The Twice-Born

by Aatish Taseer

  I was in New York, in a borrowed flat in Alphabet City. The sky in the two westward facing windows was dark.

  My father was the governor of Punjab in Pakistan. He and my mother had met in Delhi in 1980. He was there promoting his biography of Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, the Pakistani prime minister, who had recently been deposed in a military coup and executed; my mother, a cub reporter on a national daily, had been sent to interview him. They had a brief, passionate affair, conducted between London and Dubai, which eventually fell apart. My mother returned to Delhi with me. My father went on to a career in politics in Pakistan. We had a relationship for some years, starting when I was twenty-one. Difficulties arose between us after the publication of my first book, Stranger to History. I had not seen or spoken to my father in three years, since the night Benazir Bhutto, the former prime minister of Pakistan, was killed. He had in the meantime become the governor of Punjab. And now he was dead too.

  An architecture student whom I had been dating for the past six months lay asleep next to me. I woke him. “My father’s been killed.”

  We made coffee and checked our phones. A friend of my mother’s in Lahore had emailed, “Your father has been shot. He was killed by his gunman. We are here.”

  A few minutes later she called. My father, she told me, had been killed by a member of his elite guard in Islamabad. He had finished lunch with a friend and was about to get into his car when Malik Mumtaz Qadri shot him twenty-seven times. He died before he reached the hospital. Qadri said he killed him because of his position on Pakistan’s blasphemy laws.

  In the weeks leading up to his death, my father had taken up the cause of a poor Christian woman accused of blasphemy. The blasphemy laws, which had been given sharper teeth in the 1980s by a military dictator, were draconian; they had become an instrument in the hands of the Muslim majority to persecute the country’s few religious minorities. My father spoke out against the severity of the laws; he called them “man-made,” “black laws.” He thought he was protected by his class and stature—he joked in drawing rooms about how the clerics had declared him wajib-ul-qatl, an Islamic designation given to a man “fit to be killed.” The judgment of clerics and television hosts fell hard on my father. He came to be a blasphemer himself in the eyes of many. They burned him in effigy; they issued fatwas against him and made threats on his life. He responded with a bravery that was in part real, in part a feeling of class security tantamount to blindness. He quoted poetry; he tweeted prophetically, “I was under huge pressure sure 2 cow down b4 rightest pressure on blasphemy. Refused. Even if I’m the last man standing.”

  One by one the calls began to come in from Pakistan.

  A family friend rang in tears. “Just the other day, I was telling him to be careful. I can’t believe it, I just can’t believe he’s dead.”

  She had used exactly the same words for Benazir Bhutto three years before. But it was not so unbelievable that my father had been killed. The story was nothing if not a lesson in the fragility of the power of the colonial classes. In the hours, days, weeks, and months to come, my father’s killer would become a hero in Pakistan. Lawyers showered him with rose petals on the night he killed my father; ordinary people sent him food and money in jail, named a mosque after him, and had their children blessed by him. It was practically impossible to bring him to justice. During the trial, the killer’s lawyers gestured to my father’s “lifestyle,” “his character and associated matters.” My father was also a kind of foreigner in Pakistan. His mother was English; he was liberal, westernized; he had no religious faith in a country where the decade after 9/11 had given Islam a new vitality. My father’s foreignness, not unlike my own in India, had made his position in Pakistan far more precarious than he had realized.

  The day he was killed wore on. More calls, more emails. I looked at the news on my phone. When at last I got my sister on the line, she said again and again, fighting tears, “Such a bad day to die.” The news showed scenes similar to those I had seen in Pakistan when Benazir was killed three years before. The same flags, the same slogans, the same billboards—“How many Bhuttos will you kill? From every house a Bhutto will emerge!”—but now, in place of Benazir’s face, there was my father’s. The more I watched, the more the story of my father’s killing slipped away from me, becoming something remote in the world beyond. The only image that remained in my mind was of a pool of blood on a dusty stretch of road. Security men in dark blue uniforms stood around. It was hard to believe it was blood, his blood.

  There was press interest, and I thought I should say something:

  We had our differences, but he was the bravest man I knew, a man without the capacity for fear. And if there was one thing I never doubted about him, it was his love of Pakistan. It never allowed him to believe what had become of the country his forefathers had fought for. Today he joins that sad procession of martyrs—every day a thinner line—standing between Pakistan and its inexorable descent into fear and nihilism.

  My agent suggested I remove “inexorable.”

  The next morning, I trudged past the small hillocks of begrimed ice that had formed on the curbs and bought The New York Times at a deli. My father’s killer’s picture was on the front page. It would be five years before it was possible to carry out the death sentence he had been given—such was his popularity—and then a crowd the size of a small city would pour out into the streets to bid him farewell. It would be one of the largest funerals in the country’s history. My father’s, in comparison, was a small affair, from which many senior leaders, including the president, stayed away for fear of reprisals. My father’s death was part of my reason for wanting to go back to Benares. It showed me that the isolation of people such as myself on the Indian subcontinent was not merely undesirable; it was dangerous.

  I WAS IN BENARES A week after Mapu and I had lunch.

  The riverfront curled around the Ganges in a four-mile crescent, less than a mile wide. This was the labyrinth of sunless streets, the city of palaces and temples, the warren of infinite variety. Beyond was a drab and nondescript Indian town that graded into open fields. With half of India at its back, and the Ganges before it, the city felt like an island. The name Varanasi came from the two smaller rivers—the Varuna to the north, and the now-extinct Assi to the south—that enclosed between them all that was considered sacred: a slim sickle of consecrated land watched over by Shiva.

  “Benares is older than history, older than tradition, older even than legend,” wrote Mark Twain, “and looks twice as old as all of them put together.” In fact, little of brick and mortar was older than five hundred years. But the city was older as an idea than a reality. What the Belgian Sinologist Simon Leys says of China—“the Chinese everlastingness does not inhabit monuments, but people”—was true of India too: it was “a past of the mind,” and the material reality was almost actively disdained. “All of us alike can see her obvious form,” said the renowned monk Swami Karpatri, but Kashi has a “subtle form” too. It is this, added Anant Maharaj, another of the city’s great teachers, that “is like the sun behind the clouds. I know it is still there although I cannot see it.”

  The ghats of Benares are encrusted with history and legend. From these four miles of riverside it was possible to know every major historical event, every religion, every region, caste, and community that had for three thousand years seeped into the memory of India.

  The Tulsi Ghat, in the far south, was where, in the sixteenth century, a rebellious Brahmin named Tulsidas composed his retelling of the story of Ram in simple vernacular, thereby freeing it from the hold of the Brahmins, and releasing it among ordinary people. Farther along was the first of the cremation ghats, where funeral pyres burned all day and night. It was named after Harishchandra, a king who gave away his kingdom, sold his family into slavery, and worked as a dom, one of the low castes designated to handle the remains of the dead. He was about to cremate the body of his own son when the gods appeared, to release him from his suffering. Ahead
was the Piazza San Marco of ghats—the Dashashwamedh—where every evening a great spectacle of river worship was performed before an armada of pilgrims and tourists in long wooden boats. Just beyond that was the second of the burning ghats, the Manikarnika, where the earth was black and exposed, the logs piled high, and mourners in white peaked caps were visible through a screen of smoky orange fire. This was the great cremation ground where Arthur Koestler, watching corpses wrapped in cotton sheets that appeared bloodstained because they were printed in pink and white patches, had been reminded of the crematoriums at Auschwitz. Then there was the Ahilyabai Ghat, in front of which that picture of me as an eighteen-year-old in Benares was taken. It was named for Ahilyabai Holkar, a warrior queen from central India who had rebuilt the Kashi Vishwanath Temple in 1669 after Aurangzeb, the last of the great Mughals, razed it during the final Islamic assault on the city. The riverscape was threaded through with such stories, and at the far end, in the very north, the arc of history stopped abruptly at the Raj Ghat, the verdant setting for the Krishnamurti Foundation. Running parallel to the life on the river was the life of the streets, with their uneven patchwork of paving stones, their blue-washed buildings, their wrought-iron balconies and projecting oriel windows, their deep overhanging eaves and carved brackets, the saw-toothed dentil ornaments creeping in fits and starts along the walls, all winding their way, slowly but surely, in the direction of the Kashi Vishwanath Temple.

  The temple sat in the shadow of a great white mosque. I was met by one of the sons of Mapu’s guru, the old priest, and was led swiftly through the network of tight surrounding streets. Bright shops sold everything from cosmetics and copper vessels to religious offerings. We went deeper into the market, nearer the temple, and the police presence grew heavy. They were guarding the mosque, which was occasionally visible through the bars of a towering metal fence. I stopped to look, and a policeman in olive green ushered me on. I could tell from the name on his badge that he was Hindu; they all were; and there was something strange about this Islamic building, which must still have caused offense, guarded by Hindus from, I suppose, themselves. From what they might do if their passions got the better of them.

  Tonight, especially, was a night when passions would run high, and the ecstasies of faith would merge with the very real intoxication of bhang. Tonight was one of four nights in the year when the temple was open all night, and we were about to witness a raj puja.

  Mapu’s guru’s house was on a downward-sloping street covered in crude strips of bright green artificial grass. A narrow strip of sky, suffused pink, was visible past the crowded houses and the vines of snaking thick black wire creeping overhead, naked bulbs hanging off them like fruit. We were led through a small shop, with powdery-pink walls and glass cabinets filled with silk saris, and upstairs to where the old Brahmin sat, chewing his lips.

  He was wizened and sparrow-chested, with gray leggings covering his thin, exquisitely wrinkled legs. He sat in a tiny room, no bigger than an attic, which was cluttered with offerings for the ceremony that was soon to begin in the temple downstairs. The temple had been confiscated from the old priest decades ago and put in a trust managed by the state; he had spent his life in courts, and was old and embittered. He was practically deaf, but the odd phrase did make its way through. He looked hard at me with his small intent eyes, and then, chewing his lips and flaring his eyes, he said, “I see that these swines in Congress have put up that young whippersnapper Rahul!”

  Rahul was Rahul Gandhi, and his grandmother, Indira Gandhi, had been the old priest’s great enemy. It was her government that had taken his temple away.

  Mapu’s guru now became philosophical. “Sarvam khalv idam brahma,” he muttered: all is indeed Brahma. “Time beats on, forward, forward. Man must find himself within the confines of time.”

  The thought comforted him for a moment, then rancor returned. “Everything has been destroyed.”

  The walls of the room were hung with paintings of the old priest’s father, grandfather, and great-grandfather, and pictures of the guru with various members of the Nepalese royal family. Princes had once patronized the priests; now it was all businessmen. A picture of the sanctum sanctorum of the temple showed the linga, an aniconic representation of Shiva, in a silver basin embedded in the floor.

  A monkey appeared at the window and looked longingly at the offerings. An expression of pure delight crossed the old priest’s face.

  “Look!” he said, his eyes brimming with light. “He’s picked up the fragrance of the food.”

  It was time to go in. The ceremony was about to begin. I asked Mapu’s guru if he would join us, but he looked away in sadness. “You go on,” he said, “I am too old now.”

  Downstairs we met his grandson Golu. He was the last member of this Brahmin family who was directly connected to the temple. He was in his early thirties and wore a black Nehru-collared coat and pink-stemmed rimless glasses. There was little to suggest he was a priest at all, save for the top-lock of caste on the crown of his head: the shikha, which means “crest” or “summit,” is the mark of the twice-born. Many older societies, from the Native American to the Persian and Jewish to Edo Japan, have a version of this uncut measure of hair. Golu’s was a particularly impressive example, thick, oiled, and plaited. He disappeared behind a curtain to change and reappeared a moment later in full ceremonial gear: two measures of unstitched white cloth, with necklaces of coral and rudraksh hanging from his neck. Golu enjoyed the effect his transformation had on me. He flashed me a roguish smile, and I saw that his gums were encrusted with the reddish grit from paan.

  Golu led me deep into the walled precincts of the temple, which was a small building with a red base and spires of dull beaten gold. The energy inside was electric. A breathless swarm of devotees rushed from shrine to smaller shrine. Corpulent priests snatched money from the devotees’ hands and pressed offerings into them in exchange. Young Brahmins, their thin bodies smeared with sandalwood paste, carried sloshing brass pails of milk to and from the sanctum. Golu was in constant demand. Everybody needed him to do something—now a group of women who wanted access to the inner sanctum, now the agent of a rich businessman who wanted offerings to be made on his behalf. Important people had paid serious money to witness the ceremony up close. Golu tended to them all, gentle and coaxing to the rich and powerful, abrasive and rough with the poor.

  In the sanctum, devotees clawed and groped their way to the linga, which was never more beautiful than when it was unadorned, smooth and black. The sanctum, a small tube-lit room, was heavily ornamented with marble carvings. It contained almost nothing save for the silver basin with the linga, and the simple austerity of the black oblong stone that represented Shiva was especially striking amid all this marble and silver.

  The devotees were greedy for darshana. The word derives from the Sanskrit verb for “to see” and suggests an audience, or a beholding. The idea is of a spiritual enrichment that comes entirely from setting eyes on, or even being in the presence of, a revered object or person, and having the deity set eyes on the devotee. Nothing need be said or done. Seeing is all, and the benediction passes soundlessly from the eyes to the soul.

  Shiva and Parvati, the bridal couple, were waiting in a temple across the street. Their arrival here was to be the focal point of the ceremony. The linga, in the meantime, was washed and honored.

  Golu smuggled me right to the door of the sanctum, past the policemen, who seemed rattled. Charged with protecting the mosque next door from the zeal that was about to be unleashed in the temple, they had to balance their duty to the modern state with the primal demands of religion. It didn’t seem like much of a contest, and as I watched these representatives of the “secular” state, in their uniforms already red from the colored powder with which the worshippers were smearing each other, I felt that the ceremony would reclaim them.

  I had been seated at the door of the sanctum while a moving mass of bodies swayed over me, occupying every inch of available spac
e. A steady flow of consecrated items was passed by the priests inside the sanctum to the faithful outside: rose water, attar, sandalwood, flowers. The crush around me was unbearable. The air was warm and over-breathed. My right leg fell asleep. Inside the sanctum, Golu was swinging languidly from a red cloth tied to the doorway. He was completely at ease, laughing and joking with the officiating priests, who sat on the floor, even as the hypnotic cry of the Samaveda—the Veda of song, a wild and choral hymn beloved of Shiva—reverberated through the sanctum. The priests, like a troupe of performers, were engaged in an activity that was commonplace to them but of great importance to their audience. The faithful were treated roughly by the younger priests. Old and young alike were pulled and pushed out of the way, some wrenched by their limbs, their faces intent and desperate for more darshana.

  Other blessed items began to pour out of the sanctum. The crush intensified. Arms reached out from the wall of humanity for a little turmeric, sandalwood paste, or scented oil. All these things had touched the linga and were sacred by association. I could not bear the fervor any longer. I broke out of the crowd into the clearing of the open courtyard. I was able to breathe again. The throng closed behind me. The sky was dark. I got a glimpse of the night sky overhead and the silhouettes of armed men standing on rooftops. The song of the priests was reaching its crescendo within the sanctum. Bells were crashing inside; I glimpsed an eruption of white light—and fire! Smoke wafted out of the narrow doorway and I had an odd feeling of synesthesia: I could taste and smell the colors. The mouth of the inner sanctum was blocked with human bodies. But a rumor had begun to spread through the walled confines of the temple, whose doors were now locked: Shiva and Parvati were in the building. Drummers appeared in the passages of the temple, beating the two-headed drum of Shiva. The idols, glimpsed for a second, vanished into the crowd.