And there, Hasan bid me goodbye.
Was there a sadness in those parting words? Who knows. Who knows, he could have been carrying a bomb on his person each time I travelled with him on the train. (Now I understand, his train journeys do not need a financial explanation.) Each one of those journeys was potentially a farewell journey for him. But the truth is that his farewell does not ever become a farewell. Just as the death of Hasan Ibn al Sabbah in 1124 was never a death for the Hasans. Just as the fictionality of Ameer Ali is not a fiction.
For a moment I feared I was caught in a psychotic fantasy. I gripped my seat to make contact with reality. Tried to make conversation with the passengers sitting next to me. No one was interested.
The train was racing at a hundred kilometres an hour. According to the attendant we were still two hours behind schedule. It was noon by the time we reached Calcutta. I had six more hours on the road from Calcutta. After letting my hosts know I would be late, I set out in the car they had arranged for me.
If we accept that no answer is the final one, then all answers become right. If we acknowledge that no destination is final, then all destinations are right.
Midway through our drive, we were greeted by an untimely downpour. It gathered strength as we advanced, accompanied by lightning and thunder. The driver eased his foot off the accelerator in the reduced visibility. Finally, the car gave up and broke down.
The darkening Bengal countryside stretched in all directions, no houses or even a light broke the monotony. One side of the dirt road bordered the fields and the other, mango orchards. Sandwiched between the two stood the driver, his assistant, I and the motionless car. The driver declared that there was nothing seriously wrong with the car, except that he needed the services of a workshop to get it back on the road. But where were we to find a workshop in this centre of nothingness!
The driver claimed he was familiar with the area and knew of a zamindar’s kothi nearby. It was occupied by the present heir to the family, a middle-aged gentleman who lived alone. Apparently an educated and cultured man, he was interested in literature and books. ‘He is some sort of a scholar, speaks many languages, even Persian!’ The driver elaborated as we pushed our car and ourselves through the rapidly growing mud-pools. ‘He lives in the company of a hoard of books. Thakur moshai would be only too glad to host an educated person like you, saab,’ the driver assured me.
The rain beat down relentlessly. Wet and shivering, we reached the gatehouse of an old stately house. There was a slender streak of light coming from a first-floor window. Pulling at an old-fashioned bell pull hanging at the gatehouse, we announced our arrival. It took a full three minutes for a light to appear at the door. An old man came to the gate with an umbrella. The driver spoke to him, the gate was opened for us and we stumbled towards the house. The rain thundered on the rooftop.
The driver was right. Thakur moshai received us enthusiastically. An old-style Bengali bhadralok in dhoti and kurta and wrapped in a shawl. He directed the servant to prepare hot water for me and ready a bedroom.
When I returned to the drawing room after a wash, the aroma of fish being fried wafted through the house. Special dishes were being prepared in the kitchen for the guest. Thakur moshai was waiting for me on an old, worn-out sofa, which still retained its ancient grandeur in spite of the wear and tear, at one end of a very large drawing room. He offered me a shawl that too must have been priceless once upon a time. ‘It is not good to get wet in the winter,’ he said. ‘Shall I get you a brandy with some warm water?’ I accepted the offer gladly.
While he was preparing the drink, I took the chance to look around. Portraits of stern-looking zamindars with bristling moustaches and their doe-eyed zamindarinis, with vermilion-dusted hair partings and heads covered with bright-coloured sarees, looked down from the walls. Alongside were the mounted heads of two blackbucks with their branched horns towering over us. On a sidewall hung a large round mirror, no longer reflective, framed by two huge elephant tusks. There was a general aura of dust and cobwebs everywhere. The lightning outside flashed through faded, torn and practically threadbare curtains that hung at the windows. The rain continued unabated.
‘Everything is like a grand design,’ Thakur moshai said, handing me the brandy and settling himself on the other side of the five-seater sofa on which I sat. ‘Your decision to start today, the untimely rain, your car breaking down at my gate … somehow I had a premonition that a guest would be arriving today.’
‘Just a coincidence, that’s all,’ I said warily.
‘Yes, let us say a coincidence,’ he agreed. ‘I was merely joking. History too moves through coincidences and not by design, some people say. What to speak of the lives of us poor minions!’
He moved easily between history, philosophy, mathematics and science, with stories and true-life incidents and anecdotes thrown in. He had the special faculty of making the conversation lively with intellectual interventions. All this, while sitting in that ancient cobwebbed kothi in the middle of the Bengal countryside, to the accompaniment of rain, thunder and lightning.
He said that if history showed a proclivity to avoid the theories of historians, science was not in the habit of obeying dictums of common sense either. ‘Huxley’s famous observation that science is merely trained and organized common sense is no longer accepted by scientists.’
‘It is perhaps when they enter deeper terrains that scientists feel like that.’ I attempted to differ. ‘Aren’t the discoveries of ancient times mainly the contributions of common sense?’
Thakur moshai shook his head. ‘Perhaps … perhaps not. Modern scientists say that we would not have reached anywhere if we had followed our common sense. That the nature of science itself is unnatural! Even of the social sciences. I recently read somewhere that the Nobel prize — winning economist James Meade had composed an epitaph for his tombstone that went: “He tried to understand economics all his life, but common sense kept getting in the way.”’
We laughed.
After abandoning the theory of grand designs in favour of coincidences, he then claimed that there is a rope in mathematics to tie them all together, the rope of the principles of probability. On a sudden impulse I asked, ‘What is, moshai, the mathematical probability of meeting the same person four times in a train?’
He laughed aloud. ‘If you ask the probability of the person sitting opposite you being male or female, I can say fifty per cent. Probability of two persons in a group having the same date of birth can also be calculated without much difficulty: 365 × 2. But in this case, the journeys could be endless. So many trains, crores of passengers … the theory of probability must retire here. We return to coincidence. Have you heard of the list of coincidences surrounding the two American Presidents who were assassinated, Lincoln and Kennedy? Both had vice presidents named Johnson. Kennedy’s secretary was called Lincoln and Lincoln’s was called Kennedy. One may ask here, why pick only the assassinated Presidents, or only American Presidents, out of the crores and crores of people?’
We talked about numbers. About our train of thought that generally follows the order: probability — coincidence — conspiracy. The basis for all these is numbers. But numbers are just one of the many instruments man has devised for dealing with facts. He said that the geometrical proof of Pythagoras’s theorem was one of his favourites. But Pythagoreans made pyramids of numbers, composed music and even created a religion.
The discussion on numbers led me to mention the divinity attributed to certain numbers such as seven and twelve by the Ismailiyahs. He didn’t see anything in it except the extraordinary powers old beliefs attach to certain things. I came to understand that he had considerable knowledge about hashishins. He said that their collection of books had not been completely destroyed during the Mongol raids. Some of them were transported, in great secrecy, by some Mongols themselves from the fort of Alamut to a Buddhist vihara situated somewhere in Central Asia. The Buddhist vihara fell on bad days during the innumerable invasions and persecutions over the centuries and perished. The story goes that some of the books lay for years in a cave and when the Soviets took over, they were retrieved and moved to the archives in Moscow. ‘During my days in the Communist Party, when I got a chance to visit Moscow, I had the opportunity to view some of them,’ Thakur moshai said. ‘They were written in a dead language. As Stalin took a special interest in them, Soviet linguists were attempting to decode them.’