The Assassin's Song Read Online Free PDF Page B

dollars stashed away—”
    “Do you think it's easy to send money? The police are looking for you, do you know that? What have you been up to that you have to hide?”
    A long, audible breath. What was he thinking? I didn't want him to hang up, didn't want to lose him. The last time I saw him was in Ahmedabad, three weeks ago, when he told me he had become a “proper” Muslim. He had expressed some deeply distressing views, and it seemed he had gone off on a recklessly anarchic path from which he would have to be guided back. Then he had disappeared, taking this number with him where he could reach me.
    “Being safe, Bhai. Send me money if you can.”
    When I said I would try, he gave me an address and signed off, “Salaam alaykum, Bhai.”
    That Arabic greeting, so foreign to us at Pirbaag, put in to taunt me, perhaps frighten me—in a world where Islam is readily equated to terror and unreason.
    A few days later Major Narang of the CBI, who has been assigned to me, came to speak to me. He must have been informed about the late-night telephone call. It was a casual, sympathetic interview like the others, not really an interrogation. I am his link to Mansoor, whom he suspects and I fear is a link to others who may be up to the unspeakable. I told him I hadn't heard from my brother yet. Was he sure he was alive?
    We will live with that lie for a while.

The Garden of the Pir. My youth. And the world according to Raja Singh
.
    I recall—fondly, I cannot help but smile—coming home from school in the afternoon, alighting from a rickshaw or a tempo overflowing with children and women, or from the passenger side of a truck in which I would have hitched a ride. Emerging on the road beside the tire-repair shop of my friend Harish's father, I would quickly cross the road, go past the stall where Ramdas, my other friend Utu's father, would throw a quick shy greeting from behind his heaps of red and pink roses and coloured cotton chaddars. As I turned into the grounds of our shrine, past the unhitched brick gateposts and the name board, my heart would lift, my eyes alert to signs of the daily fraternal ambush. Sure enough, out would trot little Mansoor from some hiding place, in dirty shorts and open shirt or singlet, obviously barefoot, chuckling his greeting at the scholar-brother. I would have my embroidered black satchel round my shoulder, and in my hands perhaps some cricket paraphernalia—leg guards, gloves, ball. Cricket was everything.
    Little brother would carry and drag my satchel inside the house, where it was always surprisingly cool for the hour; then we would sit down at the table and Ma, beaming her love, not having seen me the whole day, would lay out our snack and join us.
    We were the two boys of the shrine. Some would have called us privileged; others, handicapped. It would have been 1961 or '62, Fidel Castro and Cuba were very much in the news. There was talk of the Third World and Panchsheel, the friendship among nonaligned nations that our prime minister Nehru much favoured. Yuri Gagarin, the Russian cosmonaut, hadbecome the first man in space. And so I was eleven or thereabouts; Mansoor was seven years younger.
    At the table, the little one, feeling sidelined as I chatted with Ma about my day at school, would start to act up; he would interrupt; he would fuss about his chappati and pickle (he preferred butter); he would kick me under the table—and when I retaliated, she would admonish me, the older one, for not understanding. Mansoor was the darling, her Munu; I called him “guerrilla,” a term I had learned from the newspapers. Even then, in those childhood days, my brother did not believe in waiting; he demanded and he took action.
    But those quarrels were forgettable. I would soon pick up bat and ball and stroll outside to join my friends, who would already be at play, Mansoor tailing me at a distance, doing his best not to be seen. I was fond of my brother. And now, after my long absence? I still