The Association of Small Bombs (25 page)

“But I have a connection,” Mansoor said, thinking of Vikas Uncle.

“The connection won't help. It's a deep issue. I've revealed too much corruption in the police.”

“We can go to the press,” Mansoor said.

“Mansoor bhai, you have to trust me. This is the one time none of this will help. You saw how the press reacted to our rally—why will they come help us? And a Muslim injured in the blast? They can easily pin it on me. Religious, young—they don't need evidence.”

“I was also injured in a blast.”

“That's different. You were little.”

Mansoor paused. He was wondering at this story.

________

Soon after, Sharif came in and asked Mansoor to accompany him to the photocopier in the hospital complex to make a copy of Ayub's prescription. Mansoor, nodding to Ayub, went out with him. He had assured Ayub he wouldn't tell the secret, yet he wasn't sure why he should keep it from his father. Still, as he walked with his father, he became aware of how burdened Sharif had become, a neckless man sunk in the worry suit of his body. Mansoor decided to help his friend.

________

Going back to Ayub's room—his father was now on the phone talking to a business contact in the lobby of the hospital—Mansoor said, “What do you need?”

“Honestly? Thousand rupees.”

“That's easy. Here's six hundred.” Mansoor's pulse raced. Would he be arrested too?

“You don't need to worry,” Ayub said. “They won't do anything to you. Their issue with me is personal.”

“It still sounds dangerous. We should tell my family friend.”

“If you tell them, it'll only cause more drama. Believe me, the best situation is for me to go.” At that moment, stuffing the money into pajama pockets, Ayub smiled. In that smile Mansoor suddenly knew that Ayub had done it, that he'd planted the bomb.

Mansoor was thrown out of himself. His emotions and facial gestures got scrambled. He smiled and blinked and frowned and twitched; he didn't seem to have control over his hands, which felt around his face as if for the first time, as if touching the face of a lover in the dark and discovering it is your enemy, or worse: a cold corpse, the corpse of a loved one. His stomach muscles cramped. The food he'd eaten earlier that day troubled the top of his throat.

Ayub stood up jauntily and put a friendly hand on Mansoor's shoulder. “You'll be OK.”

“Yes.” Mansoor smiled.

“Good. You go from the stairs,” Ayub said. “I'll take the lift.” They walked out into the corridor in opposite directions.

But going down the stairwell, that pouring cuboid of negative space, the undersides of the zags of staircase above furiously black with beards of dust, Mansoor became worried. Everything swirled in the stairwell; a bat flew up, circling, wafting through the unmarked stories. Mansoor sweated, his heart beating weirdly.

When he came to the lobby he half-expected to see his father and Ayub chatting. But neither was there. His father, it turned out, was already in the car, getting lathered with the aftershave of air-conditioning; he had left Mansoor missed calls to join him in the car.

So Mansoor walked across the lot to the pale blue Honda City and got in.

His father was sitting in the back, scratching his stubble like a happy animal, playing “Yeh Shaam Mastani” on the stereo—his favorite song, partly because it was the only one he knew how to play on guitar; late in life, Sharif had developed a fixation that he ought to learn one musical instrument.

As the car started, Sharif unconsciously put his thick hand on his son's—the hands were plastic and large, puffy, covered in ridges, fair. His fingers were so much fatter than Mansoor's. He seems to be made of a different material from me, Mansoor thought.

But they did not talk the whole way home.

________

At home Mansoor was disoriented, unable to speak at dinner, which was illuminated by the faint light of the generator—the electricity had gone. “Poor boy, you're tired,” his mother said. Mansoor, smiling sweetly and dumbly, neither agreed nor disagreed.

It was only in his room that night, in that palace of air-conditioning, that he began to shiver. The shivers were uncontrollable. His ribs hurt. His teeth clattered and sang and slid against each other, testy with enamel. His body was out of control. He got up and sat on the desk but his palm vibrated on the table like a mobile. “No,” he said out loud.

He thought of Ayub and wondered where he was now. But it was no concern of his. He was just Ayub's friend. He had only come to see Ayub in the hospital. It was Ayub's free choice to go wherever he wanted. This relaxed Mansoor. Then the shivering began again.

________

“Are we going to go today to see him?” his mother asked in the morning.

She was clearly enjoying this routine of spending time with her son.

“Let me call his room in the hospital and find out if he's awake.”

“He'll of course be awake. They wake you at six in the hospitals and they keep you up the whole day with checkups and plates of food. That's what we're being charged four thousand per day for.” Her generosity did not preclude harping.

Clutching his Nokia, Mansoor called the hospital. After an interminable wait, the receptionist came back to him and said, “He's not there.”

“Oh?”

“He's gone. There's no one in that room. Has he checked out? We have a queue of patients.” He was surprised by her lack of concern.

“He's left the hospital,” Mansoor told his mother.

She crinkled her expressive moon-shaped forehead in surprise. “Very strange.”

“He's like that. I knew he would behave this way if you got him a room. He's too self-respecting. It's how he left after we offered him a job.”

“I only hope he gets better,” his mother said. “And his poor parents are coming also.”

________

Mansoor prayed that nothing had happened, that Ayub had not been caught, that all of this fell behind them.

Then, the unraveling began—but in the strangest way.

F
or years, the Delhi police, as well as Khurana and Gill—first individually, then collaboratively—had been tracking Shockie. Three years after the 1996 blast, Malik had actually broken down and fingered Shockie, though he had returned quickly to a contrite silence.

Ever since then there had been a bounty on Shockie's head and a great deal of intelligence expended in failing to capture him. So it was a surprise when, a few days after the Sarojini Nagar blast, he was arrested.

It was a triumphant moment for everyone. A flighty, bald, wet-eyed man was produced in the lockup. He looked like an electrician—like someone you might hire for handiwork at Lajpat Nagar. There was nothing terroristic about him. Gill and the Khuranas watched with delight from behind a glass window as he was interrogated and beaten.

After three days of torture, he angrily confessed. “The real mastermind is Ayub Azmi. He's done the last ten blasts. I've been his servant.”

“Who's that?”

“A young man,” Shockie said. “An activist from Azamgarh. That's why he was never detected. He was injured in the Sarojini Nagar blast.” Shockie secretly blamed Ayub for his arrest. Actually, he had become quite attached to Ayub, the way he had been attached to Malik, and had stayed on in Delhi hoping Ayub would reappear at the park. But it was Shockie's constant presence in the park that had attracted the attention of a paranoid
man who lived on the periphery. Soon after this man had contacted the police and a policeman had matched Shockie to his photo.

________

After escaping from Delhi, Ayub went to the base near Hubli. But when he got there, exhausted—his exhaustion only fully expressing itself now, as it does at the tail end of journeys that have been soaked and powered by adrenaline—Tauqeer, looking gaunt and ill only wanted to know where Shockie was.

“I thought he had come back.”

“Obviously he didn't.”

“I assumed he had.” Ayub unconsciously covered his gashed left eye; it was lacking a patch now. No one in the group appeared to notice or care.

Soon after, the group learned Shockie had been arrested, and in a panic—but a smooth one; the group was made for panicky situations, even looked forward to them—split up into cells and went in different directions. Shafi and Rafiq went north, to Kathmandu. Waris and Karim headed to Gujarat. Ayub and Tauqeer hurtled overland, in the back of a truck, to a secluded beach in Kerala. Once there, Tauqeer and he settled into a hut on the beach.

The first two days were almost pleasant. Ayub liked Tauqeer now and they talked about Palestine and Carlos the Jackal. Then one evening, after going out for a walk, Tauqeer vanished.

The problem with this was that Tauqeer locked the door whenever he left; Ayub couldn't get out of the hut. For a few hours he sat cross-legged in the sand.

He could hear the ocean susurrating beyond and after a while, he pounded the door and threw his bulk against it but the force was useless; the door was metal, clasped with a chitkani outside.

He sat back down in the sand and told himself not to worry. Tauqeer would come back for him.

Night came—no Tauqeer. He drowsed and drooled, hungry. He hadn't eaten in a day. He was thirsty too; to get to the water under the sand, he began to dig.

He passed out. When he woke the next day, he was in another hut, on an operating table of some sort. “I'm glad you found me,” he said with a smile, still surprisingly weak. “Is there a drip here? Some glucose?”

He had a vague memory of waking and trying to open the door of the hut and then passing out again.

The doctor, who was wearing a face mask, said to another man in the dark corner, “Our friend is awake.” He had kind eyes that closed into slits.

“Tauqeer bhai?” Ayub asked. “Are you there? Was the key to the hut lost or what?”

The man in the shadows did not answer.

Ayub became aware that he was undressed to his waist. More to the point: there was a strange square scar on his chest, where a scalpel had been recently applied. The skin was reddish, welted, peeling.

“Did I need to have surgery? Was I very sick?”

“You are the bomb,” the doctor said.

Ayub moaned and tried to turn over.

The doctor tapped his chest with a blunt cold metal instrument. “We've put a bomb in you. It's a new kind of bomb, since you're curious. It isn't timed. It goes off when you move your body in a particular way.”

Ayub's broad shoulders shook and compressed. His leg muscles tensed. “What did I do?”

“We know who you're working for,” the man in the corner said. It was Tauqeer after all.

The doctor helped Ayub off the table. “It's OK,” he said. “You can walk. Here,” he said. “Put this shirt on.” Ayub complied, hunching himself to accept the shirt. He was very weak.

He must have been walked some distance in this drowsy state, because when he came to, he was on a deserted beach.

Tauqeer and the doctor were gone. The hut was gone. The birds struggled in the wind like flies in honey. The sounds were enormous, the ocean regally hushing the beach. It was beautiful. He tried not to move—to avoid the secret configuration that might set off the bomb. With one hand he picked at the sand, kneaded it. What a waste of a life, of talent. Did he
believe he would explode? Of course. Stranger things have happened. He had never experienced such a fear of the body before, not even with his back pain, or the bomb he'd planted in Delhi. The body itself was abhorrent. It could be made subservient to anything. It could work for despots, tyrants, fascists, terrorists—it could work for machines. He realized the pointlessness, at a time like this, of having a mind. He kept imagining the form the explosion would take, how it might gush out of him like a white star, pelting the ocean with soft embers and pieces of his skin. What was a bomb, really? A means of separation, of opening. A factory of undoing. It took the violent forces of civilization and applied them to the very opposite aims with a childlike glee. A bomb was a child. A tantrum directed at all things. A wail of a being that hadn't got its own way. The choice of suicide over defeat. Ayub, in his reading of Marxist history and leftist theory, had always been interested in the role of bombs; now he too was a weapon, part of a long evolution of revolution. In that instant, he was connected to the bomb throwers of the past and the bomb men of the future. Entire cities of exploding people might exist someday. He saw a hut in the distance. Casting aside fear for an instant, he got up and ran.

He punched out holes in the sand with his feet, breathing, hyperventilating. His pellucid, cellophane-like toenails, advancing feelers of dead skin, were small helmets of death on the living crab of the foot. The metal object implanted in his chest rattled. His body, for all its glaring tension, was free of pain. Arriving at the hut, he panted and waited, hoping someone would show up. But it was a bombed-out husk. No one was there. He saw an entire village of husks leading up a hill.

He wondered if this was a place that had gone extinct in an experiment of the sort that was being carried out on him. Tired and hungry, his eyes fastened on a glistening mound of coconuts—green balls with flattened heads and straws sticking out of them. The hunger was so bad, it overrode his fear of dying. On his knees he got before the mound of coconuts and sucked the tart juice from the used husks. It came out one drop at a time. It was pink overhead, the sky. He knew he had to go to the police.

Whatever had been done to him had weakened him. He thought of how
far he'd come, once again—from Tara to Azamgarh to Delhi to this beach, destined to perish and vanish the way the whole village had vanished. Had the villagers been taken out by dacoits? By bandits? By the government—cleared for some massive project? He became impatient for the bomb to go off. The coconuts yielded very little. He got up abruptly, gnashing his teeth, the muscles in his legs squeezed. He had the distinct feeling that he was in a dream—a hallucination like those he'd had on drugs.

This village at the edge of India, the complete absence of living things save for the jutting birds overhead, the mysterious mound of recently drunk coconuts—complete with the twisted straws brutally stuck back into the maws of the fruit—the bomb in his heart, the shabbiness of his clothes: none of it felt plausible, connected to the reality he'd known. He hoped he might fall asleep and wake up corrected. He put his fists against his blackly circled eyes. Twenty feet from him, water gushed on crumbling soil. His systems were shutting down; he could feel it—and it was right before he fell into sleep that he realized:
sleep
might trigger the bomb. He jerked awake. Brilliant. A person exhausts himself trying to avoid obvious postures only to fall into the default position of nature. Sleep. Everything major happened when you were sleeping. Plants grew. The earth, browsing the aisles of the sun, renewed itself. The truth about a place—its dangers, its crimes—came out. Why shouldn't the bomb in me work the same way?

Suffering a fit of mania, he began to believe he controlled how the bomb worked. That he could turn it on and off with his mind. One with his body, he breathed deeply, yogically. Waves of tension passed up through his legs.

Suddenly feeling watched, he cast his gaze behind him, in an arc. He felt he was bringing the bomb up with concentration. Instead he vomited—a thin, colorless, sleek fluid. His system emptied itself out. Hunger, mania, vomiting—he didn't understand. He was certain he would go off now. He was hungry for it.

He began singing.
Haathi ka anda la. Aati kya khandala
. A favorite of his and Tara's. He was losing his mind. It was like that time in the fields of Azamgarh soon after he'd heard that Tara was going to America. This was the absurd singing of a man near death. A man looking to be finished and
still throwing notes into the void. He let out his high-pitched laugh. It was like a tennis ball thrown high over a sparkling, waiting field. He got up suddenly and ran again. He ran through the town, past the shattered huts, huts that seemed bashed softly, rattled by the ocean, the wood fungal and ancient, the objects scattered around with such basaltic, modern randomness—plastic buckets, plastic bats, a bansuri—that he could make no sense of the people who'd lived there except to say they must have been happy and they must have used plastic.

The ocean had come into these homes and dragged the people away. The floors of cement, where they existed, had busted through to reveal black melting radiant damp soil. Somehow the plastic objects had been spared. It was as if the dragging bag of the blue ocean had known to reject certain things. A skeleton of a small dog grew bright with age. He moved up the winding streets. I have to find someone, he thought. Nothing is lost yet. I am only twenty-seven! I have sixty more years—years in which to decide what I wish to do, to make incremental change. I will dedicate myself to normal life. This will be a turning point.

An explosion threw him to the ground.

No—he was alive. It was just a rotten branch falling off a tree. He tore open his shirt and looked at his chest. The scar, shaped like a square, was like a space demarcated for punching. “Help!” he screamed. “Help!” His voice went far and deep, tearing up his larynx, knotting and releasing it. “Help!” Deep, large, explosive sounds. “Help!” Where did this strength come from? Whom was he beseeching? “Help!”

Afterwards he became very tired and despairing and he sat down by a crooked doorframe and wept. “I am sorry, God,” he said finally, recalling his oldest companion—one he had forgotten. “Take me back.”

He was found dead on the beach a day later, from hunger and exhaustion.

________

The police back in Delhi, of course, did not know any of this. They went to the hospital and followed the trail of documents and paperwork to the Ahmeds' house.

________

Mansoor was taken from the house while still in his morning Adidas shirt and Bermuda shorts.

“Do you know why they think Ayub is a terrorist?” his father—jogging down the driveway, sweating, hair scrambled on his head—asked Mansoor, as he was led away in a knot of policeman on a thin colony road. The neighbors, arms folded over low walls, watched.

Mansoor's shame kept him from speaking. “No, nothing,” he said, hoping that his father's plastic business, which could so easily be linked to bombs, wasn't held against him.

________

That first night, Mansoor was taken to the thana and beaten on the back and legs with a hockey stick by two policemen on a broken concrete floor. As he whimpered and cried and begged for his parents—as he thought of his days in California—he never denied knowing Ayub, or the fact that Ayub had stayed with them, or that they had taken care of him in the hospital.

Wouldn't this string of charitable actions only exonerate them?

“The person who helps a terrorist—he's even worse than a terrorist,” a young policeman, who at first had seemed as afraid of Mansoor as Mansoor was of him—the man could barely grow a beard—screamed. Over the next few days, Mansoor became very frightened of this sociopathic policeman with no sideburns, this eunuch of an angry policeman. He seemed unafraid and undeterred by threats. He didn't care a jot for Mansoor's “connections,” and when his parents and Vikas Uncle visited the station, pressing the police for his release, for bail, Mansoor was beaten even harder and not allowed to meet them. He wanted to meet them to tell them
not
to come. He was too sensitive to physical pain. Oddly, though, his wrists did not hurt; it was his neck that sent out shockwaves of pain.

Usually you could meet family but under the terrorist law all restrictions were permitted. He sat in the cell and wept.

Eventually, Mansoor confessed to setting off the Sarojini Nagar blast with Ayub.

________

The Khuranas had, of course, become involved—they told the Ahmeds they thought of Mansoor as a son and couldn't believe that the good news of the 1996 accused arrest had led to this.