The Association of Small Bombs (16 page)

A
t home, Mansoor found himself in the grip of a profound anger. He kept looking back at the day of the bombing and seeing Mr. and Mrs. Khurana skulking about and talking in their bright house, tall human adults in their forties, Mr. Khurana in a white shirt and khaki pants, Deepa Auntie in a red kameez dyed with purple mangoes running down the front in parallel rows (how vividly he remembered the details of that day, as if it had been stained by the wine of memory), full of domestic swagger and confidence, lost in their adult world, discussing bills and the latest gossip about a relative who had left her husband, the kids playing around and under them, kids they were eager to shoo out. Why had they been so irresponsible—with him in particular? But Indians were like that, happy to be puppets of fate. “Chalta hai.” “It's in God's hands.” “Everything goes.”

When Mansoor had told Vikas Uncle he'd call his mother so she could pick him up, Vikas Uncle had perversely cajoled him into going with Tushar and Nakul to the market. “Don't worry, yaar,” he'd said, sitting back lazily in the sofa chair, his arms forming a relaxed hammock behind his head. Mansoor hated him.

The Khuranas had never apologized to him.

Mansoor's thoughts flew in a circle of rage. His wrists hurt, his back throbbed, he sweated, his sciatica sparked. In his room, he turned the pages of ten odd books strewn on his bed—the Chomskys, Roys, Dalrymples. He wasn't reading them, but testing his pain; even turning a page hurt. He was a highly defective machine, sensitive to everything.

When he sat on the sofa in the drawing room, the same old drawing room with its chests from Korea and Indonesia, its frantic unreconstructed Orientalism, the Orientalism only allowed to people in the Orient, a sickly current, like that of a tube light about to die, vomiting the last of its milky light, filled the columns of his arms.

Surrounded by unfeeling objects, his parents off to the lawyers to discuss the case and to figure out how to keep the business running (Sharif ran a plastics consulting and supply company), he began to whimper. Nothing had changed for him since the day after the bomb, when he had come back home to this very pain.

During a moment of insanity, he imagined doing something different—becoming a full-time activist and teacher with the group, traveling around the country and educating people about communal violence and
 . . .
carpal tunnel. What if he became a doctor or physiotherapist like that South Indian bore Jaya? Well, that would be amusing!

Eventually, out of loneliness and rage, Mansoor returned to volunteering for Peace For All.

T
he group meetings were the same—the discussions about the 1996 inmates had been put on hold to develop strategies to protest Modi when he arrived in Delhi a few weeks from now—but Mansoor, sitting on the floor, a mute spectator to the verbal drama, haggard and uneasy, avoiding Ayub, began to notice something strange: his pain had become much worse after the nerve conduction test. Whereas before he'd experienced a snipping tension and tiredness and a subcutaneous wetness, now an elastic, electric current spread through his limbs, dizzying him with its dull throb, making him feel like an overly tightened string instrument.

He began to wonder if there was something to Ayub's notion that the pain was partly mental, seeing how it had jumped after the diagnosis from the doctor. At home, on his bed, enclosed by a life-size poster of Tendulkar on one side and of Michael Jackson on the other—old posters from the age of fourteen he had never taken down or replaced—he began to read the book Ayub had given him,
The Religion of Pain
.

The book said straightforward things. Pain was a response to injury. But when pain didn't go away it was because a deep-seated psychological pattern had been established; besides, back pain hadn't existed till fifty years before—before that, people got ulcers when they were depressed; where were ulcers now? Replaced by back pain. Mansoor skipped pages, his wrists singing with pain, his chin sunk into his neck, the back of his neck stiff. He was a mannequin of pain, controlled by it; he altered his posture every few
seconds and kept the bloated tuber of the hot-water bottle pressed to his lumbar.

Then Mansoor got to the part where the author proposed a solution.

The solutions seemed laughably simple. One, the author wrote, exercise frequently but don't focus unduly, in your exercises, on the troubled part of the body; and two, visualize at night the body part that suffers from pain and imagine it getting better.

In normal circumstances, Mansoor would have shrugged these off, but he was so down and out that he decided to give them a try.

________

Miraculously, as the weeks wore on, he began to get better. Establishing a routine of Iyengar yoga poses, swimming a few turgid laps in the covered Gymkhana pool, and skidding forward on the treadmill in the gym, he felt his pain beginning to dissipate, clear out, the way a clogged sinus might suddenly give up the ghost of its liquid. The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.

(Later, when it was all over, when his life was coming to an end, he would think that he had probably started to recover because months of therapy had paid off; that he had been misdiagnosed during the nerve test; and that his recovery had been an act of faith and belief, the sort that can only take hold of a person when he is at his lowest.

But then, in the middle of this storm of circumstances, with his father's fortune disappearing and the family in decline and his future uncertain and curtailed and the bomb still sitting vastly on the horizon of his past, like a furious private sun, always pulling him toward it—in the middle of this, this experiment with visualization, with accepting there might be other reasons for pain beside injury, had seemed like a paradigm shift.)

“Mine, when I started it, was gone in three months,” Ayub said one day, in the room at the back of Holy Child Nursing Home. The two men had become friendly again when Mansoor had told him his advice had helped; they had arrived early, before the others, and were sitting on the floor and
talking. Ayub was wearing a white kurta with Kolhapuri slippers. He clutched one foot with his hands. He had enormous toes with bright symmetrical toenails. “I too was skeptical when I was first told about this idea. We're slaves of science. We can't believe there can be an answer outside doctors. We believe whatever they tell us—you have microtears in your wrists, is it? Well, there might be an easier explanation for why you don't see them! I don't mean to be too philosophical here, but we're brought up within that system and are incapable of seeing what may be wrong with it. You've read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings were doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don't eliminate disease—they perpetuate the existence of doctors. This is all there, in
Hind Swaraj
. But our own problem is—and I'm talking about all of us—we swallow everything Western civilization gives us. We reject even the best parts of our own culture. All these things we now call faith healing—what were they? Just forms of this, visualization, holistic techniques. But modern men like you and me wouldn't be caught doing this so-called jhaad-phoonk. That's something our servants do. But our servants aren't idiots. This is a
country
of servants. And these people are living, right? Healthier than you would expect given the water they drink, the food they eat, the air they breathe. How?”

It was a mistake to tell him, Mansoor thought. He's getting all excited. “The tough thing for you,” Ayub said, “will be what to do when the pain starts moving around.”

“Yes, the book told me about that.”

“Your body's not going to give up on pain so easily. It's been living with it for six years. And it's been validated by the doctor. The doctor who is like a priest marrying you to your pain. Anyway, what will be interesting is not even what you'll do when the pain moves around—you'll handle it if you can handle this—but what you'll do when it finally disappears.”

________

Mansoor felt close to Ayub. His wisdom wasn't just for show; he wasn't a quack—in fact, he was the only person to have truly helped Mansoor since the blast. Mansoor despaired about the years he'd lost to pain, and wished
he'd healed faster. “Don't regret things. Look at the present, and pray,” Ayub said. “That's why I started praying. If you look backwards or forward, you stumble. But prayer keeps you focused on the eternal present.”

They started going to the mosque together again, several days a week this time, Mansoor driving over in his car, no longer ashamed of his new religiosity. In the mosque he wore a skullcap and tried to be near the front and was fervent in his devotion.

He used his time praying to do what prayer must have been meant for in the first place, before it became ritual: visualization. Pressing his fingers behind his ears, he'd see himself playing cricket one winter day with Tushar and Nakul, smashing the ball. He could picture, in that hothouse of intoning bodies, the leaves on the trees, crisp and crumbling, above and beneath his feet, crunching; a discarded cricket glove, white and dirty and stiff around the thumbs, lying on the dusty earth; Nakul's flexible, rubbery body curled over to bat, the bat kicking impatiently at the crease, looking sometimes like the leg of a tied horse and other times like the stuck tine of a clock—those were the happiest days of his life.

In visualization—used by athletes as well as the injured—you were first supposed to conjure and concentrate on a moment of surpassing happiness, a scene to which you could bring scents, sounds, colors. When Mansoor had started at home, he'd been surprised by how few happy moments he could pull out from the quiver of his memory. Had he never been happy? Then, one day, at the mosque, he'd hit upon this image of Tushar and Nakul and him and the other colony boys playing cricket and he'd been floored by the details, and kneeling on the ground in the mosque, the fabric of hundreds of worshippers crinkling and rustling around him, he had been overwhelmed. How long he'd suppressed that image! That image of life before the bomb, when one's main concern was how not to be accidentally neutered by the hard cricket ball and how to avoid being brained when the ball spiraled down toward you from the air and you stood underneath with your small, smooth, rich-boy palms to catch it. Sometimes he got so lost in the memory that he forgot the most important part of the visualization exercise: picturing oneself doing the task one feared, in his
case typing. Sometimes he just roamed the placid heat-struck diorama of the cricket field of his memory, interacting with Tushar—excitable, nervous Tushar—who loved Mansoor for unknown reasons, and sly Nakul with his excessively opposable thumbs, a boy who, like so many athletes, seemed happy to be led, thought of himself as a highly respected grunt capable of performing only one specialized task (speed bowling).

How strange to have these thoughts in the mosque, in that place where no experience was supposed to be private, where each person was consumed by the same God, the same words
 . . .
though of course that wasn't true: for most people, as Mansoor had noticed, going to the mosque was rote, like changing the oil in the scooter, or paying the school fees, another task to be checked off the list. Sometimes, coming up after the twelve minutes of prayer, he felt he was the only person who'd had an ecstatic experience with God on the clammy floor.

His hands were much better now and his fear of typing gradually went away. In fact, whenever he felt fear, or pain—the manifestation of fear—he kept going.

The Internet, which had been closed to him for so long, now was thrown open again and he dashed off e-mails to friends and read Yahoo! News and
Rolling Stone
as he had in the past.

It was when he almost visited a porn website that he began to recall what had caused this trauma in the first place.

________

When he'd moved to the U.S., he'd been fully healed. The pain in his right arm and wrist were in the past; the bomb itself was in the past. But the bomb, churning the materials of the city, eking a war zone out of a regular market, had ruined Delhi for him. He spent his childhood doing homework and pecking brutally at the keyboard. He had no desire to leave the house, to risk another encounter with a bomb, and when he did try to leave, to visit friends, to hang out with them at PVR and Priya (where the boys often got into A movies by showing the bemused lads in the ticket booths the hair on their legs as proof of age), his parents encouraged him to stay home.
“Watch a movie
here
,” they said. “Invite your friends. Lamhe has such a good selection of LDs.” So he never left.

When he went to the U.S. and found himself suddenly alive, free of fear, he'd been enraged about all the time he'd wasted; angry at his parents in conspiring with the bomb to keep him indoors.

Encountering freedom for the first time, he threw himself into everything: he drank, smoked, partied, smoked up, even kissed a girl in the corner of a room during a party. He was amazed at how quickly the inhibitions he'd rehearsed over a lifetime—the belief, for example, that one shouldn't have sex before marriage—fell away. He was like a snake overdue for shedding its skin. And with every inhibition he shed, he was angrier at his parents—parents who had first exposed him to the bomb instead of protecting him and had then punished him by keeping him indoors, where he learned and experienced nothing (in this new atmosphere of freedom, he forgot that much of his imprisonment was self-imposed, brought on by fear and panic attacks—he had been afraid of Delhi the way he later became afraid of typing, thinking that, just as Delhi might rip off his face in a sudden upwelling of fire, the machine might cripple him for life). He briefly stopped communicating with his parents. He led what he would later call a “dissipated life.” It was after a weekend of drinking that his wrists gave way.

He made no connection between his wrists and his new life; he seemed incapable of making connections of any kind on his own (another symptom of an overprotected childhood). But even then he knew that he was overusing the computer—if not to study, then to watch porn.

He had become addicted to porn. The obsession with porn was an aspect of an obsession with sex. When he arrived in the U.S., he'd only seen a few pictures—his dial-up Internet in Delhi wasn't fast enough to load videos. That changed quickly. His roommate Eddy, with his Cheshire cat grin, watched porn on his computer openly, obsessively, keeping the door ajar so that the moans of women wafted down the corridors of the dorm. Dealing with some problem of his own—Eddy had been a football player in school, but was possibly gay; he had the largest collection of shoes
Mansoor had ever seen, and he cried easily—Eddy plastered the walls with posters of seminude women from
Maxim
magazine. In the day, with the sun beating against the windows, the room emitted a rank yellowish glow—the glow of an adult store. Mansoor had not known how to resist this assault on the walls. Perhaps he didn't want to resist—he wanted to buck stereotypes about Muslims, stereotypes that were flourishing after 9/11, and anyway he too liked porn. He talked with disgust to girls about Eddy's pitiful misogyny but watched days' worth of porn, on his own, in secret, when Eddy was gone or asleep. He felt guilty, felt watched by God, but it was overruled by the great pleasure of seeing blond naked bodies trapped in his laptop monitor, providing him a template in which to fit the unapproachable girls who roamed the hallways in their towels.

Around the same time he read
The Fountainhead
and became obsessed with becoming a great programmer at the expense of everything else.

But his body had been unable to take it, and he'd come reeling back to India, his wrists aflame. Now, in India, in the mosque, he saw his body was simply rejecting this selfish way of life; it was begging him to pause, reconsider. And he did. He thought about who he actually was: a mild person, brought up with firm good Muslim values, someone who thrived not on pursuing individual pleasures, but on being among people like himself, living a life of moderation: praying, exercising, thinking healthy thoughts. The more he realized the connection between the mind and the brain, the more he wished to keep his mind clean. If you had horrible thoughts, if you carried rage against your parents and sexual fury against women in your head, as he had—how could you be healthy, happy? Your body imploded. You became the bomb.