But what right do I have to blame them? I am just like them, clinging to my own weird story of a mysterious phone call and transposed rooms. My friend, a renowned social psychologist, says it is in the nature of human beings to turn tragedies into mystical events. People surviving tragedy by a coincidence (God is with us), dying freakishly (who can stop fate?), unlucky numbers and dates, premonitions and astrological predictions — what is the real function of this magical web woven around a tragedy by the affected and the bystanders alike? Like the oyster that turns pain into a pearl, it helps reduce the intensity of tragedies and brutal crimes and softens their impact. At the same time, it surrounds them with the halo of heavenly intervention, obscuring responsibility, imbuing them with an inevitability. Why, even the perpetrators of these ghastly acts see themselves as heroes, courageously carrying out orders, sent straight from God! Come to think of it, isn’t there a dash of mystique, of absurdity, in every tragedy, every act of violence? My psychologist friend, however, doesn’t hold the view that peace and happiness are in the natural order of things.
To the oft-repeated question, why and for what purpose did Zainul Abidin become a fedayeen, there was no straight answer forthcoming. All the police could conclude was that behind the façade of a cultured man, a music lover, a businessman, and a prince charming, there lived a terrorist. If he had been such an extremist shaped by fundamentalist thought, how could he, at the same time, have led a life immersed in material comforts and geared towards the acquisition of wealth? This tall and handsome man was always to be seen in finely tailored designer outfits, his trademark ponytail injecting a frivolous playfulness into his personality. At the same time, he was also a forward-looking and aggressive businessman. He made his money manufacturing earth-moving machinery, and he had interests in the shipping industry. It was only recently that he had diversified into the hotel business. Welcome Hotel was a fairly recent construction. Ironically, the earth-moving machines clearing the debris from the site of the explosion bore the name of his company. Zainul Abidin joined Hasan Ibn al Sabbah in the list of puzzles swirling around in my mind. What was Hasan’s business? He never did say, in all our conversations on the various train journeys. On the phone he had mentioned he was here in the city to fight a court case against a business partner. In any case, a man travelling by train could not have been very rich, unlike Abidin.
Answers to my questions soon began to trickle in. I don’t know if I should call them answers. They might be called merely the explanations the police provided. To put it another way, alternatives instead of solutions. I am sometimes inclined to think that what we call the right answer does not exist. All answers are the right answers, as long as we agree that no answer is the final answer. Who was it who said that? Oh, my God, it was Hasan Ibn al Sabbah, during our last train journey together! The long list of answers, all real, but none true. It sounds like a prophecy now. Chance encounters in trains, the transposition of rooms, the contradiction between the image and the counter-image of Zainul Abidin, his own earthmoving machines cleaning up the debris of his actions, the red herrings in the investigation … none of them true ultimately, but all real at the same time!
Five months passed. The Welcome Hotel, Hasan and Abidin all buried beneath the earth, shovelled in by time. Then suddenly one day, the past resurrected.
One afternoon in December of the same year, I was travelling in a taxi towards the railway station. I was to catch a train to Calcutta. I was running a little late and as the taxi halted at a signal, once again I glanced at my watch. Boys selling magazines, dusters and boxes of face tissues wove in and out of the waiting traffic. One of them pushed a magazine through the partially opened window of my taxi. When I tried to stop him he assured me it was free and moved on. The enterprising child was pushing the magazine into every open window he could find. My eyes were fixed on the signal and when it turned green, I picked up the magazine with a sigh of relief. It was not the usual fashion, consumer products or cinema tabloid. Urban Recidivism was its name; I wondered if it would be of interest to any of the people in the cars. Must be an opening issue being distributed free for promotion. I stuffed it into my bag, something to read during the journey.
I managed to catch the train with just five minutes to spare. After settling down and having had the evening tea served by the staff, I took the magazine out of my bag. Good production, art paper, pictures, full-page advertisements. The articles inside were, however, of intellectual value, written by well-known social scientists.
One article caught my eye: ‘Assassins: The Do and Die People’. I had heard of the sect called the Assassins, a militant religious order, which had operated in West and Central Asia during the early medieval times. Described as an Islamic sect on par with the contemporary militant Christian orders such as the Jesuits and the Templars. But I was not aware that the Assassins believed in sacrificing themselves in the course of carrying out their mission. If that were true it would make them very different from other killer organizations of those days. As I mused, my eyes snagged on the writer’s name: Professor Ameer Ali. A fairly ordinary name, no doubt. But the way my mind worked nowadays, it reminded me of the central character in a semi-historical novel about thugs written by a British administrator and archaeologist of the nineteenth century, Colonel Medows Taylor. I had happened to read it recently, in my new obsession with thugs and thuggee. The continuing appearance of new editions of this book in the market showed that its popularity among readers had not waned. When it was first published in 1839, it is said that Queen Victoria had ordered a copy and even read it. During the same century, a serialized novel titled Feringhea was published in a French paper by René de Pont-Jest, in which the leading character was named Hyder Ali, obviously inspired by Ameer Ali, the thug. But the Ameer Ali before me was a twenty-first-century historian, professor, and the author of an article about a terrorist organization that existed in West and Central Asia during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, in a magazine founded in the first years of the twenty-first century and being distributed free among Delhiites by the boys of the Pardi tribe living in the streets of Delhi! How some names float freely, untethered, through the centuries! Yes, through such strange names did this story also begin.
The mystery of names did not stop here. As I turned the pages of the magazine, a few pages written in hand and stapled neatly fell into my lap from between a two-page advertisement for a new sports car draped with a scantily clad model. A pretty long letter it was. Addressed specifically to me. And the name of its author, imagine: Hasan Ibn al Sabbah!
The Hasan who I had innocently thought had been laid to rest under the debris of Welcome Hotel five months ago had thus resurrected. The letter was dated twelfth December, the same day I was reading it. The author of the letter had not just ensured the free distribution of Urban Recidivism at signal crossings in Delhi, but he appeared to have known that on that day I would be travelling by a taxi, that the heat inside the car would force me to roll down the window, that my taxi would stop at that particular signal crossing. He had also picked out that particular copy of the magazine, placed the letter inside it and somehow contrived it so that the Pardi boy would drop it into my taxi. As if God himself had guided the events towards this outcome. Very smoothly done. The magazine dropped on to the seat of my taxi, the signal turned green, the taxi moved away and the boy disappeared. And lo, out of the darkness of death, Hasan Ibn al Sabbah re-emerged!