Book of Destruction

by P Sachidanandan

  The hotel owner, Zainul Abidin, was a prominent name among the business magnates of the city. A handsome and charismatic bachelor, he had filled the fashion and gossip columns of the media and was always seen surrounded by beautiful women. On the fateful night, he had apparently entered the disco room around midnight with a guitar of extraordinary size; the party was already in full swing; he mingled with the dancers, traded jokes and became the life of the party as he always did. According to the police, his guitar was packed with high-grade explosives and metal objects. He detonated the bomb when the noise inside the hall reached a peak. This was the story of a girl who had been inside the disco moments before the bomb went off. Abidin had apparently blown himself up with a great cry.

  Quite a number of the hotel staff had survived. But, mysteriously, there were no survivors from the reception staff and not a single guest had survived. This was attributed to the report that Abidin had extended a personal invitation to every one of the guests for the party in the bar and disco. Apart from the guests staying at the hotel, there were also some friends of Abidin’s at the party, according to the surviving staff. And yet, the unidentified seven bodies and the missing seven remained unmatched.

  There was no dearth of anecdotes, of course, and the press paid great attention to them. The girl who had witnessed Zainul blowing himself up but had herself escaped by a freak chance claimed that her sister who lived in another city had died by lightning on the same evening. Similar accounts by survivors about loved ones losing their lives on the same day peppered the newspaper pages. The media and individuals joined together in giving a mystical aura to the whole tragedy.

  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!

  What did this man look like, I asked myself. We are particular that all those who find a place in our minds, even those whom we have never met, should have a face. We are forever giving faces to God even as we declare that he cannot have one. Even the blind, it is believed, conjure some shapes in their dark world to identify people around them. Hasan had sat before me for a total of about eight days in four separate segments of time. And he had left no trace in my mind. However, my obstinate brain had assigned to him a form, most likely bearing no relationship to memory or reality, since that seventh of July, and it was like this: a tall, hefty, fair figure of Persian-Afghan descent, slightly reddish hair and moustache, eyes wide enough but not sharp, a pleasant grin revealing yellowish teeth … Something at the back of my mind told me I would not be meeting him again, even though he now appeared to be alive. He has somehow entered an area outside my field of vision and could communicate only by way of letters and phone calls. An invisible but omnipresent place, somewhat like history, from where he cannot return. He might still have methods of revealing himself, but perhaps they will not be visual. So I accepted the picture of him I had constructed in my mind. It was with that form that he spoke to me from the letter.

  I was in a dilemma about what to read first, Prof. Ameer Ali’s article or Hasan’s letter. I adopted my usual practice in such situations: delayed gratification. The one that raised more curiosity, I saved for later. I opted for the professor’s article and climbed up to my upper berth and switched on the reading light. The outside world faded away.

  Below the title the author had added a short quotation from one of Tennyson’s poems as an epigraph: Theirs not to make reply, / Theirs not to reason why, / Theirs but to do and die. After that, he plunged straight into the matter without even a synopsis.

  Prof. Ameer Ali adopted a documentary style of presenting historical facts in a linear and objective manner. He did not attempt to provide new insights or to project his own arguments. One could call the article eclectic. And yet, reminding me of the electric current that had passed through me upon reading his name, he began with a reference to thugs. Colonialists have popularized their preconceived notions that thugs were the cruellest killers history had ever seen, he wrote. On the other hand, postcolonial historians and critics of orientalism like to think of thugs as a creation of the colonial rulers’ imagination. While Aijaz Ahmad consigns thuggee to the ‘realm of pure untruth’ and Radhika Singha to ‘constructed history’, Kathleen Gough characterizes thugs as ‘social bandits’ or remnants of peasant insurrections. All of them are wrong, declared the author. Thugs existed. Just as the several other groups or cults that made killing a matter of faith. Templars, Jesuits, Buccaneers and many others. But none equalled the Assassins.

  At this point Prof. Ameer Ali turned his attention to Islamic history, going back to the death of the Prophet, to illustrate the context of the emergence of the Assassins. The story goes that Mohammed had nominated Ali, his daughter Fatima’s husband, as his successor or caliph and Abu Bakr, his wife Ayesha’s father, as amir. But in the disputes that followed Mohammed’s death, Ali was superseded and became the fourth caliph only after the reigns of Abu Bakr, Umar and Usman. Even after his succession to the Caliphate the strife continued and eventually Ali was killed. Al Hasan who succeeded Ali also met the same fate and Muawiya of the other camp enthroned himself as caliph. The Umayyad dynasty established by Muawiya then moved its capital from Mecca to Damascus. The Abbasid dynasty, which unseated the Umayyads, established its Caliphate and made Baghdad its seat. It was followed by the Ottoman dynasty and Usman, their caliph, who ruled from Constantinople. The Sunnis recognize all these rulers as caliphs.

  The Shias, however, regard only those who are descendants of Ali as the rightful Imams (they do not accept the word caliph). In their order there were only twelve rightful Imams starting with Ali, Al Hasan, Al Husain, Zainul Abidin, and so on, until Muhammad, the twelfth Imam. The Shias are further divided into two different sects. While Imamiyahs acknowledge all the twelve Imams, Ismailiyahs consider Ismail, son of the sixth Imam, Jafar, the last true Imam. They believe in an abstract concept of a God who is neither existent nor non-existent, neither intelligent nor unintelligent and neither powerful nor powerless.

  The Sunnis flourished in the Middle East with their capitals moving from Mecca to Damascus to Baghdad and Constantinople, right from the time of the Prophet’s death to nearly the end of the nineteenth century. Other Sunni rulers such as Abdur Rahman of the Umayyad dynasty moved to Spain in the eighth century to establish a Caliphate from Cordova. When Cordova fell to the Christians, a new Caliphate was established in Granada by the Moors, which carried on till it fell to the Christians in the fifteenth century.

  In the meanwhile, Ubaidullah, a scion of the Sunni Abbasid Caliphate Muqtadir, claimed to be a direct descendant of Fatima, Ali’s wife, and moved to Egypt to establish a Fatimid Caliphate at Cairo that flourished from the tenth to the twelfth centuries. For the Twelvean Imamiyahs as well as the Sevener Ismailiyahs, this resurrection of Shia faith generated a lot of confidence and fervour.

  Contrary to Sunni practice, Shias built myths and wove their imagination around their Imams, raising them to the level of divinity. Ali reigns on a throne in the midst of clouds, they believe. Lightning is his anger and thunder his roar. The fifth Imam, Muhammad al Baqir, did not die and still inhabits our world, according to some.

  Shias believed that through the Fatimid Caliphate they would recapture lost power. Among the political sects borne out of this belief, the one that came to be known as Assassins was the most organized, extremist and violent. Their modus operandi consisted of preparations in utmost secrecy and executions with maximum publicity, in front of the largest possible crowd. They wanted the public to recognize the name Assassins and recognize their mission as murder. They made it a point to claim responsibility once the ‘assassination’ was carried out.

  The Assassins were highly organized and specialized in imparting prolonged, rigorous and secretive training to the recruits. Their goal was to capture power; they believed that the end justified the means and were not too particular about the Islamic ideals taught by the Prophet or the common principles of human morality. They, in fact, believed that their emotional and religious detachment made them better fighters. They encouraged it.

  The first stage of the training involved an education in the material sciences. Religion came in the second stage. Here, the recruits were indoctrinated into an unquestioning submission to the teacher. However, they were encouraged to approach the Qur’an critically and even go beyond it. Myths, symbols, signs and imageries, completely alien to the holy book, were introduced to them. This included a belief in the divinity of the figure seven. Seven Imams: Ali, al Hasan, al Husain, Zainul Abidin, Muhammad al Baqir, Jafar a Sadiq and, finally, Ismail, the son of God. Seven heavens, seven worlds, seven oceans, planets, colours, musical note
s, metals, and so on. The lesson being that the Almighty has constructed the universe on the principle of seven. Like seven Imams, there were also seven holy men sent by God: Adam, Noah, Abraham, Moses, Jesus, Mohammed and Ismail, and they graced the seven thrones in heaven. But the final messenger of God remained Ismail and he alone.

  Here my thoughts strayed to the inset titled ‘The Game of Seven’ that had appeared in the Welcome Hotel blast reports. The blast had occurred on the seventh day of the seventh month. Seventy-seven people had been killed, seven bodies had remained unidentified, and seven people were still missing. It was not just a gallery of coincidences that existed, but a coincidence of galleries too!

  The train attendant brought the dinner tray. How many dishes were there in it, I wondered. Seven? I smiled to myself as I climbed down from my berth. My co-passengers must’ve thought it was out embarrassment at my awkward climb down.

  I didn’t count the items on the plate. I wanted to finish the meal quickly and get back to my reading. And when I picked up the magazine again, I faced another holy number—twelve.

  After seven, the next holy figure is twelve, said Prof. Ameer Ali. The twelve zodiac signs, twelve constellations, months, bones, thus goes on the list of the Twelveans. The author described the journey of the trainee-assassins wherein the symbols and signs made them slaves to mechanical thinking on the one hand and deniers of principles on the other. They learnt not to be anxious or attached to anything, including their own lives.

  When I reached this section, my mind again pulled me back. Can there actually exist such a state of mind? There could be several obvious arguments in support of evil, but how do you build a movement for only death and destruction, without a cause? I could feel Seshadri’s breath on the back of my neck. I had tried so hard to forget him. Then that mysterious book, which I figured was his Book of Destruction, surfaced, only to get smothered under the debris of Welcome Hotel. And now, this article …