The Association of Small Bombs (12 page)

Y
ears passed. In 2001, at the age of seventeen, Mansoor left Delhi for the US, excited to pursue a degree in computer science, which had become his main passion after years of confinement in his home. He was more intimate with his 486—and then his Pentium with Intel Inside—than with any person in Delhi. After all, to see other people meant you had to leave your house, and this made them accessories to danger.

He had also become a decent programmer and web designer, building a tennis website, Sampras Mania, with a friend, which, though it plagiarized its stats and player summaries from ATP and ESPN, presented them in a (he thought) more orderly fashion.

He won second-place trophies in class eleven in the computer quizzes at ACCESS and MODEM, where he was, he noted, the only Muslim in attendance, the Azim Premji of the gathering, if you will.

The fact of the bombing, the exceptionalism of his last name in Hindu Punjabi society—these things filled him with an odd pride.

He became aware of the oppression of Muslims as the BJP tenaciously clung to power all through the late nineties. His mother never stopped being alarmed. “They're still angry about something that happened fifty years ago,” she'd say, thinking of partition, and returning again and again to the images of party workers swarming the domes of the Babri Masjid, gashing the onionskin of cement with hammers. Mansoor concurred. He believed, like his father, that the imprisoned men might be innocent. “Is
there anything we can do as informed citizens?” he asked, parroting the vocabulary of his earnest civics textbooks.

“In this country they prefer deformed citizens to informed citizens,” his father said drily. “And how will the Khuranas feel?”

“They also want justice.”

“Who knows what they want?”

The families, in the years since Anusha's birth, had grown apart. The Khuranas had stopped calling the Ahmeds for social gatherings—which they still organized—and often didn't return Afsheen's monthly, inquiring, concerned calls.

“Ulta chor kotwal ko daante,” Sharif said, bungling the context of the homily.
This is case of the thief scolding the watchman
. “They should be thankful to us and to Mansoor. If he hadn't been there, they wouldn't have known what happened.”

Since the first few visits to the market, the Khuranas had recovered scraps of cloth they were sure came from the boys' shirts. They'd found the exact spot where the boys had died from Mansoor's memories.

“You can't get inside people's minds,” Afsheen said. “But their situation also isn't good.”

She had her own theory: their marriage was in trouble. She had heard it from a common friend. But she did not think it right to gossip about this with her husband.

________

When Mansoor was set to leave for the U.S., though, the Khuranas came over with Anusha and everyone was together again. An anxious serenity pervaded the air.

“Have a wonderful time abroad,” Deepa Auntie said, rubbing her nose, as she did when she wanted to convey emotion, and presenting Mansoor with a fragrant envelope of rupees, rupees, which, of course, would be useless the minute he stepped on the plane.

“Thank you, auntie.”

“You must visit the museum where they keep Eadweard Muybridge's
first film.” Vikas Uncle was full of advice about the U.S., though it wasn't clear he'd ever been there.

Anusha ran over and gave Mansoor a hug at the waist and then went back to deftly polluting a notebook on the ground with the unnatural jumping colors of sketch pens.

She was four now, the daughter of the bomb.

________

Mansoor arrived in August on a farmlike campus in Santa Clara that was wide open and safe and he settled into his dorm, getting to know Eddy and Chris, his roommates, one a Hispanic football player from San Antonio, the other an Armenian-American tennis player from Los Angeles, each creature alien to the other in build and form (Eddy massive, Chris tall, Mansoor slight but hairy), the alienness canceling into a common brotherly bonding.

“Dude!” “Dude!” “Dude!” they said, addressing each other, and Mansoor had never been happier. He developed a routine of working hard on his C++ assignments by day and then loitering in the cool California air by night as freshmen stormed the campus, singing their dorm chants.

He was like a person who, thinking his vision perfect, puts on glasses for the first time to discover he has been going blind.

Then one day he was brushing his teeth in his dorm sink when he heard a commotion—a rare sound for this time of the morning. Wiping his mouth, he went down to the main lounge, a wide rectangular room broken by driving asbestos-smeared pillars. Boys and girls were draped on the sofa in their athletic wear—shorts, sweatshirts, T-shirts—watching TV. They had smiles on their faces, which Mansoor quickly realized were the tight expressions that came before tears.

Planes had crashed into the World Trade Center.

“Shit,” Mansoor said, though he couldn't really feel anything.

________

Things began to change immediately on the pristine campus with its clear fountains like lucid dreams of the earth. People discussed the hijackers, who were all Muslims (the hijackers had made no effort to hide their identities, which had been radioed back by the flight attendants, who knew their
seat numbers); and talked about Islam and its connection to violence. Mansoor felt uncomfortable, felt he was being looked at in a new way, but also felt he ought to stay clear of the debate. When he said hello to acquaintances as they marched past in the dorm, they didn't wave back.

“Are you OK my laad? My son?” his mother asked on the phone.

“I'm in California, Mama, nothing's happening here.”

“They're saying al-Qaeda wants to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Don't go there.”

“No one walks on the bridge. It's very far from my campus. People drive on it.” Like many immigrants, he too had felt let down by the bridge.

Still, back in the dorm, the little confidence he'd gained was gone—the wit wilted away from sentences and he was entrapped by his own thickening accent, which people suddenly found impossible to understand. He wanted to tell them about his own experiences with terror, but in those days after 9/11, when panic ruled the campus, and administrators warned students not to even accidentally drink water from a public faucet, since al-Qaeda was planning chemical warfare next, he did not get the opportunity.

Then one day, he was sitting in the dining hall with Alex, a polymathic Jewish boy from Boston who was interested in all the international students and also liked flooring them with his intimate knowledge of their countries, when he began speaking. Alex had been quizzing Mansoor about Sikh separatism. “It's strange for me to hear all this talk about terrorism,” Mansoor said. “I was actually in a car bombing when I was young.” Once he started, he couldn't stop. The story poured out. Telling it to a foreigner, in another language, having to put it in context—this made it small, exotic, alien, and terrifying. “The shop fronts had mirrors on them,” he said, realizing how odd it had been. “It was a fashion. And the mirrors blew up and the shards cut up people's faces. I was very lucky. The worst thing that could have happened long term, apart from losing a limb, was damaging my ears. Your eardrums get blown out and you develop tinnitus, where you can hear a buzzing sound constantly. That didn't happen. But I did get a similar kind of pain in my wrist and arm. It was like a buzzing.”

“Shit, Mansoor-mian,” Alex said, spooning his hot pea soup. “Do you still have it?”

“No, thank God, though it took years to heal.”

________

After that, Mansoor thought things would change for him, but nothing did. People did not care about a small bomb in a foreign country that had injured a Muslim, and why should they? They were grieving. Three thousand of their countrymen had perished. Why would they look outward? Mansoor stopped talking about it and concentrated on his work.

One night in the computer cluster in the basement of the dorm—a rank space that had clearly once been a boiler room; one wall was a jungle gym of gurgling pipes—a girl sitting next to him, a thin black-haired girl in an alluring tank top and shorts that had
SANTA CLARA U
stenciled on the buttocks (he had seen it when she got up to adjust the shorts), turned to him. She asked if he knew how to retrieve e-mails from the trash in Pine. Her manner was neutral and friendly and Mansoor was overjoyed. “Of course,” he said, and leaned over the desk. “Just click here.” She held back from the screen, blinking liquidly.

“Thank you so much,” she said when he was done.

“Of course.”

But when Mansoor went back to typing at his terminal, he heard her stirring again.

“Hi, I'm Emma,” she was saying to the curly-haired white boy on the other side of her—a boy also in a tank top, playing
Quake
on the screen.

“Daniel.”

That was all. The next day Mansoor complained to his friend Irfan at the campus Starbucks. “To them I'm either a computer programmer or a terrorist.”

Irfan was a stocky boy with a limp that made him look oddly rakish and wise for his age. “American women are like that,” Irfan said, twirling a wet Frappuccino bottle. “You have to fuck them first before they talk.”

Irfan had a particular way of making his disaffection cool, and Mansoor hung out with him for a few weeks, before tiring of his misogyny and his
habit of wanting to borrow Mansoor's problem sets. Soon after, Mansoor returned to programming with a vengeance.

________

He worked steadily for the next year. He had decided to become an exceptional programmer on par with Bill Joy and Steve Wozniak. Keeping a copy of
The Fountainhead
by his side, he rapped away at the keyboard into the night.

Then, one day, during his sophomore year, while programming Boggle for a Programming Methods class, his wrists started to ache.

His wrists had ached off and on ever since the Lajpat Nagar blast—Jaya, in her pedantic way, had warned him that such deep-seated pain, at the level of the tissues, where the cells and nerves themselves had been singed, did not go away easily, and he was supposed to keep up his wrist and arm exercises, lying on a yoga mat and lifting one-kilogram weights in contorted poses. Of course, he hadn't. Exercise bored him—why run if you weren't being chased?—and he'd been caught up in the ardor of college. Now the flaring pain sent vectors of electricity up and down his right arm. In the unintelligible void of his muscles danced a thousand pins and needles. “Don't panic,” he told himself. But what scared him was that the left wrist, weak from all that typing, could barely continue on its journey along the valleys and plateaus of the keyboard. His neck ached.

After a few days of this (within three days, he was totally unable to type) he went to see the physiotherapist at the campus health center. Sitting among fragrant potted plants, amazed by how similar the place looked to the physiotherapy center in India, though the two countries were ten thousand kilometers and eons of income apart, he was careful to explain how it had happened, his history with the bomb—careful to separate himself from the other namby-pambies who came to see her. The physiotherapist, a bright and squat pregnant woman with blond hair and enormous overworked arms, put his arms one at a time in a hot bath of wax, so that a skin of hot wax hardened on them. It was like having another skin. “The heat will be good for you,” she said. After a while, she cut the wax away softly with a butter knife—it was a pleasing sensation—and she gave him
printouts showing exercises and different relaxation techniques and told him he would be totally OK.

But Mansoor's pain didn't get better. It got worse. A few weeks after his visit to the physiotherapist, he woke up in the middle of the night with his arms radiant and loud with electricity. The massive hunk of Eddy from San Antonio snored in the upper bunk. When he got up to go to the bathroom, sparks shot up his sciatic nerve and numbed his leg, and he stumbled.

“You've got tons of microtears in your wrists from typing,” Laurie, the physiotherapist, concluded, when he went back to see her. “These things build up over years. You get injured, you develop a compensatory posture when you type, and bam!—years later you have herniated discs. When did you start using a computer?” she asked.

“Twelve,” he said. He had got a 486 right after the blast—he had got so much after the blast!

“There you go—all those years of sitting still, hunched over, not taking breaks.” She told him he had carpal tunnel, an incurable condition. “Though it
can
be controlled and improved,” she assured him.

He was essentially crippled. Walking around the bright campus in a daze, he felt his right leg and right arm and left wrist go numb.

Free from India and still plagued by pain! After all these years! He'd changed his mind about the bomb so many times. Of course it was a curse to have witnessed that explosion, to have suffered so vividly—to have so many things opened to him at once: death, a woman's hanging breast, the cowardice of men and women who ran screaming from the market. At other times—the blast had improved his life, hadn't it? He'd eked a spectacular college essay out of it—the dean himself had congratulated him on it when he'd arrived. Now he played the essay back in his mind: those homilies and banalities he'd penned about terror, the death of his friends, communal harmony—bah! Maybe that was why he was suffering now: he'd tried to take advantage of a tragedy. His mind darkened. When it comes to cause and effect, he thought, I really do believe God exists; I really do think God is watching, drawing his conclusions, doling out consequences. Sometimes I don't even know I've committed a sin till a punishment comes along.

After all, he wouldn't have been typing so much if he hadn't been in the U.S., where everything ran on computers, where the Internet was available on tap and the electricity never went out. And he wouldn't have been in the U.S. without the essay. You have to stop thinking like that, he told himself. You
did
almost die. He saw again the small child with flaring red-hot fragments around him, the screams, the stampede, the cowardice of a whole society stripped bare. Most of the people who had learned these lessons about their country and city died seconds later, as if the bomb existed to prove to them, in their final moments, that they had lived a useless life in a useless place.