed daily miracles at his shrine. It was from this mosque that the azan would be heard every prayer time; in particular, its singular Arabic call formed a deep, rising counterpoint to the singalong Gujarati ginans of Pirbaag at the dawn hour, when all else was quiet.

Recently, while the rest of the nation was tense with war anxiety, the devotees of the Child had celebrated a thanksgiving, with ceremonies and prayers. Not long ago the papers were full of news about an Italian mystic who had gone up a mountain and brought back news about the impending end of the world. With the Chinese threatening a mighty war in the north,
the Kali Yuga seemed to be nearing its predicted demise, and the Balakshahis thought this might be just the moment for their Child-imam to awake from his grave beside his mother and lead the world to glory. With him would awaken all the illustrious personages from the past, including the Prophet Muhammad, Hazrat Ali, Jesus Christ, Shri Rama, Shri Krishna, and others. The Balakshahis gathered flowers and prepared garlands, they hired musicians, they sang their songs of celebration. When the hostilities ended, denying them the second coming, they quietly heaped their flowers on their few graves and our many.

It was all good fun for the town. “So he's still sleeping?” one might ask playfully, and be rewarded with a smile. No harm was done. And yet, behind this practised communal amity lurked a fire that almost devoured us.

One afternoon, the local school, which stood exactly where the road forked in our village, ended. The Balakshahi children would come down the main trunk of the road; the Hindus lived close to this junction and also up the left branch of the fork, which proceeded to the Baroda highway; and those remaining, mostly the other Muslims and the cattle keepers, went up the right branch and around to the fields behind Pirbaag. Three boys emerged from the school, continuing a lively discussion.

“Ey,” says Paado, the shopkeeper Manilal Damani's son, “Pakistan was behind this war, Pakistan. It is our worst enemy, worst …”

“There are Chinese in Pakistan?” asks the second boy, a sycophant.

“My father says these Balakshahi people have been praying to their pir to help China! They are Pakistanis themselves only, all their relations live in Pakistan!”

“Saala!” comes the shrill response. The third boy hitches up his shorts, ready for battle. He is the buckle-maker's son, Mukhtiar. “You are calling us Pakistani—”

The two lock in combat—an ungainly embrace, grunts and sniffles— in the middle of which one of the Damani brothers leaps out of the store, separates them and deals a slap at Mukhtiar, throwing him to the ground.

That evening, towards the end of the busy shopping hour, Salim Buckle, the injured boy's father, led a demonstration outside the village shop. The group consisted of a few vendors and their supporters. What they expected from the shopkeepers was not clear. The latter were not
from Haripir originally but had come down from the north during the Partition to take up the property of my uncle's in-laws, who had declared themselves Muslims and headed the opposite direction. The Damanis, through their influence on Goshala, had recently made it difficult for the vendors to obtain goods to sell, whether cigarettes, stamps, or bananas, thus stifling their competition. And so there already had been a quarrel brewing between the two parties.

The three Damanis were hefty amateur wrestlers who reportedly ate eggs in secret to build their strength. They were of course confessed vegetarians. As the crowd began to thin at the fork, having had their fill of the word-slinging spectacle, the brothers came out and easily beat off the scrawny vendors; not satisfied by their victory, they called out, “Pakistani cunts!” behind their backs.

The next morning at dawn, as the azan prayer call rose up from the mosque in the distance, and the singing was well under way at our shrine, a short sharp scream cut through the air.

A man soon brought news from the tea stall outside: some unknown person had thrown a piece of meat into the family shrine of the Damanis, an arboreal structure in their backyard housing statues of the gods. The ladies of the family, not to say the gods, had been defiled. And the Damanis were out for blood.

“Now what will happen?” Ma asked softly.

Bapu-ji, my brother, and I were at the table next to the kitchen where we usually ate, and Ma was serving us breakfast.

After a brief pause, Bapu-ji replied slowly, “Even during Partition we didn't experience this sort of thing in our village. Some vile mischief is afoot …”

“Who would defile a god's house?” Ma asked. “Hindus would not do this.”

“Keep these two inside,” Bapu-ji said, indicating Mansoor and me.

She nodded, and as she did so, an involuntary sound escaped from her throat.

Revenge would be certain, they both knew. The only question was what form it would take.

I did not stay indoors for long, of course. Soon enough I ambled my way towards the front gate. Harish was outside his father's tire shed across the road, similarly dawdling, and I waved and went out to meet him. He too had been instructed to stay close to home. His father was a thickset hairy-chested man in a singlet, his hands at his waist now as he stood at the doorway looking out expectantly. Pretending life as usual, the two of us started up the road towards the fork and the school, throwing a cricket ball to each other and making a show of ourselves. The school was closed. Utu, having observed us, came over and together the three of us strolled back towards Pirbaag, hoping to play cricket at our playground. Also in a show of normality, apparently, the barber was setting off on his rounds, swinging his leather bag, calling out his greetings of jovial deference; and a vegetable cart was creaking its way up the hill, in stops and starts. A truck passed.

When suddenly a cold chill had descended upon the street, muting all sound, and a wave of nervous apprehension came trembling through; the shops began to close one by one. The barber stopped and reversed, hurried towards the back of the Hindu quarters; the vegetable hawker pushed his cart to park it outside a shop, adjusted his green dhoti, and scampered off. Harish, Utu, and I parted company without a word, infected now by this new and still incomprehensible fear.

The shrine was absolutely deserted, like the dead of night. Bapu was inside the library. Sensing my presence outside the door on the pavilion, he looked up and said, “Yes, Karsan?”

“Bapu-ji—something's happening—the whole village is closing—”

“Come,” he said, “sit down.”

I went inside and sat down on the floor beside him. He said nothing more, went about his business. Today he was answering letters.

“Bapu-ji—” I said.

“Yes?”

“Why do Hindus and Muslims hate each other?”

He became quiet, looked away, and for a moment I thought he was going to say, I don't know. Instead, he said, “They don't hate each other. They're only sometimes afraid of each other … and there are those among them who exploit that fear.”

I did not ask him, Are we Hindus or Muslims, Bapu-ji?—because I
knew what he would have said. We are neither and both. We bow neither to Kashi nor to Kaaba, et cetera. And we are respected for that.

It was three o'clock. I had already with some reluctance played Bandits of Kathiawad with my brother Mansoor, in which game at his insistence I was always a hapless sipai, a bumbling cop, so he could be the fierce outlaw who defeated me among the graves that were his fortresses. And I had explored the neglected graves at a far corner of the compound, large and ancient and crumbling, guarded by the thorny scrub and the vicious vicchi-butti plants that could make the skin itch for hours; the broken texts on the stones were unreadable and could well have been in Persian. Among these stone giants stood a small, ornate, and unmarked grave of marble, which I knew Bapu-ji sometimes came to visit. He had said once that it belonged to a princess. Now I sat on the floor, at the edge of the pavilion by myself, intensely tuned to the exhausted stillness all around me. What would happen next, how would the night end?

The answer came with the sudden and various sounds of motor vehicles on the road outside, accompanied by sporadic shouting.

My father's two attendants appeared and woke him up from a nap among his books and told him what was happening. Three pickups had arrived with a load of young men, all wearing red headbands and armed with sticks and swords. Two vans had followed with other young men, wearing green headbands and similarly armed. They had all disappeared into the village.

No sooner had this news come than there arrived a delegation of three men. My father heard them out quietly on the pavilion, after which they left and he turned and entered his library and shut the door behind him. The two attendants and I waited nervously outside, sitting on the floor, arms crossed over our knees. The afternoon was drawing to a close and was still eerily quiet, except for an occasional all-too-human sound: a child at play in a nearby yard, a man's brief, sharp shout. My companions were among the regular stream of volunteers who came to the shrine to serve. They were from the Champaner area, and I heard from their murmurs that they were not entirely new to the situation now gripping us in Haripir. Ma brought tea and bhajias for us, asked me if I did not want to come inside. I said no. Don't go outside, she warned.

Finally Bapu-ji emerged. “Let's go to the Balak Shah place,” he told us, looking surprisingly fresh, perhaps having gone inside and had a bath. It was about four o'clock.

The road was deserted, except for the stray dogs quietly trotting about, only too happy to exist without the company of men. In the distance, at the fork, there stood a few young men, some of them swinging staffs in their hands, one of them holding up a transistor radio that crackled. These were the redbands.

The four of us arrived at the massive gate of the Balak Shah shrine. Above the door, in the lookout, there was some movement. Trouble was being anticipated.

Bapu-ji stepped forward and banged on the door with a fist. “Open, this is Tejpal Saheb!”

The small wicket in the lower portion of the great door opened a crack, a face peeped out and withdrew. There was a quick conference on the other side, then the small door opened wider and a voice said, “Come in, Saheb.”

Bapu-ji, then I, then the two volunteers went stooping through the wicket. Inside, all was quiet, but on both sides, men and women were sitting outside their shacks, some of them on their haunches, and they stared at us. Not a word was spoken. Our entourage proceeded awkwardly through this gauntlet towards the shrine of the grandson of the Wanderer. These people were related to us in some way, but I was almost completely ignorant about them. This was my first visit to their settlement, yet I knew that they came regularly on Fridays to Pirbaag to pay their respects to our Pir Bawa. Straight ahead stood a group of men waiting for us, it seemed, at yet another gate, which led to the mosque and the shrine of the Child. The sheikh, Sayyed Ahmed, stepped forward and shook hands with my father. He was a short heavy man with a long beard and wore a simple kurtapyjama and a cap. He patted me on the shoulder and nodded at the two volunteers. Then he led us all in through the gate.

“Sheikh-ji,” my father said when we were inside and facing the mosque, which was a tall, domed, whitewashed building with a verandah in front. “What has happened to our village all of a sudden? We must intervene—this is not what we want.”