Book of Destruction

by P Sachidanandan

  ‘Sublimation, the change from solid to gas is real, though uncommon. So is the change from gas to solid state, deposition. Hashishins made destruction profound and poetic. Its journey towards still higher levels of aesthetic ecstasy continues. A journey that will continue for a while, I promise you.’

  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 h
ashishins. 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.’

  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?

  Everyone is a link, Hasan had said. Destruction is an act that brings gods, devotees and victims together, according to him. All three move freely into each other’s roles and clothes while engaged in the act of destruction. To my mind, the drama has been taken a step ahead; the audience too is expected to join the actors on stage, in the tragedies we witness today. We all know we will die. In the present situation we also realize that the chances of it being a violent death, at the hands of another person, are not that remote. As the atmosphere gets more and more charged, we cann
ot exclude the possibility of even killing another person with our own hands. Suspense is no longer an essential ingredient in the new ‘theatre-absurd’ around us.

  Who then assigns us our role, and at what point of time? What is the apparel, the costume that awaits us? So, this is where the clothes come in, the tailoring and, of course, the tailor that my friends (friends? Good Lord!) have been surreptitiously introducing me to. Hasan had even challenged me to write a history of the art of tailoring, calling it an exceptionally important job. Come to think of it, it certainly is an exceptional job and must have an interesting history too. Someone is bound to have written it already. I have come across historical treatises on all manner of subjects in these days of deconstruction: science, technology, God, psychology, library, war, madness, torture, etc. Toynbee even tried a history of history itself. Recently I picked up a moth-eaten book from a wayside stall of second-hand books claiming to be a history of the professional salon.

  These days we are identified and assessed by the clothes we wear. We claim to be able to judge merely by looking at their apparel whether a person is a man or a woman, which country they belong to, which religion they practise, and what their social or economic status may be. From their clothes we can also judge the ‘taste’ of a person and how egoistic or snobbish they might be. The previous century was dominated by ideologies, many defined by the colour of the shirt worn by their storm troopers. I don’t know if ideologies would regain the importance and awe they had generated during the last century, but other professions appear to have taken the symbolism of shirts and colours to their heart. While companies insist on their sales employees wearing shirts of a particular brand, others entice their customers into wearing their brand names.

  I found that recently I had started paying more attention to my tailor friend in the market. He certainly was not the grand, hypothetical tailor Hasan had spoken of. Just an ordinary tailor in our neighbourhood market, quiet and unassuming. He would talk to me about the art of tailoring, in his own way. He felt that his art came very close to a spiritual activity, changing not just the body, but the very soul of a person who wore his garments. I had not given it much thought. I had assumed he was being poetical, and he did exhibit a flair for poetry in his speech. Come to think about it, Seshadri too had waxed poetic when he, as a mali, had befriended me. Hasan had not been far behind.