The Association of Small Bombs (23 page)

They lived in a crowded complex—how long before everyone was talking about it? The servants, with their practiced clairvoyance, probably already knew.

“This is the advantage of being a do-gooder type,” Mukesh said. “They think I'm interfering with everyone's business and so won't think it's unusual I'm sometimes at your house.” It was a shocking touch of self-awareness and Deepa saw now how being generally shameless could permit and cloak even more dire shamelessness. “I've told them I'm bringing homeopathic medicines for Anusha,” he said. It was true: he
did
bring medicines, for Anusha's persistent colds, but Deepa didn't let him give her any. “I want Anusha to grow up free of all pollutants,” she said, thinking suddenly of Tushar's pleading, brimming reactions to the tetanus injection brandished by the bespectacled lady pediatrician, or Nakul's habit of squirreling away homeopathic pellets for all kinds of maladies in a single bottle, so he could nibble on them every night till they were inevitably found and confiscated.

________

Vikas, cut off from family, knew nothing about this. He came home and saw his wife in the same pose with Anusha—scolding her for running around too much, for falling and injuring herself when she had been diagnosed with keloids.

“Why not restart your baking business?” Vikas asked, waking from the dead dream of his endless documentary about terror.

“I want to be there for her,” Deepa said, eyes pouring toward some faraway spot.

Over the years Deepa had started to blame herself for the boys' visit to the market. If
she
had been present, if
she
hadn't been so dead set on making up the shortfall in the family income by furiously baking, if
she
had known to intervene when her husband, lazing around, doing nothing, had nevertheless sent them all away in an auto on an obvious suicide mission
 . . .
if
she
had asserted herself. “What are you doing that's so important that you can't take them?” she imagined saying to Vikas. She often shouted it out loud as she walked about the house on her increasingly troubled knees, hobbling quickly.

But it didn't matter what she said to her husband, now or then. He continued to slip further and further into his dream of self-abnegation that predated even the boys' deaths.

________

For a man who had dedicated his life to seeing, he noticed very little. What he was really good at was getting people to talk, but that was within the square jail of his camera lens.

________

She was alone with Anusha, always had been, so one day in 2002, when Vikas said they should invite Mansoor over for tea, that Mansoor had had a relapse of his bomb injury and was back in India, she said yes—what choice did she have?

________

This was before the association, before the Sarojini Nagar blast. But seeing Mansoor in their drawing room—young, able-bodied, grown-up, handsome, thin, holding out his wrists, his stormy eyebrows like two thoughts disagreeing with each other—freed something in both of them. After years, they began to talk to each other again. They remembered stray things about the boys—the way Tushar, the morning of the blast, had come into the bedroom soon after Deepa and Vikas had made love, looking hurt and surprised, unsure what had happened, but putting his hands on his hips in a school-ma'amish manner, intuiting something.

They remembered the high-pitched sound, like the Dopplering whistle of a train, that Nakul made during his imaginary cricket commentary as he ran back and forth in the bedroom, awaiting Mansoor's visit—Mansoor's visit, which the Khurana boys were always so excited about, as if having two of them wasn't enough. But introducing a stranger always altered things, threw you into a new mood, forced you out of yourself, your small battles and jealousies; a new person signaled play. Tushar and Nakul were
always their shiny boyish best around Mansoor. They had probably taken him to the market out of love and enthusiasm.

For the first time, the Khuranas found themselves forgiving the boys themselves. They had not known till now that the boys had
needed
to be forgiven.

But the boys
had
ruined their lives. The boys, not the bomb, had been
their
killers.

A booming cord of light fell over their necks as they sat in the drawing room. They were together again. They hugged and held each other.

________

The next day Deepa told Mukesh she wanted to end the affair. He looked at her sadly, his gray eyelids like two slow sloping slugs, mollusks with their own squirming life. Then he rolled the buttons through the buttonholes of his shirt and left.

A day later, he was back.

________

Deepa knew she must end it but was also addicted to it—to the numb pleasure, the dark routine, the certainty of his devotion; it had given her life, a feeling of independence from the domestic sphere. She had a
secret
. She stalked about the house powerfully now, not doting excessively on Anusha as she had before. She was a person again. Vikas was a befuddled aspect of her life, a sick branch that barely held on. They began to discuss ways they could memorialize the boys.

Soon after 9/11 and the Parliament attack, the Khuranas had been visited by a journalist eager for their opinion about America's response to 9/11 and how they felt about the 1996 trial, which was still lapsing through the courts. Deepa and Vikas had tried to be objective but ended up frothing. “They should kill everyone in the Taliban,” Deepa had said, sitting under two garlanded portraits of Tushar and Nakul. “Every single one.” Vikas had added, “When we see what is happening in the West, we are glad. We are glad George Bush is going after terrorists. It should be a lesson to our country. We've been passive people too long. But this passivity and ignorance doesn't work before terrorism.”

Afterwards, they were shocked at themselves. They were no longer liberals.

Soon after Mansoor's visit, they approached K. R. Gill.

Gill, a sardar in his forties, was a former Youth Congress leader who had survived three separate car bombings by Khalistan separatists in the 1990s and now headed an association of terror victims. This group, which supposedly had fifty members, lobbied for terrorists to be hanged. Gill, who had a personal investment in the cause, was a towering, swaying figure full of undistinguished rage. He tilted about on artificial legs—both legs had been blown off in separate bombs—which he dismantled and brandished at the slightest provocation from a journalist or judge. He gave medals to victims and shamed politicians. He was theatrical, morbid, explosive, full of hot tears. He threatened suicide in court. The Khuranas had come across him when he made a vehement appeal before a Sessions judge for Malik to be hanged.

They had been frightened by him then, but now they reached out with an idea.

Gill, who had been looking to energize the drooping association, was happy to induct such well-spoken victims into his group. Vikas and Deepa began working with the victims of small bombings. “The deadliness of an attack should not be measured by its size,” Vikas told a news channel who interviewed him about the association. “In my estimation the small attacks are more deadly, because a few have to carry the burden of the majority. Then, as these victims' grievances get forgotten, as the blasts themselves are forgotten, the victims of these small bombs turn against the government instead of the terrorists. Is that a situation we want? No. That's why, along with Mr. Gill, we've decided to take matters into our own hands.”

The Khuranas now went to hospitals right after attacks. Vikas talked to victims and their families in the hospital, listening sympathetically, nodding on cue, his long neck bent down in respect and his large hands tenderly mashing the dense, comforting, youthful patches in his hair. Deepa, more unsentimental and direct, was better at knowing how to boss the nurses around, at noticing what exactly the doctors were overlooking as the
patients lay bloodied and bandaged and dazed in the hospital. “Please bring him water,” she might shout at a nurse, taking the bridge of her nose between her fingers and stroking off the dust and sweat. Or, “For how many days has this sheet not been changed?”

Together, aged, having experienced so much, they cut warm, comforting, watchful figures in the hospitals. Often, they were observing not the victims but each other. How had they come from marriage to the death of their boys—to this? And yet, it gave them enormous solace to know that their suffering had not been for naught, that they had been able to eke a larger meaning out of it; they felt the closeness couples sometimes experience when they become rich after years of poverty, a mutual appreciation and gratefulness and wonder and an awareness of the depths of the other person—an awareness that is stronger than any affection or love.

These kinds of couples are at their best when they are silent together, letting the world do the talking; when the world ignores them, taking them wonderfully for granted, so that they are no longer an anomaly. This kind of love is shot through with the fire of long-vanquished sadness. Deepa and Vikas did not hold hands as they stood by the beds of victims, listening to the complaints of mothers, the women distraught beneath the head cover of their dupattas. But they may as well have been.

“Let me know if you need help with the association,” Mukesh said one day when he was sitting with Deepa, having tea. Many of their trysts amounted to nothing more than this; the illicitness of the meetings themselves was thrilling, with Deepa finding an excuse to send the servant on an errand to a distant market. “I'm sure I could get Naidu-ji to come.”

“No need,” she said.

It was the last time she saw him.

But not everything returned to normal. Anusha became neglected. Whereas she'd once been a bright, soliloquizing, self-contained child, hopping and leaping about the place in her looped black shoes, shaking her hips to Bollywood tunes that were frozen from the 1990s, when the boys were growing up (Deepa had kept all their tapes—
Hum Aapke Hain Koun
,
DDLJ
, etc.), she now found she had no audience. A knowledge of loss
entered her face as her parents came and went, busy with work and the association. She began to grow up.

Later, when she was older, she would tell her friends that she understood how such people, outwardly sensitive, could neglect their children to the point that they would go to a market and blow themselves up.

“T
he association of small bombs,” as the Khuranas called it privately, was a support group and forum for the grievances of victims. It was also an alternative family for Deepa and Vikas, a group of individuals with whom they could converse freely, of which they were the matriarch and the patriarch. Not only were they the oldest members, but—besides one family in which three of five people had died (a mother had taken her two children out shopping to buy birthday gifts for the other sibling; all three were killed)—they had suffered the greatest loss. Sitting up together in drawing rooms, they dispensed advice on compensation and injuries and medical bills. Gill, meanwhile, dealt with the issue of the terrorists themselves, lobbying for the terrorists to be stripped of all rights. This put him in direct opposition to Tara and Ayub's NGO. “You people support terrorism,” he'd shouted at Ayub some years before. “All the evidence is there—we need the trial to happen faster.”

The way the association was structured—dependent, in a way, on the inflow of victims—also made the Khuranas perversely eager for new bombings. Soon after they heard about the blast in Sarojini Nagar on TV, they headed to the hospital.

________

It was in the hospital, amid the chaos and stinking blistered bodies and nurses pushing trolleys full of IVs and bottles and news crews thuggishly infiltrating the wards, that Deepa and Vikas met Ayub, though they had no
idea who he was. He lay in a bed with a patch over his left eye and legs tightened in bandages. The blast had caused lots of lower-extremity injuries, the doctor said, talking to the Khuranas, but this particular man had been spared the worst. Instead a piece of shrapnel had bounced up and penetrated his left eye; the bomb had been packed with industrial nails and ball bearings. “Many of these people,” he said, gesturing around the room, “have wounds that look like bullet holes.”

“Better to have lower- than upper-extremity injuries,” Vikas said.

The doctor looked at Vikas as if to say, “You know a lot,” but then, pointing to Ayub, went on, “He'll be fine. If he had been closer he would have died instantly of an internal hemorrhage, so you're lucky.” The Khuranas had pretended they were relatives of this boy on the bed. This was their usual ploy to get access to hospitals right after a blast.

What was it about such a morbid war zone that energized Vikas? Once, on a trip to France to screen a documentary at the Aix-en-Provence film festival, Vikas had peeled off and visited a chateau in the Loire Valley. Stony and hard skinned, the chateau consisted of two towers connected by a covered bridge that ran over a river. During the Great War, his guide had told him, the battling armies shared the bridge as a common hospital. Vikas had been stunned by the idea of wounded soldiers—who may have wounded each other—lying bed-to-bed in the same ward. What horrified him was the fact that injury, its violent horizontal stasis, revealed the complete
artificiality
of war.

He remembered seeing Tushar and Nakul in the morgue and thinking: They belong to a different class now. The class of the dead.

He had never lost his urge for classification—this tyrant's urge for unity
and
separation. He knew everyone was different, yet he wanted them to be the same. Hence his obsession with death.

Vikas had always been obsessed with death. In his youth, it had taken the form of constant anxiety and brooding, and he had always been fascinated by Deepa's star-crossed past, the way so many of her relatives had died young. And maybe he had taken satisfaction in the ruin of his own life,
the way in which death had washed over him in an equalizing wave. Maybe if he had not thought so much, worried so much about death, it would not have come for him.

And yet, death could not get him now. Everything had been taken away from him. Even his wife, to a degree, was gone; he knew (vaguely) that he didn't have her completely. He had made himself immune to the only disease without a cure.