The Association of Small Bombs (10 page)

W
hen the Khuranas received the news of the pregnancy at the office of their GP in East of Kailash, they fell silent. They'd known this was coming, had known what they were working toward, yet their actions had been suffused with denial, Vikas with his muddled commerce-student's understanding of science telling himself, “Well, she's forty; the chances of getting pregnant are lower,” and adding mentally, “We can always get an abortion,” imagining such a conversation would be easy to have given the higher risk of Down syndrome in a child born to an older mother. Deepa was in denial too, convinced they would kill themselves. She had thought that the lovemaking was simply a form of postponement. So it was a surprise to her when she was overcome by such raw, vivid emotion in the doctor's office.

“This is an interesting situation,” Vikas said in the car on the way home, expecting Deepa to have a similar response. Instead she put her hand in his—cold, light fingers. Delhi even in December was dusty, lurid, sunlit, perplexingly dry, dug up on the megalomaniacal whims of urban planners and chief ministers, and it occurred to Vikas, as he drove, turning with the dips in the road, that Jagmohan, the politician, was the connective tissue between Vikas's life in Delhi and the violence in Kashmir. Jagmohan, the demolition artist of the Indian state. Working swiftly, tirelessly, without imagination—a true peon—he'd bulldozed the slums of Delhi during the Emergency and knocked the city's teeth out, what was termed at the time as “beautification.”

Vikas remembered this period of history acutely, the way one can only recall one's college days. Twenty-one, he was commencing an MA in economics from DSE, already miserable, his future as a CA foaming at his feet while filmmaking was a distant flagless island beyond. His fellow students—especially of economics—knew better than to raise a fuss about politics and kept to themselves, huddled with exam guides and cups of tea. The situation appalled Vikas—who was already developing a social conscience in the apartheid halls of the university, where no two disciplines could debate each other—and one day, he followed the bread crumbs left by a newspaper to watch a demolition.

It led to his first short film. After seeing one demolition, he came back again, with a friend's camera, a Norelco. The demolition he filmed was somber by Indian standards. Slum dwellers, mostly Muslims, queued up alongside the bulldozer that would render them homeless, watching wide-eyed, intense, waving to the camera. Warned beforehand of the government's intentions, they'd dismantled their nests of tarpaulin and tin themselves; and now, as the bulldozer climbed upon and tossed aside layers of history—waddling over tarpaulin, crumpling tin, knocking out wooden supports—a surprising thing happened. Someone began to cheer. Party workers, maybe. A man came around dancing madly, his face painted and parodic with holi powders, distributing plastic whistles to the little slum kids that they then blew, cheering on their own demise.

Vikas caught it on camera, gratified by his luck. You always needed this kind of luck as a documentarian. He had told the government workers he was making a film commissioned by the state—and he had, in fact, received tacit permission from Jagdish Chacha, using the family connections he would later decry.

The demolition, of course, was Jagmohan's doing, and as a reward for his loyalty, Jagmohan would eventually be posted to Kashmir as governor, where, in response to an uprising, he ordered the military to open fire on protesters on a bridge over the Jhelum, inciting years of violence.

“What do you think we should do?” Vikas asked when they came home.

Deepa—walking about the kitchen, hunched, banging cabinet doors,
her behind prominent through the salwar—said nothing. She was letting the news grow inside her. Was it possible that one of the boys would be . . . reborn? When Vikas's mother had died, a puppy appeared at their door every day for five days after the cremation and Vikas had tried to adopt it and she'd mocked him.

“Let's think about it,” she said. “I should have more tests.”

His sensible wife! “Yes, of course,” he said.

________

They were happy about the pregnancy, but also bewildered—had a sense they were moving several pieces ahead in a game they were playing against (or with?) God: on one hand, they were blessed—who knew how long it might have taken Deepa to get pregnant; on the other, they were unsure if they'd committed an injustice against their dead sons, having a child before the joint pyre had even cooled.

The extended family, of course, was thrilled—thrilled to have news, also relieved that Deepa and Vikas, the epicenter of silence in the crumbling complex, had chosen life. Some of the evil and stillness that had settled over the common areas, on the dusty bushes and trees and the tattered driveway, lifted. The women went over with advice about how to handle the pregnancy. “Don't worry about your age,” they counseled Deepa. “Dadi-ji was fifty when she had Ashok. What matters is not age, but the amount of stress one experiences.” They brought her special paans, concoctions of halwa and ayurvedic medicine, and recommended a midwife who was good at giving oil massages that developed the brain of the baby in the womb. “Papa-ji, when he and Dadi-ji lost children, always tried to have another child immediately,” Mala said. “It's the only way to get over this kind of a thing.”

Privately, of course, these relatives were worried. “Let's pray there isn't a miscarriage,” Bunty said.

“In my estimation, this is exactly the type of situation in which a miscarriage occurs,” Rana prophesied, taking breaks to puff at his pipe.

There
were
frights. Deepa fainted three months into the pregnancy only to be diagnosed with gestational diabetes. “Another blow,” Vikas told a
friend. Suffering panic attacks, Deepa woke with the feeling of small hands at her throat. She barely slept, except with sleeping pills, which didn't count as sleep but as a sieve through which anxiety filtered, so that when she woke, she was even more panicked and sweat soaked than before.

Vikas, meanwhile, sank, rose up, lived, sank again—fighting off bomb dreams at all hours. They were not dreams, but upwellings of pain, moments when the fire of recollection and repression got so fervid he felt he might actually explode, which he did, suffering searing headaches, and shouting at Hari the servant (who had also become absent and bereaved) and at drivers who had the nerve to overtake him on the road.

To distract himself from pain, he played tennis at the club with his friend Prabhat, smashing the ball so ferociously that the fibers inside constricted with hurt, like a small heart.

The Ahmeds, when they heard about the pregnancy, were supportive. Afsheen, dabbing her wide-set eyes (set on either side of her face like the understanding eyes of a whale) with a hankie, told Deepa on the phone that this was the only way to preserve the memory of the boys. “And if it's a girl, who knows, maybe Mansoor can marry her,” she said, becoming sentimental and hysterical.

Sharif, though, found the whole thing depressing. “It's a mess, horrible,” he told his wife. “Do you think they'll just have another child and live happily ever after? Every child is a packet of disappointments, hurts, dangers. If something, heaven forbid, happens to this child—then? What will they do? We're assuming it's not a miscarriage, which could happen—remember how many Zaib had?”

“You men, because you don't go through it, are much more afraid of pregnancy,” Afsheen said. “Women give birth through many kinds of stress. Your view is just negative.”

“What
happened
is so negative.” And again he thought of how close his wife and he had come to losing everything—their beloved son, her sanity, their marriage—and he shuddered with superstitious disgust about his own good fortune.

________

The Khuranas had their baby in September, more than a year after the blast. Deepa gave birth to a daughter. It was a relief to everyone, again—to not have to make obligatory comparisons between the new baby and Tushar and Nakul, whose faces had grown distant, consigned to the scrap heap of children's faces, faces that were never watched closely in the first place because they were destined to be discarded, covered up with the eventual masks of adulthood.

The girl's name, Anusha, as more than one person noted, compounded the sounds in Tushar's and Nakul's names. But Deepa curiously denied this. Otherwise, everyone felt, the parents looked happy. “That's the thing about them, you know,” Bunty said. “Deepa and Vikas are so mild and they never impose on anyone, but they're also very tough—Deepa once told me how much effort goes into making these documentaries, the amount of editing you have to do. You'll be shocked. We think when a thing is effortless, it must have been effortless to make. In fact, those things are the hardest.”

“Quite right, quite right,” said Rana, wheezing without his pipe.

In fact, the Khuranas
were
happy, but they were terrified about nearing the bend of that word. Deepa was gaunt and tired and exhausted and light-headed from the delivery while Vikas became dreamy around the new diapers.

Then Vikas started having visions.

I
t was a season of breakdowns. And it was Vikas's turn.

How far they'd come from the death of their boys! His life had leapt and swallowed itself up and rolled into a ball and split open. Now—as if it were necessary for him to be trapped to grieve properly—Vikas's true grieving began. He'd done what he always did, he realized: grabbed for the nearest middle-class solution to his problem. How could another child solve anything? How could they care for her, coddle her, bring her up—they were so old already! Depressed, destroyed!

When his wife received guests and held out Anusha to them, he imagined gunning them down.

“Can we go with you, Papa?” Tushar and Nakul asked.

Vikas stood in the drawing room on a summer day. It was hot and the air was shrieky with pressure-cooker hoots and honks. He did not want to take them on the shoot. He had no desire to be a father, had always considered himself above these things, and yet there were now these two boys filling up his drawing room, issuing commands and requests, their sullen persistence reminding him of nothing more than the members of his extended family, those disappointed creeps who pressed on and surrounded him at all times.

“Why do you keep doing that to your wrist?” Vikas asked Nakul. Nakul had been flicking his wrist donnishly, an action he seemed to have picked up from his uncle, Mukesh. “Are you a sardar? Do you have a kara there?”

Nakul's handsome face hung.

“Yah, don't do that,” Tushar chimed in.

“You take care of your brother, Tushar. I have to go.”

Divide and rule. It wasn't just the British toward the Indians but all parents toward their children.

Vikas was awfully partial toward Tushar, though he would have never acknowledged it. Nakul was popular in school, good at sports, intense, competitive, moody—just like Vikas, in other words—whereas Tushar was lumpy, effeminate, eccentric, troubled, getting pushed around in school, and moseying up to his mother in the kitchen with the halting eyes of an abused animal, always eager to please, reading the newspaper and engaging his father in incessant chatter about politics, a pet topic for him, one he had honed through quiz competitions in school, the one area in which he shone.

Still, Vikas did not like the younger one. He found him entitled and bad-tempered. “All your good marks mean nothing if you don't have a good personality,” he lectured Nakul, as if a good personality could be hammered into a child with hate.

“You're too hard on him,” Deepa said at night. She lay next to him in the cabin of the bedroom, the walls pressed close with night, the TV on the side basting their bodies with light. They took some time to themselves before the boys jumped into bed with them.

He did not like being lectured by his wife. Whenever she told him he was being partial, he spent a few days ignoring both of the boys, and that's what he did now, closing his eyes and sulking into sleep before the boys climbed aboard.

He dreamed fantastically. He'd always been a dreamer. In the dreams, all the parts of his life came together. Film, family, mother, father, characters, children. Life is fragmentary but dreams are not. This is why, later, he would put so much stock in the bomb dreams.

________

A few months before the blast, Nakul stole a toy from a friend. Vikas heard about it from his schoolteacher, Sudha Ma'am, and then from Mrs. Aggarwal, the mother of the friend. “When he came over, he took Mayank's GI Joe,” she complained with a lazy, lecherous indifference, as if pleased that
this disease of immorality was spreading. “I found it in his pocket. It's not a problem—they're just boys—but I wanted to tell you.” At home, Vikas confronted Nakul. “Haven't we given you everything?” Nakul reprised his morose expression. He fiddled with the imaginary kara on his wrist. At that moment, Vikas caught sight of the satellite dish rising up from the roof of the CEO's mansion across the street, noticed how it exaggerated the dilapidation of the Khurana complex, its hanging electric wires and busted driveway.

It was impossible to make any money as an independent filmmaker in Delhi. A tight-knit circle of friends supported each other in their endeavors—got together and discussed Scorsese and Fellini and Godard, hosted film festivals and also peopled them—but the audience just did not exist. Indians sometimes read literature but there was no appetite for serious movies. The filmmakers, all idealistic middle-class types, succumbed to alcoholism, depression, poverty. One couple moved into a slum to finance their film. Years later, the female half of this couple wrote
The God of Small Things
. A novelist became the biggest star of the independent film world in India.

Vikas was well placed when compared to his cohort. He had his flat in the heart of Punjabi Delhi (Maharani Bagh, at the time of independence, when it had been founded, had been at the very outskirts; now the city in its growth had smuggled it to the center). He had money saved up from his time as a CA. He made commercials and corporate videos for brands like Amul and Nirma and Weekender. He penned a film review column for the
Pioneer
. His wife, once an aspiring actress, was supportive. And yet, while the country boomed and erupted with money, he stayed steady or declined. He had an urge to blame his self-consciousness on his kids, who were constantly demanding things, but he knew his
own mind
was warped by money.

It was only when he was deep in a project—erased by filming and writing—that his anxieties subsided. For this reason he worked all the time, kept a low profile in the colony, hardly talked to his relatives.

He took loans, finally, from his brother. This was his ultimate moment of shame. Vikas had four siblings. They were all deeply estranged. Their father had disapproved of every marriage. The siblings had been,
consequently, wild. Rekha lived in Bombay; Raakhi, in Shillong. Arun practiced dermatology in Dehra Dun. Only Rajat remained in Delhi. He too could have claimed the property in Maharani Bagh, but he had gallantly declined. Vikas felt nervous around him. Artists, who are selfish people, become anxious around the self-sacrificing. Now he was approaching him for money? Impossible. And yet he went one day with his kids to visit Rajat. Rajat was hassled too, in his Friends Colony flat, drowning in in-laws, kids, responsibilities—he could never say no to responsibilities. Quickly, with eager, wobbling hands, he counted off the cash. Rajat was happy for this connection with his unstable brother. If it takes money to bring us together, so be it.

Vikas, now flush—Rajat had given him more than necessary—spent generously on his sons, taking them to the markets: to Rio Grande in GK Market, to Sehgal Brothers in South Ex, to Honey-Money Top Sports in Lajpat Nagar. Some of it was done behind his wife's back. He wasn't honest with her about how much he'd got, and when she found out, she was incensed. Her voluble nostrils flared. She believed she deserved the money too. “How many years I've supported you and I've never asked that we take a holiday once. They're spoiled enough already. Besides, they won't be artists like you,” she said. “They'll make money.”

Why couldn't he let his wife spend? Because he had an urge to win love, and his wife's, in a way, had been won and lost a long time ago.

________

One day, he was working from the bedroom, storyboarding in a scrapbook, when Deepa came home fuming, having picked up the boys from school. From the boys' swollen rigid faces he could tell that some kind of fight had transpired in the car. Nakul's glycerin-perfect hair was ruffled. Tushar stared out angrily from his girly face, clapping his chapped lips—a rare look of defiance. Deepa sat the boys down at the dining table and then instructed Vikas to join them all.

“When I went to pick them up from school today,” she said, “first they refused to get off the bus. Then, when these two idiots got into the car, they put their blazers on their faces so that the kids in the bus wouldn't see them.
Can you believe it?” She scooped back her hair with her palm, as she did when she was furious. “They're ashamed of the Fiat.” (Vikas's old Fiat.) “They're ashamed of us.” She looked at them, at their frightened faces—though only Nakul looked contrite, while Tushar had the smirking guiltless look of a victim who has just learned how to strike back. “Shame on you two. Is this what you're learning? Do you know how many people live in poverty?”

After they had retired to their room to sulk, she said to Vikas, “You spoil them too much. You make all these documentaries about social issues—can't you teach these idiots something?” She was literally spitting. Oh, how he loved it when Deepa, who was so kind and patient, got angry! How harmless her beautiful anger was!

That day, after she had busied herself in the kitchen, Vikas drove his brats to Lajpat Nagar to explain how footpath dwellers, about whom he was planning a documentary, had such difficult lives. But as soon as he got to the crowded market, with its glut of humans, heat, concrete, moving metal cars, elbows, he realized that there was something very strange about pointing out poor people in their natural habitat to children—like they were zoo animals. He had felt it when he had done his initial research, but it was somehow more pronounced now that he had two eager schoolboys with slick gelled pompadours and black shoes and shorts with him (as punishment they'd had to bathe and dress up). Worse, when they approached one of the many tiny smelly canals in Lajpat Nagar, it was clear that the footpath dwellers were not going to put up a good show. Sitting deep in their tepees of blue crinkly tarpaulin, the men were smoking bidis and playing cards. A cobbler beat a shoe to death. The potbellied children were naked and dancing. Poverty wasn't so miserable in the winter. And Vikas realized with horror that poor people look nothing like the rich, or even the middle-class: they are a different species. To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat—at least you can see a goat being slaughtered. There is real revulsion in death. Whereas the poor keep living: dumb, insensate, nasty. They live among old newspapers, Saffola cans, Nirma bottles, Kohinoor rice sacks—brands you recognize so fiercely that you don't see them at all, that are as
familiar as any other local building material: mica, quartz, sandstone. Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering? Why aren't they frowning, or at least moaning? Vikas was almost upset at how much they were misrepresenting themselves. Then he felt bad for wanting them to be wretched—wasn't his job to humanize them? He also felt bad that he knew no statistics that he could rattle off to stupefy the boys.

They were looking at him, waiting. Finally, he took them to a shop in the Central Market, where they examined cricket bats together. The bats were as large as they were and smelled of linseed oil. Still, the boys looked grateful and were quiet, like two convicts on bail, and they were even quieter when Vikas paid for the bat. Outside, they made pretend cricket strokes with it. “He's hit a six out of the park and now Jonty's coming in to field . . . ,” Nakul whispered, commentating under his breath. Vikas rested his back against the crumbling wall of the tiny park at the center of the market and looked at the name of the shop: Honey-Money Top Sports
.
What a crazy name! he thought. What a crazy world!

Later, this shop too would burn in the bombing.

________

Back in the present, Vikas's visions continued.

Why me? he wondered, sitting on his toilet and grabbing fistfuls of his hair. Was I Hitler in my past life? Did I massacre a million people and forget? Was I Stalin, General Dyer, Cortes, or Ashoka before his conversion? He looked into the mirror and saw his unshaved mouth and upper lip and felt deeply crazy, cracked. His mind was drawn repeatedly to the
texture
of the bomb—metal, nails, heat, fire, plastic, mud: Didn't that all correspond somehow with the texture of his
life
? The gooey plasticky smell of his shower curtain? The dirty gray terrazzo of the floor? The strange oil refinery of the Fiat's engine, into which he so often had to dunk his head just to get the thing to start? The orange magenta heat into which he so often ventured with his tripod? The poorer you are, the closer you are to machines in all their nakedness and grit. The suave decoration of consumer electronics falls away. Vikas felt he understood the bomb. It was part of his world.

One day, in a great confusion, not knowing where his wife was, he found himself walking around Connaught Place. It was October and everyone's face was red and inflamed with sickness. The office workers wiped their mouths with hankies or the backs of their hands—the end of lunch. He walked about in the dust and his black pants were painted white from the bottom up. Vikas had been many times to Connaught Place—his old Arthur Andersen office had been in the market—but in all those years, he had never bothered to look up, to lift his head above the ground floor, with its old, circular, white-plaster colonial British construction and cool corridors and robust colonnades. Looking up now, he saw a big, broad, deep-blue, hot, arid metal sign that read through the hard glitter of sunlight:
STATE BANK OF INDIA
. The words were repeated underneath in Hindi. There were numbers on the board—the pin code, a phone. An insignia that might have been a peacock.

Vikas began to weep. He couldn't stop.

What was it about this sign? Something about its familiarity, perhaps—he must have seen a sign for the State Bank of India a million times in his life, on endless crossings and in the tiniest marketplace. But the feeling went deeper as Vikas stood under the big board, looking up from the tarred earth, crying into his sleeve. It was the crying of a man who is not long for this world, and for whom the tiniest signs of belonging are enough to spur a great sense of loss. The government, with its stupid boards, its multilingual blandness, its boring acronyms, had been there for him since his childhood. It had seen him grow up. Through its boards it had told him: You are here. You are in India. You exist.