The Assassin's Song (48 page)

The character of Nur Fazal in this novel is entirely fictitious, though undoubtedly inspired by the arrival in medieval India of Muslim mystics who gathered a following and came to be called pirs. I have quoted or adapted for my purposes several ginans, as the compositions of the Khoja Ismaili pirs, in old Gujarati and archaic mixtures of Indian languages, are called, and adopted the term
ginan;
however, the verses purporting to tell the story of Nur Fazal and appearing as epigraphs to certain of the chapters in this novel are pure inventions. Elements of the story of the arrival of Nur Fazal in Anularra (Anhilvad, Patan) were inspired by the story of Nur Satgur, who according to tradition arrived at the court of the great Jaisingh Siddhraj in the twelfth century, a hundred years before the arrival of the fictitious Nur Fazal to the court of Vishal Dev. I have used (and abused freely) the story from a translation from the Gujarati by Abualy A. Aziz. Nur Satgur is believed to be buried in Nawsari, and several of his descendants in Pirana and Champaner, all in Gujarat. I have had occasion to visit all of these shrines. It turned out that people of various beliefs and many of no single affiliation attended them, and some of the ginans I was familiar with were in fact common to several communities. The history of these traditions is complex and in a state of flux, with fundamentalisms of either stripe trying to claim them. But this is a work of fiction. The shrine of Pirbaag and the town of Haripir are inventions, as are all of the characters here. Unfortunately the mayhem unleashed in Gujarat was only too real.

There used to be a time when non-English terms appearing in fiction were necessarily italicized to denote their foreignness, or adorned with a superscript to provide their meanings. Happily this is not the case any more, for the meaning of a term should be apparent in a novel or story wherever it occurs. However, to shun a glossary or even a hint of a meaning merely on principle risks becoming another orthodoxy, a posture which I would like to avoid. An explanation does not hurt if only to provide further context for a term. The reader is not obliged to consider it. I have resorted to italics where the narrator, Karsan Dargawalla, who writes in English, deems them necessary.

Atman
             the true inner self or soul of a person or being

bhajan
            a devotional song

bol
                 a secret mantra

Brahman
        the Universal Soul that encompasses everything

brahmin
         a member of the traditional priestly caste

chaddar
         a coloured, decorated cloth, given as an offering at a shrine where it is used to drape a grave

dargah
           a shrine where a Muslim holy man is buried

ginan
             from the Sanskrit
gnan
, meaning “knowledge,” here refer ring to a devotional song or hymn

Jain
               a member of an Indian religious faith known especially for extreme aversion to killing all living forms

Mahabharat
   the great war of the Indian epic
Mahabharata

namaz
           the traditional Muslim prayer

pir
                a Muslim holy man of saintly status

prasad
          an offering received from a temple

puja
              the act of devotion to a god

sufi
               a Muslim mystic

Pankaj Singh, Arun Mukherjee, Alok Mukherjee, Marc Lizoain, for answering questions. Stella Sandahl, for reading the manuscript and catching a very Vedic error, besides providing the translation used. The New York Public Library and the Jawaharlal Nehru Library in Delhi, for their facilities. Rajkumar Hans, Muhammad Salat, Sudha Pandya, for their hospitality in Gujarat. Rikhav Desai and Sanjay Talreja, for their company on the roads of Gujarat. Professor Mrinal Miri and the staff of the Indian Institute of Advanced Studies, Shimla, for their generous hospitality; all my other hosts and friends in India: Charu Verma, Chandra Mohan, Om Juneja, Neerja Chand, Alka Kumar, Harish Narang. Abualy A. Aziz for generously making available manuscripts of his translations from Gujarati.

My family, as always, for their constant indulgence. And Nurjehan for her careful proofreading.

Maya Mavjee for her sensitivity and enthusiasm; Sonny Mehta, Bruce Westwood, Diya Kar Hazra, for their encouragement.

Charles Stuart for gently handling the text; Martha Leonard, Diana Coglianese, and Avanija Sundaramuti for constantly caring about the details.

Quotes were used from the following sources:

The following publications, among many others, have been especially useful:

Grateful acknowledgement is made to the following for permission to reprint previously published material:

Faber and Faber Ltd.: Excerpt from
Orpheus: A Version of Rilke's
Die Sonnette an Orpheus, translated by Don Paterson (London: Faber and Faber Ltd., 2006). Reprinted by permission of Faber and Faber Ltd.

Manchester University Press: Excerpt from
Genghis Khan: The History of the World Conqueror
by Ata-Malik Juvaini, translated from the text of Mirza Muhammad Qazvini by J. A. Boyle, translation copyright © 1958 by UNESCO (Manchester University Press, 1958). Reprinted by permission of Manchester University Press.

Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center Publications: Excerpt from
The Bhagavad Gita
, translated by Swami Nikhilananda, copyright © 1944 by Swami Nikhilananda. Reprinted by permission of Ramakrishna-Vivekananda Center Publications.

M. G. Vassanji was born in Kenya and raised in Tanzania. Before moving to Canada in 1978, he attended MIT. and later was writer in residence at the University of Iowa. Vassanji is the author of five acclaimed novels:
The Gunny Sack
(1989), which won a regional Commonwealth Prize;
No New Land
(1991);
The Book of Secrets
(1994), which won the very first Giller Prize and the Bressani Prize;
Amriika
(1999); and
The In-Between World of Vikram Lall
(2003), which also won the Giller Prize. In addition, he is the author of two collections of short stories,
Uhuru Street
(1992) and
When She Was Queen
(2005). He was awarded the Harbourfront Festival Prize in 1994 in recognition of his achievement in and contribution to the world of letters, and was in the same year chosen as one of twelve Canadians on Maclean's Honour Roll. Vassanji lives in Toronto with his wife and two sons.

Pierre Simon Fournier le jeune, who designed the type used in this book, was both an originator and a collector of types. His services to the art of printing were his design of letters, his creation of ornaments and initials, and his standardization of type sizes. His types are old style in character and sharply cut. In 1764and 1766he published his
Manuel typographique
, a treatise on the history of French types and printing, on typefounding in all its details, and on what many consider his most important contribution to typography—the measurement of type by the point system.

Composed by Creative Graphics, Allentown,
Pennsylvania Printed and bound by Berryville Graphics, Berryville, Virginia
Designed by Virginia Tan

THIS IS A BORZOI BOOK
PUBLISHED BY ALFRED A. KNOPF

Copyright © 2007 by M. G. Vassanji

All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, a
division of Random House, Inc., New York.
www.aaknopf.com

Knopf, Borzoi Books, and the colophon are registered trademarks of
Random House, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Vassanji, M. G.

The assassin's song / by M. G. Vassanji.—1st ed.
p. cm.

eISBN: 978-0-307-51355-7

1. Sufis—Fiction. 2. India—Fiction. I. Title.
PR9199.3.v388A9 2007

813'.54—dc22 2007008562

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either
are the product of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any
resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is
entirely coincidental.

v3.0