The Assassin's Song by M.G. Vassanji Read Free Book Online Page A

arrive in the compound, which would be abuzz with the steady, intriguing murmur of worshippers, and sit away in a corner on one of the ancient and less visited graves of some ancestor or holy man, vaguely aware that I was the future master of this place. It took me a couple of minutes, perhaps, to orient myself to the scene before me, and as I continued to observe I would begin to imagine the dramas in the lives of these people that had brought them to seek help. The well-fed man in a suit, looking humbled as he emerged from the mausoleum … surely had neglected his parents in pursuit of wealth; the young unhappy woman, avoiding others' eyes as she walked about listlessly … Pir Bawa help me … what could ail someone like her? Spoilt by a badmaash man, as Ma would say. And the well-dressed city adolescent with his domineering mother could only be on his way overseas … to England, where else? Such is sansara, as Bapu would say, life and the endless quest for solutions. The smallpox lady, her dark face covered in pustules, her grey eyes staring vacantly ahead: what could the Pir give her?
    She too had come for a miracle. And the man with no legs, his stump of a body tied to a mat, on which he moved about briskly propelling with his hands. A frequent visitor, Pran Nath. The Pir was not helping him, and for good reason, for he was a busybody and gossip, flitting hither and thither like a fly searching for feed.
    And there went the thin man from Goshala with the blue handkerchief tied round his head, circumambulating the mausoleum in his rapid, jerky walk, his eyes humbly directed to the ground before him; he came without fail every fourth week, and walked without pause from ten in the morning to two, in a thin, elliptical orbit. And did eight miles, as I once estimated. When he had finished he would step inside the mausoleum, and when he emerged, Ma would have water fetched for him. Another devotee of Pir Bawa. But I knew his story, so I convinced myself; he was a man whose son or daughter had been saved by the Pir from the very jaws of death, and this severe ritual was what he had promised in return. He would continue it till the day he died.
    Sometimes Harish or Utu would come over and sit beside me, and I would tell them these stories, with all the authority of someone privy to special knowledge, an inner voice. I sensed the envy in their eyes as I sat there, a prince viewing the domain I would inherit, when their own world was so ordinary, so dreary. What did Harish have to look forward to? A tire-repair shop? And Utu? A flower stall?
    Occasionally I would be pressed into service as a sevak, a volunteer to assist the visitors from abroad, to tell them about the history, the miracles.
    “At this spot under a neem—no, not this one, forgive me, but its predecessor—sat a group of Lohana farmers from Jamnagar who were on their way to Kashi for pilgrimage and had stopped to rest. Pir Bawa— Mussafar Shah—he has many names, as you know—made them welcome. They were given food. He noticed that they were very tired, and an old woman among them was about to die. Pir Bawa thereupon asked them where they were headed with a dying woman. They gave him their answer, and Pir Bawa replied, ‘Do you think this sick woman will make it all the way to Kashi?’ ‘No, Guru-ji,’ they replied. ‘We might have to take her ashes only.’ And Pir Bawa said, ‘I will take all of you to Kashi myself.’ And he did, right there. They gathered around him and closed their eyes as bid, and next they were in the holy city, beside the holy river. They bathedin the Ganga, paid their respects at the temples, and when they opened their eyes they were back at Pirbaag. Right here. The halwa they had received from the temples was beside them. And Pir Bawa himself was sitting in their midst. The pilgrims fell at his feet. ‘Show us your path, Guruji, you are truly the saviour,’ they said.
    “Now this area with the marble slabs on the