Free The Assassin's Song by M.G. Vassanji

time, foreign scholars would visit the shrine, arriving on bullock cart or muleback, sent by the local British collector inAhmedabad or the Oriental Institute in Bombay. And because the collectors had been kind to the reign of the Sahebs of Pirbaag, Dada welcomed these red-faced visitors wiping their dripping brows with handkerchiefs. But he was suspicious of them and did not like them greedily pawing his precious heritage. However, a small brass plate on a doorpost acknowledged gifts from the Royal Asiatic Society and a Mr. Cranston Paul, Collector of Ahmedabad.
    One day, sensing my presence at the door, Bapu-ji looked towards me, then gave a rare smile and said, “Come and have a look.” He was examining an extraordinary length of paper across his lap and there was a magnifying lens on the portable desk beside him.
    I had never been invited inside, except to hand him his glass of milk. If anything, I recalled admonitions from my mother not to enter the library on my own. Therefore no word would escape my lips and I stared in disbelief.
    “Come now,” he beckoned with a gesture of the head.
    Slowly I stepped forward, bent down on my knees in front of his desk, and looked.
    On the long sheet of ancient paper danced and skipped a kind of writing in red and black ink that I had never seen before. Not like the stolid Devanagari I had learned in school, dangling from a bar as if from a clothesline, or the slightly less controlled letters of Gujarati; these before me, faded unevenly but still clear, curled and raced crazily, taking their unreadable message across the page as if it had no end, and indeed it did not have one, the lines falling like rain down the side.
    My father saw me grappling mentally to read the writing, attempting to steal even a bit of its message, and said, “It's in a secret script—which Master-ji or someone else will teach you one day. It was used to hide our message from our enemies.”
    “Which enemies, Bapu-ji?”
    “Rulers … fanatics …”
    Master-ji had indeed taught us that rulers in the past had persecuted the shrine, sometimes killed our holy men, burnt down precious Pirbaag; in each case through a miracle the tomb with its eternal light had stood intact, resplendent and without a blemish. Sometimes the remorseful persecutor had gone down on his belly before the Pir and become a devotee.
    “This page is six feet long,” Bapu-ji said, watching me follow the writing down its length. “It contains ginans written both horizontally and vertically—like a crossword.”
    I was just conscious enough to stare in wonder at the exhibits he was showing me, in this bewildering, unexpected act of confidence. In an open, more modern book beside him was a printed picture of a king seated on a throne under a canopy, surrounded by robed priests and guarded by soldiers in armour. An ordinary-looking dhoti-clad fellow in front of the king was evidently receiving a royal scolding.
    “Raja Vishal Dev in his court,” Bapu-ji declared, his voice wavering, a thin smile on his lips.
    Then he pointed to two coins lying on the desk, black, with glimmers of gold. “Coins,” he declared, “bearing the seal of Siddhraj. One day we will have a museum at Pirbaag, where all the artifacts and books from our past can be displayed.”
    “That's a good idea, Bapu-ji,” I said.
    “Go now,” he said, and shakily I stood up, for I had been on my knees a long time.
    “One day I will introduce you to this entire collection,” he said with a smile. “It will all be yours to look after.”
    He was watching me; and I was then looking, I would think later, not at the human father I craved, nor the lofty Saheb of Pirbaag, but a third, different entity altogether. Who was speaking to me then? Pir Bawa himself?
    “Can I come and dust your books for you, Bapu-ji?” I asked.
    “Yes … you could do that once a week.”
    I nodded. He nodded. I left through the back door into the courtyard, closed it, feeling his eyes all