The Assassin's Song (41 page)

As I sat in the chai shop now, beside the olive green grave of a child with a red flower on top, I noticed a fair-featured middle-aged man with a trim black beard sitting a few tables away: his hair thick and short, a cup of tea before him, next to a blue pamphlet. He wore a green and maroon vest open in front, in the pocket of which, I guessed, was a cellphone. He had been throwing me covert looks, a thin private smile flickering on his face, and it had just occurred to me that he must have passed me outside and followed me in. A wave of irritation hit me—here was another smooth customer hoping to touch an unwary visitor from abroad for a few hundred rupees—an immoderate reaction on my part perhaps—when I realized with a shock that I was staring straight at my brother. I had of course been expecting to run into him, having left a message for him at Pirbaag that I would be staying in Ahmedabad at Teen Darwaja.

My face had betrayed me, for at that moment he got up and came over.

“How are you, Bhai?” he said.

“Mansoor—”

My voice came out hoarse, and there lay an uneasy instant before I stood up and we quickly embraced. He was shorter in stature than I but better proportioned and stronger; a good-looking man now, my brother.

We sat down, and he turned around to order another tea for himself, then faced me again.

“You recognized me.”

“Yes—though for a moment there I didn't. You were only a little boy when I last saw you!”

A small-statured, thin-faced imp, and eleven years old, to be precise.

He nodded briefly in response to my inane, though heartfelt smile. “Now you see a man. And you saw what they did to Pirbaag.”

The voice hard and clear, so certain of itself.

“Yes, but what happened, Mansoor, why did they attack us?”

“You've been away a long time, Bhai. You have a lot to learn.”

“Yes. All right.”

What had I expected from him? A welcome. A tender embrace. Some understanding. Not this cold carapace. We remained in awkward silence for some moments, occasionally stealing glances at each other, for it still had to sink in completely that we had finally met after so many years and were sitting across from each other. Physically I could not have changed as much as he had, I thought, but he was still the rebel. It would take some doing to get to know him.

“Well?” I ventured at length.

He met my look, and his face softened a whit as he said, “I have Bapu's ashes with me that I would like to give you. It's for you to decide what to do with them.”

“They should be buried in Pirbaag,” I told him.

“What's left of it.”

He said he lived not far away, behind the great mosque on Gandhi Road, and so we paid and left. Outside the mosque, on the sidewalk, a perfumer had laid out his samples on a cart, in tiny coloured bottles; on the steps a man sat watching the footware placed in his care by the worshippers who had gone inside. We took ours in our hands and entered the vast courtyard with the washing pool in the centre. There were not many people about, it was not prayer time. This was where I had come a few times during my escapades long ago, and watched in bewilderment the people praying, and wondered how to relate to them. In silence we crossed the courtyard to the back gate, and thence went through a crowded shopping district to the run-down area of the Tomb of the Queen. Here, above a
store selling modest kitchenware, was where he roomed with an old widow who kept the keys to the tomb, he told me, in case I cared to visit. He gave me water, and it was mostly he who talked.

There remained that edginess in him, and he had a look whenever he paused that made me nervous, as if I was being judged and dare not contradict him. He had become a proper Muslim, he said, and no longer was the half or hidden or confused Muslim of before. They—the Hindus— were out to exterminate the Muslims of India; none of them were to be trusted. Bapu would just not understand this; but Iqbal Uncle had been right to leave the superstitions and impure practices of Pirbaag behind and get away to Pakistan in time. And I was lucky to be living abroad. Did I bring any clothes for him?

“I brought two shirts,” I said, taken completely by surprise.

“No jeans?”

“I'm sorry. I was in a desperate hurry.”

Shopping had been the furthest thing from my mind; but perhaps I should have paid more thought to my brother. My luggage had been laughably paltry compared to the leviathan cargoes of my fellow passengers.

“And you didn't send anything in a long time. Forgot your little brother, eh—living in all that affluence?”

“But you wouldn't write to me!”

“We didn't know where you were,” came the sharp retort. “Bapu tried desperately to find you. I wrote to you too. One of the letters came back, saying, ‘Addressee Unknown.’” He announced those two words like a proclamation.

I didn't ask him if in that letter he had written more than his customary two lines to me. He was right, of course, in that I had ultimately escaped into a world of my making. And quietly closed the door behind me. But if he had responded to my pleas for friendship and fraternal love, I could hardly have abandoned him. I had often thought and worried about him. And now again I wanted desperately to reach out to him, but as always he remained insensitive. We met a couple of times more in Ahmedabad, once again in the chai shop and then in a restaurant. What had he been doing these many years? He had been to a college in Baroda, and married in Jamnagar, Ma's hometown, and lived there a few years. He was divorced now. He had travelled, but wouldn't give me the details. He had worked in
Master-ji's print shop in Haripir, but had fallen out with him. He had been a teacher for some time in Godhra. At the mention of this infamous town where the train compartment with all its passengers had been set on fire, I perked up; he eyed my unspoken response and said emphatically, “I taught there.”

Before we parted the final time, promising to meet again soon, I asked him, “How did Ma die, Mansoor?”

“You mean to say Bapu didn't tell you?”

“No.”

He didn't tell me either. He gave his tight smile and said, “The Saheb wasn't the saint you thought he was.”

I asked if he wanted some money. “Yes, if you don't mind,” he replied, and I gave him a wad of notes I had cashed that day for this purpose. Perhaps he would buy a pair of jeans from one of the many stores in the area.

I buried the earthen urn containing my father's ashes at Pirbaag, in the area where our ancestors were commemorated. The spot had been tidied, the marble plaques were in place and gleaming—though bearing the scars of damage and perhaps having lost their original arrangement—for which I was grateful. Neeta was with me; she must have known where the urn in my arms had come from but did not ask. I had become rather dependent on her. In my shocked disoriented state, it was convenient to be minded by a woman of means and influence, and an old friend, if I could call her that.

After a week's stay in Ahmedabad, during which I visited Pirbaag several times, still unsure of its fate, I departed for this stay in Shimla which she had arranged for me.

We have an argument, my brother and I.

M: “Why don't you join me in prayer?”

K: “You go ahead, it's all right.”

“Don't you pray? I have not seen you pray. Have you ever prayed?”

(Yes, I have; I once prayed to Pir Bawa for your life to be saved, and the prayer was answered.)

I tell him, “I don't pray formally.”

“Do you believe in God?”

No reply. To which the believer's incredulous response: “Do you believe in anything? You must believe in something?”

I look away.

I could tell him that over the weeks I have resolved to remember, construct a shrine of my own out of the ashes of Pirbaag; a bookish shrine of songs and stories. This is my prayer, if you will, this is my fist in the air, my anger, so unlike his; it is my responsibility, my duty to my father and all the people who relied on us as the sufi's representatives and whose stories are intertwined with ours. I say nothing.

Two nights ago there came a rapid knock at the back door. It was not very loud but it was clear and discrete and in that cold dead stillness it could have been heard perhaps half a mile away. Why would Ajay bring tea from the kitchen this late, was my first thought. I hadn't ordered it anyway. Or was it some animal? A ghost? The whisky reverend, again?

“Kaun?” I said softly, ear cocked at the door.

“It's me, Karsan Bhai,” came the reply. “Hurry!”

I opened, and Mansoor hustled in. He was wearing a bomber jacket, his arms folded, hands inside the armpits. A small pack on his back.

“Arré, it's cold, what a place you picked to hide.”

“What—” I began. What was he doing here?

“I've come to hide—I hope you don't mind.”

“You know I am being watched.”

“Don't worry.”

As a boy, I remembered, he would call and plead when he needed me to play with him; at other times he would play by himself or with his friends, among them the Muslim boys of the Balak Shah shrine. Karsan was there when needed; and Ma said, But you are the older one, you understand.

He sat down at my large, rarely used dining table. I boiled some tea for him. I brought out what little I had in dry food and placed it before him.

“What happened?” I asked him. “Have you left Delhi?”

“They were onto us—” He paused, watched my face, then changed tack and continued quietly, “We had to leave … we went our separate ways.”

“Look, Mansoor—”

“Omar,” he said, reminding me of his new name, and dunked a couple of biscuits into his tea. He looked up defiantly.

I felt a wave of annoyance rising up in me, yet I dared not reveal my feelings. Here we were, two bereaved brothers without a relation in the country, strangers to one another, yet hopelessly entangled with each other. He with his familiarity and antagonism towards me, and his easy dependence on me, and I with my guilty concern and fear for him. I did not believe he cared a whit for me; he assumed he knew me, and what he gave me of his life story was selected only to wound.

“Why don't you come clean,” I ventured, not quite sure of myself; perhaps my voice gave me away. “I know you've not done anything dreadful … why don't you speak to the police? We 'll get you a lawyer.”

He opened his mouth, closed it. Then he said in a surprisingly even tone, “They don't want to talk—don't you understand that? They want bodies. The evidence they supply later—a packet of pistachios, a letter in Urdu found on your corpse—there, a manufactured Kashmiri terrorist killed in a so-called encounter!”

I stared at him in shock. What do you say to that? How far off he had gone on his own path. He was in another league altogether. He had been in Godhra, I knew that. And that made me scared for him.

He slept as soundly as a babe that night, the way he always did; like an angel, as Ma would say, standing and watching over him tenderly with a smile, before waking him up on Sundays.

And he is as reckless as ever, though now his attitude borders on arrogance. When Ajay came with a pot of wake-up tea the morning after his arrival, he showed himself and asked for another cup to be brought. At breakfast later in the dining room, Ajay asked me—in full hearing of everyone—if the other sah'b would be joining us. I said no, but now there is always the extra cup on the wake-up tray early in the morning. All I need is for Major Narang to show up and ask questions.

And so at my suggestive silence in response to his question, “Do you believe in anything?” he almost shouts at me:

“Then how can you be Saheb? What will you tell the people when they come to you for guidance? Nothing! You are a false Saheb. You forfeited your status of successor when you abandoned us!”

I do not tell him what he does not apparently know, that I had already in a letter to my father abdicated my successorship to the position of Saheb. Instead, I reply, surprising myself,

“But I am his successor, nevertheless! He gave me the succession and he gave me his bol.”

“Bol. Hunh. Now you think of succession, when everything is gone. And what bol? Do you even remember it?”

“Yes, I do.”

We glare at each other. Then quietly, defiantly, I pick up pen and paper from my desk and suppressing all thought from my mind unconsciously write down the syllables my father spoke to me, and made me repeat, at the moment of my departure. They come, flowing out of my pen, concrete and mysterious. I repeat the sounds to myself in silence, as my brother watches me from the sofa, incredulous. There, the precious bol of the Sahebs, handed down father to son. I take the piece of paper to the kitchen and burn it in the flame of the gas stove, for the bol must remain a secret; I pick up the ashes and crush them; still holding them in one hand, with the other I open the back door and walk out to the lawn. I throw the ashes out into the wind.

In the distance, the hundreds of pinprick lights of Shimla hug the dark hills; in the farther distance, the faint shapes of the mountains, guardians of our nation; above me, the galaxies and stars, the Milky Way casually shaded in …

There, Bapu-ji, I have recalled the bol. Now tell me what you wanted to say.