Making Miracles
The Assassin's Song by M. G. Vasssanji; Delhi: Viking/Penguin India New Delhi; 2007; pp. 375; Rs. 450.
"Everything is connected and has a purpose, there are no accidents" (p. 322). The Assassin's Song, the latest novel by Kenya-born, Toronto-based author M.G. Vassanji, could be read as an extended meditation on this philosophical theme. The words also encapsulate the hard-won wisdom that Karsan Dargawallah, Vassanji's protagonist, arrives at through a long, painful journey from innocence to knowledge. In this journey history blends with personal memory to create the groundwork for Karsan's own extraordinary destiny. For he is born, so he is told, to inherit the role of spiritual guide, keeper of the shrine of Pir Bawa, or Nur Fazal, a thirteenth century Sufi saint who had come to Gujarat during the reign of Vishal Dev. Karsan rebels against his heritage and his father's austere discipline to take up work and study in the USA, but the call of destiny brings him back to his family home Pirbaag in the aftermath of the Godhra carnage of 2002. Here he must confront the past, both personal and public, including the circumstances of his parents' separate deaths and the truth about his brother Masoor, who reacts to communal violence by embracing the path of extremism. Vassanji, winner of the Commonwealth Writers Prize (1990), is known for his preoccupation with the ways in which the collective past can affect individual lives. In The Assassin's Song the past as history is often indistinguishable from myth. "[P]eople have a need of miracles," Bapu-ji tells the young, uncomprehending Karsan (p.175). The novel's grand design spans many centuries and covers several continents, switching back and forth between the tale of the fictional Nur Fazal in the distant past and the story of Karsan's growth to maturity in the present. Within these two framing narratives are enfolded several others: the confessions of Karsan's father, for instance, the legend of Pir Bawa's wife Rupa Devi, or the tale of Balak Shah, the child saint buried in the rival Muslim shrine opposite Pirbaag. Punctuating these personal narratives are moments in public history where communalism reared its ugly head Partition, the anti-Sikh riots after Indira Gandhi's assassination, the demolition of Babri Masjid, and then Godhra as if to depict history as a cycle that repeats itself, rather than a linear narrative of progress. It was religious persecution that brought Nur Fazal to India, and the same motif recurs in the death of Karsan's father when the shrine of Pirbaag, once dedicated to the ideals of secularism and tolerance, finds itself no longer immune to onslaughts of communal violence. "But I don't want to be God, Bapu-ji!" Karsan protests to his father before leaving for America (189). But as the narrative draws to its melancholy close, a wiser Karsan acknowledges that escape from history is not an option, and understands the mythmaking impulse of the human mind: "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 . . .it is my responsibility, my duty to my father and all the people who relied on us" (316). Peopling this narrative of pain, disillusionment and eventual self-knowledge are an array of characters from the many worlds that Karsan traverses in his circuitous route back to where his life began. We vividly remember Salim Buckle, who pays with his life for a moment of communal tension in Karsan's childhood; Raja Singh, the truck driver whose supply of newspapers and magazines keeps the cocooned young boy in touch with the world outside; Mr. Hemani, whose bookshop in Ahmedabad becomes Karsan's favourite getaway during adolescence; and Elias, the Jewish boy from whom Karsan learns of the possibility of applying for higher studies abroad. There are also the women in Karsan's life: the mysterious girl with the large nose ring, the subject of his adolescent dreams; Shilpa the seductive devotee of Karsan's father, the chink in the holy man's spiritual armour; Marge, Karsan's partner in a short-lived marriage that ends in tragedy; and Nita, the casual acquaintance from his days at the US university, who becomes his emotional mainstay when his world threatens to collapse around him. We encounter Major Narang, whose task it is to track down the absconding Masoor, Mr. David, the Christian schoolteacher accused of being a paedophile, and Nur Fazal himself, whose shadowy but powerful mystery haunts the entire narrative. Most believable is Karsan's delightfully portrayed mother, who sneaks off in a burqua to watch Hindi films in defiance of her husband's credo, sends her US-based son parathas and theplas wrapped in pages of his favourite Indian magazine, and makes a public display of wifely jealousy that eventually drives her to her death. Not all the other figures are equally lifelike though, some of them appearing perfunctorily to serve some obvious thematic purpose before dropping out of the pages of the narrative. But then realism is not Vassanji's favoured mode, and since everything is filtered through Karsan's consciousness and rendered in his voice, we see every other character through his eyes. Though the novel has moments of poetic, elegiac intensity, it does not always live up to the demands of its epic sweep. The personal, quirky elements capture our imagination far more vividly than the passages of philosophizing that intersperse the narrative. A sense of the inevitable hangs over the entire novel. We feel no surprise when Karsan finds himself back in Pirbaag against his will, nor can we share his excitement upon solving the mystery of the Assassin's identity, for too many clues have been planted in the text already. What makes this novel worthwhile all the same is Vassanji's deep awareness of the wounds of history and his faith in the human endeavour to heal them. Radha Chakravarty is an academic and translator
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