The Assassin's Song (33 page)

“Where next?” the driver asked. “You know anyone else?”

I told him I wanted to find the offices of a company called Engineers Mutual.

The man shook his head. “Tell you what, I'll drop you off downtown, you ask around or find a phone book there.”

An hour later, the address of Engineers Mutual tucked inside my pocket, I sat at a restaurant in the downtown square, looking out the window, sipping a soda, and contemplating my next move. The Pirbaag faithful had gathered at six thirty for their devotions, it was eleven in the morning now; what to do in the meanwhile? I walked around, had a soup and sandwich, for which I spent more than I anticipated; I browsed in a bookstore, then found the library, where I had a nap until closing, when I was turned out. Finally, at six o'clock I caught a taxi for the offices of Engineers Mutual.

The building was new and stood alone at a distance away from the main road; it had a glass exterior and was brightly lit. These details I had hardly noticed before. At this grey hour all looked quiet for miles around except for the gusting wind. I had never come across a bleaker scene in my
life. When I tried the entrance door, it was solidly locked. My depression was complete. I was at my wits' end. With Premji beside me the previous time, how easily the door had swung open. Everything was different today. I decided to wait, standing close to the door and facing inside, desperate to shield myself from the cold. A police cruiser came whining up the long driveway, and when the window rolled down I explained my purpose; the cops checked my identification and reluctantly drove away, maintaining a crawling speed until they disappeared. Six thirty came and went, nothing happened. Finally at seven I started walking back to town, bitterly disheartened, realizing how ill-conceived my plan had been. Of course, if the devotions had taken place, everything would have turned out all right. It hadn't, and I had this long walk back to the station. I was hungry; my fingertips, my toes, my ears all stung from exposure. I had no choice but to take the taxi that stopped for me.

At the bus stop I had a dollar bill left on me, and assorted loose change. The bus ticket to Boston was well over that amount. I was stuck.

“What shall I do?” I asked the clerk at the counter, expecting perhaps a kindness.

The man shrugged.

I walked to the convenience store at the station's other end, explained my predicament. The man grinned. “Tough luck.”

I came out of the store in absolute despair. Where to go? I was frightened. The ticket clerk had his sights on me; what did he think I would do? No doubt the store man was watching my back. A woman sat down on one of the linked plastic waiting seats attached with coin-operated TVs; she must have arrived recently, was waiting to be picked up. She looked miserable and gave me a red-eyed glare, pulled her suitcase closer. A drunk had retched near the end of the row, where I decided to sit, away from the woman. There was no one else around. This is what the world is like, outside of my books, I thought. This is what it can be like to be alone. Most of the world does not live on Harvard scholarships.

A while later, having composed myself, I tried calling up my friends at residence. They were not in but I found another lonely soul next door with whom I left the number of the pay phone where I could be reached. It was eleven o'clock when the phone rang. “Wait there till morning, I'll come and pick you up,” Russell said. “Don't worry, nothing will happen to you.”

Someone came and sat close to me in the middle of the night, perhaps seeking warmth, but otherwise I was not accosted. Russell arrived at nine thirty in the morning in a borrowed car and we drove back to Cambridge.

Exams came, summer approached. Still no message from home; not one line, to say: Your mother is well. Guilt gnawed at me, quietly and persistently, with the thought that I would not have been asked to return if Ma's condition had not been serious. The Saheb did not lie. I had been heartless, a selfish obstinate son who had put himself before his mother. My first and my only thought should have been of her. But there had been an alternative, a two-way ticket, which my father in his godly wisdom and his own obstinacy had denied to me.

Someone suggested I look for a person who would be travelling to my part of India over the holidays. Through an ad on a notice board, therefore, I met a student called Ramesh who kindly agreed to attempt to look up the shrine at Haripir during his visit home. He was from Rajasthan and his mother enjoyed no outing more than a visit to a holy place or shrine. During the summer a letter arrived from Ramesh in India telling me briefly that he had gone to Haripir and met my mother, Shrimati Dargawalla. She was as well as could be, and so were my brother and father. They all sent me their love. His own mother had benefited from the visit too. My hands trembled as I read the letter, and read it again. My fears were over. “Thank you, Pir Bawa,” I said. “And thank you, Ramesh.”

Early in September I met Ramesh over bagels and flavoured tea at the MIT Student Center, when he gave me a package of food from my mother. Tell him not to worry, Ma had said, tell him I am well. With the food was a copy of a cricket magazine.

But what had been wrong with her?

The price of freedom.

The winter looked bleak as it had not done before, the ground hard, the trees bare, the evenings long and empty. My friends had steady girlfriends now, all very upper class and levelheaded. Suddenly their penchant for horseplay and games was gone, and they were conscious of the future. You are not going to spend all your life clowning around at Harvard, after all, the four years will soon be up, the reckoning is close. They prepared to enter law and business and politics, and the tenor on our floor at Philpotts House was often hushed and academic.

Alone in my room at night, hopelessly I would look up from a book and let out a quiet howl of despair. My mind had begun to wander and worry. No longer was there the charge, the tension to it. Gone, that excitement of before, that burning driving thirst for all the knowledge of the world; gone and turned to ash. Everything seemed
okay
now, whatever I read; not banal, just, So-what? or worse, Big-deal. What had my rebellion been about, what had I cried tears for; how could the one thing that had come to mean my very existence suddenly abandon me now, leaving me with nothing—just a flaccid brain, an unbearable emptiness.

Help me, Bapu-ji; help me, Ma. Help me, Pir Bawa, you who also travelled so far away from home … You surely must know what this is about. I am alone now, totally absolutely alone.

To my friends' horror, I had transformed myself from the friendly Indian with the Maharishi smile into an irate alien; if they unthinkingly kept the volume on their stereos loud when I tried uselessly to concentrate,
the next time someone was huddled with his girlfriend or frantically finishing an assignment I would sing—sing those ginans I knew so well; their alienness of melody and language driving them up the wall, as they described it. Or recalling Raja Singh I would hurl out choice Punjabi expletives, swear at imaginary stragglers on the road, the camels, the Rabari women, the kids. Or declaim in the grossest form of my funny accent (as it had been called) pieces of pure nonsense composed from remembered readings:
Hail, Banquo, let us go then you and I, to your beginning and your end! If you prick us with a pin, don't we bleed? No, but we are God! Then on thy belly shalt thy crawl!
And when one of them banged on my door in sheer frustration, out from my room I would emerge like Ham-let's ghost, so I thought, but more a belligerent Mr. Hyde. The prim girlfriends would flee.

Finally, my revenge for all the times they had laughed at me, treated me like a yahoo.

One day I got drunk on bourbon; another day I stayed over at a student house in BU and got stoned. I pinched a book from the Coop; it was called
Steal This Book
, a radical primer by Abbie Hoffman. How clever. My friends began to fear for me. During my saner moments I spoke with them, listened, apologized. We made up. A round of pizza from me. Croissants at the Blue Parrot. They suggested that perhaps I needed to go home for a while.
Go home? For a while? Go home and become God? You've got to be kidding! I'm all right, Jack!

Then once again, those empty soul-sucking moments in the night, silent vampires … and the crescendo of the uncontrollable despair in the privacy of my room. The lack of all will and confidence, any interest in anything. The feeling of Alone. Of groping for something to cling to. For dear life. Crying to the dark.
Someone somehow tell me what to do, someone please help me … someone set it straight, this tormenting mind! It's come off, it's twisted … it's whirling round and round inside me …

A dream. An excavation site, muddy, wet, deep, and craggy; people digging strenuously with spades … in, out. Cut, and I am alone, and a voice says above me, Come out now! Wait! I shout desperately, I'm still digging! I continue digging in the twilight … in, out … as black lumps of brain come flying out of the ground.

Another dream. Bapu-ji walks among his followers in Pirbaag (it must
be), waving his blessings at them; but look—all is silent, and they don't respond to him, they turn away. And someone cries out desperately, But he is the Saheb! Why is no one greeting the Saheb?

My father's letters had resumed, though they were much less frequent than before, and they were heartbreakingly brief; there was no advice in them. “My dear son Karsan, Accept our greetings for your birthday. Yesterday we celebrated your day by cutting a cake. I hope you were able to celebrate with your friends there. We are all well and Ma's health is improving. Your father Tejpal.”

Where is the love, Bapu-ji?
Kem, tamaro dikro mati gayo?
Am I no longer your son, even a disobedient one?

Yes, the snow looks beautiful now, after the blizzard; soft white clumps balanced on the tree branches like pearls or tears, lights reflecting off the white crystals so that the night has the magical glow of fairy land; snowball fights, and Bob the burly Canadian is out showing off on his skis. I too should be out there among the brightly clothed boisterous fellows, this is the only way to beat the winter; only it's one of those days and the heart feels heavy, wants to drag me screaming into the darkness, though I won't let it, no I won't let you do that today, heart, it's lightness and freedom I want. It looks so good outside, I know that if I only let some of that cold air enter the lungs and clean out the old, poisoned blood inside me I'd be a new man. Perhaps I will go out, take in a deep breath of that bracing cold … it's what I need … why not? Indeed, why not … I can step out … it's soft as pillows out there …

I was rescued within minutes of falling on the cushion of fresh snow on the ground, someone having seen me tumbling past his window. I sprained my wrist and was blue in the bum. I had a bad dream, I explained to the doctors, and to the two cops who came by to the infirmary. I had been having nightmares recently, I said. My friends concurred, but not without giving me an ultimatum: Behave, or else.

Dr. Julius Goldstein was a small balding man with round glasses, looking more like a graduate student than someone who would heal me. He was the psychiatrist at Health Services, and I had gone to see him, upon advice, convinced that I was mentally sick, unable to come to grips with the processes of my mind. He was kind, with a soft but clear voice and a mannerism in which he would lean searchingly towards me when he spoke. I had lost him within the first few minutes of our first encounter, with the exotica of my life, and we both seemed to sense a hopelessness in the situation; he couldn't go where I came from. Still, he convinced me to lie down (“I don't like losing control of myself …” “Don't worry, you won't lose control, nothing will happen to you. It's normal.”) and encouraged me to talk, and not looking at him but at a small landscape painting up on the wall before me, I unburdened myself to myself. Only rarely would he prompt. I told my stories, collecting them under different headings. My fears, my strong memories, my jealousies, my contradictions. At the end of each hour, then, I felt I had unwound a tangled strain of thought in my mind, experienced a limited clarity. Sometimes I came out with a heavier heart and more depressed than before, and if at the end I believed I had not been cured, then I had also to admit that I did not know what I meant by a cure. Perhaps all I needed was a chance to talk clearly to myself and thus let in some light of day into my benighted soul. Dr. Goldstein brought our few sessions to a close with one piece of advice.

“Have you spoken to your father—or written to him—about what you want from your life?”

“No … actually not.”

“Well, that might not be a bad place to start, would it? Remember, he doesn't know what you want.”

He doesn't? He is the Saheb, isn't he?

“Your father may be better disposed to your wishes than you give him credit for.”

My wishes? What I want from my life?
I had not even articulated to myself what the meaning was of the freedom I had craved so much, for which I had gone away to America, and then disobeyed my father, committed a cosmic offence. Freedom, and then what? What life did I have in mind to lead in my freedom? Like a child I had wanted to have my cake and eat it too. But as a child I had known I didn't want to be Saheb; I had wanted to be a great cricketer. That is what I would tell Ma as we sat
together on the steps of the front porch, it was what R.D. Patel of the cricket academy and the Gujarat Lions might have made possible. That had been my wish, my desperate desire, to which Bapu-ji had said, No. It was too late for cricket now. But not for my freedom.