The books that, according to Prof. Ameer Ali, had turned to dust under the stones of Alamut Fort kept appearing before me throughout the night, disturbing my sleep. Reincarnating on leather scrolls or brittle paper or in the perfect binding of Progress Publishers or Raduga Publishers or Nauka Publishing House of Moscow. No, Stalin would not have published them, I told myself, as I seesawed between sleep and wakefulness in the early morning. He would have realized their teachings himself. Or, he could have handed them over to the Nazis in October 1939 while shaking hands with Hitler at the line of control, midway in Poland where they are supposed to have met. Since then, to how many more, for translating them chapter by chapter into action! From the fedayeen to the thugs, and from the thugs back to the fedayeen. While the historian and the anthropologist debated … I woke up with the roar of Zainul Abidin’s earth movers in my ears, removing the debris of his own grand hotel, thus ‘de-writing’ the pages read by him.
The rain had spent itself. The sky was clear. The countryside of Bengal, fields, ponds, bamboo and mango groves, dirt roads and the clusters of huts in the distance shone in the fresh light of dawn. As I walked outside and turned back, I was struck by the shape of the zamindar’s kothi, which I had not noticed in the dark. The left wing of the kothi appeared to have completely collapsed. Crumbled into a heap of bricks, concrete, and broken doors and windows. The right wing where he lived and I had slept during the night was still in a good enough state. Caught in the tug of war between the two wings, the middle portion, which must have been the grand entrance to the original building, seemed to be slowly giving in to the persuasion of the crumbling left wing. The left wall of the room I had slept in was the last big wall standing. The courtyard of the right wing had been tended while the courtyard serving the left wing had been left undisturbed in its decrepit state, perhaps ever since that portion had collapsed. Furniture and appliances also lay trapped in time and space. As I walked around I saw a snake crawling through the debris, over which ivy and grass had grown, towards the wall of the room I had slept in.
‘They are all friends of Thakur moshai’s,’ said the driver who saw me retreating in haste. He had succeeded in repairing the car himself and was ready to go.
Breakfast over, I thanked the Thakur for his hospitality, and turned to leave.
‘There is an item in the morning news,’ Thakur moshai said, arresting my steps. ‘A huge explosion in a Delhi cinema hall at twelve o’clock last night, December the twelfth. Over a hundred dead. Some terrorist organization has claimed responsibility for the blast. Apparently, an operative by the name of Hasan was the suicide bomber.’
‘Hasan?’ I cried.
‘Yes, Hasan Ibn al Sabbah himself.’
‘Hasan Ibn al Sabbah! Thakur, you know him?’ I asked warily.
‘Yes,’ Thakur said with a smile. ‘Just like you, I too travelled with him on the train, four times.’
‘My God!’
‘Yes, my friend. They want to be with us, always. In the trains, in the cinema halls and hotels, in the markets … why, even inside our graves. What can we do?’
Back in the car, my mind returned to Hasan. Two days ago, as he drafted his letter to me, Hasan was planning his death in cold-blooded detail.
‘What did you think of Thakur moshai, sir?’ the driver asked. I just nodded.
The driver continued, ‘He has no near ones alive. The lineage is ending. Sometimes he says that the kothi should be blasted in one shot with a bomb. But he will not do that. It will collapse by itself, like his family, over him, burying him inside one day.’
The Tailor
In spite of the sinister reference to it in Seshadri’s letter and its near manifestation in Hasan’s now-crumbled hotel room, my apprehensions about The Book of Destruction seemed to have taken a back seat for the present. Instead, I began contemplating the clash of philosophies and methodologies of the thugs, the assassins and the modern breed of worshippers of the ideology of destruction. The clash was not Hasan’s invention; Seshadri too had expressed his misgivings on the methods adopted by the modern protagonists of destruction. Seshadri had given me the task of investigating this, and to some extent Hasan had provided an explanation in his critique on Prof. Ali’s paper. Hasan had given me yet another task — to ponder over the history of tailoring! An innocuous-sounding task but a highly cryptic one as I began to appreciate it. Oh Lord, I can already feel my readers beginning to suspect me of having become a collaborator with these people! After what I have gone through and the mental torture they have subjected me to, you will understand, it is not very easy for me to wriggle out of this nightmare. One of them has spoken to me from the other side of death, another, as he faced his end, and the third, Ameer Ali, could be alive or dead; that is, of course, if, contrary to Hasan’s arguments, he was a real person. Their life or death, however, does not matter. The world of destruction these people have unfolded before me is real. And, true to Seshadri’s curse, I am now unable to think of anything else. Going back to what I was saying, I am reasonably sure that there is another messenger coming: coming to resolve the task assigned to me by Hasan. Just as Hasan had put to rest some of the questions raised by Seshadri. Something at the back of my mind insisted that the arguments put before me were far from resolved.
The arguments, contentions and justifications that Seshadri had woven around his killings point towards one thing, that they were all sacrifices made to his godhead. Whatever amount of faith or belief one may pump into it, it remains horrendous. When you consider the even wilder theories of Hasan, where the devotee sacrifices himself or herself along with the victim, it is chilling. Seshadri maintains that thugs still exist, citing his own example. But he himself vouchsafes that the practice is highly secretive and not apparent to the untrained eye. This, however, does not appear to be the case with Hasan. His form of sacrifice is not secretive or obscure. Eight centuries after the disappearance of the Assassins from history (as we are assured by the experts), we are witnessing their resurgence, almost on a daily basis now, all over the world. These people do not go away just like that, Thakur moshai had benignly enlightened me. Going away is one thing, going beyond, yet another. An unresolved, incomplete problem is like a thorn in the flesh; the brain will not leave it alone, however unpleasant it may be. Or perhaps it is the fear that becomes an obsession, something to hold on to. Each of the three who had spoken to me, one from beyond his death and two in absentia — the last of whom may also be dead — had something to say about fear. I hate to keep harping on about this, but their words seem to be following me, propelling me towards the question — What next? What would be the third form of sacrifice? And what would be the role of the victim in that? And, above all, who makes these decisions?