The Association of Small Bombs (11 page)

Do I exist? Vikas thought. Yes. Thanks to the State Bank of India.

I have started to love anything that exudes great power, he thought. To love anything that touches me from a great distance.

And why couldn't the State Bank of India be God? Who had proof that it wasn't God? What if the government of India
was
God?

He realized that, walking randomly, he had arrived at the Arthur Andersen office. He stood outside a small door in the curving edifice of the market; beyond it, steps fed into the second floor. What would have happened
if he had kept his job as a chartered accountant? Vikas wondered now, imagining an alternative life for himself. Why was I so foolish? I must have been suffering from a fever when I resigned; that's the only thing that can explain it.

He couldn't remember in this depressed state that he had hated his job as a CA, that the work had been so dull that his body had developed phantom pains and a sinus problem to keep his overactive brain annexed while it ran helter-skelter over spreadsheets—no, what he remembered instead was the visual grandeur of the Arthur Andersen office, which annexed the entire second floor and bulged with views of the street—the windows so ancient, with such congealed glass, that you felt they were quietly weeping light. And of course the whip-smart cadet-like CAs who came every morning in their suits, looking very British and unfazed, some of them with combs still sticking out of their back pockets. The tables piled with fresh-smelling paper. Above all this, the enormous distant ceiling fans that shivered like the antennae of insects and patrolled the sprawling empire of paperwork with their breeze. . . .

In the afternoons Vikas would go down the corridor and lean against the cool, hard plaster wall, feeling dizzy. When people passed by he'd rakishly bunch up his hair with one hand, cock his head to the side, and nod—his way of waving stylishly, though every time he did it he felt fake: it was not an original gesture but one he had stolen from a friend who was something of a playboy. Does everyone steal gestures? Vikas wondered. The workers in the corridor were bright and vigorous, moving with the assurance of people who know that the great horror of their lives—the big exams, their private world wars—are behind them. Yet they too must have been the sum of small thefts. The years of your chartered accountancy exams were years of nervousness, where you were still a child. You had a constant sense of falling. You were in the trenches with your guidebooks but when you came out you were on your own, dodging multiple-choice bullets. Meanwhile your self-esteem fluctuated. Some of your friends who had done wiser things—engineering or family business, for example—might already be married, and when you came into the company of these people you
naturally looked up to them. . . . Or no. This theory was flawed. If Vikas had to be honest with himself he had stolen gestures aspirationally, from the people he knew he would never be, like Prabhat the playboy. And more weirdly, he had stolen gestures from people whose hand motions or mannerisms he had initially found ugly, loud, objectionable, weird. Dilip Patrekar, for example. The man had a loud hyena laugh: not exactly infectious. Within a year Vikas was emitting the laugh as well. Same with his college friend Mahinder, the sardar: a short, stout character with unblinking psychopath eyes, but popular nevertheless and a great success with girls . . . he would often make a gesture while talking in which he held one hand out and rotated it endlessly, as if rubbing a cricket ball against the air—really, it was a way of giving artificial momentum to a story that may be boring, and you could track how far along you were in the story by how much the rotation had sped up: the faster it was, the further along you were, and when it stopped, the story stopped, and the net effect was quite satisfying. So Vikas had stolen this as well.

Some more people passed by; he bunched up his hair and nodded again.

You have to stop that, he scolded himself. You have to be original.

When the next woman passed by, he was no longer leaning rakishly against the wall but standing with his arms crossed looking straight ahead, like a cadet.

The woman passed. He felt a touch on his shoulder. “Are you OK?”

It was another woman, a thin, slight, dark girl, who was a secretary.

“Yes,” he said, smiling. He tapped his head. “Just thinking.”

The woman burst into a bright smile, revealing an endearing set of crooked teeth. “Sorry, you just looked like an Egyptian mummy. I wanted to make sure you weren't having a seizure.”

“A seizure?” said Vikas. “Do people stand like this when they're having seizures?”

“I saw it in a movie.” She grinned.

“In a movie! So of course it must be true!” He meant it to be wry, but it came out sounding cruel, and he was relieved when she played along and smiled.

“An American movie, no less!” she said, shaking her head.

“Ah, the Americans and their seizures,” he said vaguely, feeling bad that he was such a bad flirt and so easily embarrassed by women. “What movie was it, actually?”

“This new movie; you probably haven't heard of it. It's called
Mean Streets
.”

He paused. “Of course.
Mean Streets
. By Martin Scorsese. From 1973.”

“I wasn't sure how to pronounce it,” she said, looking surprised.

“I haven't seen it, actually—I've read about it. I heard it was very good. Did you see it at the Rivoli film festival last month? I wanted to see it.”

“Yes,” she said. “Rivoli.”

Vikas looked at the girl more carefully. The first thing about her was that she was a little darker than the sort of girl that Vikas would have wanted to date or marry. The second thing was that she was pretty. She had a small strawberry-shaped face with high cheekbones, big, liquid eyes, and a crooked goofy smile—in some ways it was a cartoonish face. He had never noticed before how small and delicate this girl's face was, because, when he had spotted her occasionally across the office, what stood out was her cascading curly hair, so uncommon in North India, and the fact that, unlike the Punjabi secretaries, she wore skirts and loose shirts with big starched collars. “What's your name, remind me?”

“Deepa. Deepa Thomas.”

So she was a Christian; that explained it. Vikas, who was a serious man, decided to cut off his flirtation. He crossed his arms again. “Very nice to meet you, Deepa.”

________

When Vikas, standing outside the office in CP, thought back on this memory, with its innocence, its inarticulate posturing, its sudden movement toward the common love of cinema, it made him cry.

Maybe it was my destiny to suffer.

But I could have ignored her. Instead I sought her out.

A week after meeting Deepa, Vikas had become silently infatuated with her. It was not an uncommon development for him. He spoke to girls so
infrequently and was generally such a shy character that a pretty face and a few flirtatious words were enough to make him tipsy with love. Often he would begin fantasizing deep into the future about women—courtship, sex, marriage, the works—and with Deepa it was the same: he must have written several imaginary novels' worth of conversation with her in his head in that first week of infatuation. He also rebuked himself for his silliness.

She might have a boyfriend, he told himself.

She might be married
.

She's a Christian, for God's sake—you can't go steady with her!

What will Mummy and Daddy say when you tell them you're going to marry a South Indian?

And your friends, won't they judge you also?

He began to rail against his friends.
What a judgmental, bigoted bunch I've been blessed with. Not one intellectual or broad-minded fellow in the whole lot of them. They all watch movies and read pondy mags and fantasize about all sorts of women but when it comes to marriage they'll be marrying the usual fat Punjabi kuddis. . . .
He suddenly felt very brave, like he was an activist hired by the government to promote national integration in a stubbornly segregationist Indian subcontinent.

Then a week passed. She made no effort to talk to him and was busy walking around the office twirling her hair with a finger, her crisp skirts making a sound like grains being raked, and Vikas began to feel nervous. What if she was about to quit? What if one of these British-looking fellows had designs on her? In the office Vikas had calculated that about fifteen men were better-looking and more articulate than he, while the other seventy were not; of course, he believed himself to be the most brilliant, with the best taste.
Your taste won't matter if you do nothing with it. If you just sit.
He thought of his playboy friend Prabhat, who was just finishing his specialization in pediatrics, and from whom he had stolen so many gestures.
Prabhat flirts with everyone: girls, aunties, babies, men, children. He has no shame at all.
Prabhat's lack of shame was amusing and endearing. He was in a sense an ecumenical playboy. In college in Delhi he had dated a couple of fantastically ugly coconut–hair oil types from Haryana—fellow medical students
who, Vikas had said unkindly, should consider specializing in the medicine of self–plastic surgery. But then Prabhat had also snagged an air hostess and a TV newscaster, and in fact was now engaged to the latter.
Bloody lucky fellow, with his good looks, his height, his hair which stands up on end . . .

Vikas went one day to Deepa's desk doing a full medley of Prabhat gestures: tousling his hair into thick black twisting flames; stooping a little, as if he were a tall man; and looking off to the side as he spoke, as if deeply distracted by the galloping machinery of his intellect. “Deepa, hi. Oh—I saw
Mean Streets
, by the way. It's bloody brilliant, man.”

She looked up from her desk. “Isn't it? I love that scene in the billiards place.”

“Yeah, yeah, what amazing camerawork,” he said, fumbling—he hadn't seen it. “Only thing was—I had a bad print. I saw it on my cousin's VCR and there was that normal PAL/NTSC problem.” He continued, “Someone should bring new wave to India also.”

“Indian men aren't handsome enough to pull off new wave stuff,” she laughed.

“Insult, yaar. Insult.”

“I'm joking, yaar,” she said. She picked up a piece of paper and began signing it. “One minute,” she said, and signed something else.

Vikas waited with his hands on his hips, wondering if the crowd of CAs was surveying him. To distract himself, he dished out more of his hair from his scalp and looked up at the ceiling. It occurred to him that there was something brilliant about Prabhat's gestures: he'd taken a host of normal nervous tics and transformed them into something sexy and unpredictable and moody.

“You love touching your hair,” Deepa said, interrupting.

“No, no,” Vikas said. “It just distracts me.”

“What happened to your thumbs?” she said.

“Oh this?” he said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. There were two gashes, like mini eyes, on the sides of both his thumbs. “I scratch my thumbs when I'm bored and sometimes they peel off.” He had been doing it a lot recently, thinking of Deepa.

“It's quite deep,” she said, taking his hands in hers and turning them over, like he was a child being examined for dirt by his mother.

Vikas felt a wild electric charge shoot through him. I wonder what the other CAs are thinking, he thought. But he let her look at the thumbs. These Christian girls, he thought. So fast. No wonder Mahinder the sardar was always going on about them.

She let his hands go and seemed to nod in a deep, knowing way. “I have many nervous tics also,” she said. “I bite my nails. I also pick at my face.” She grinned crookedly. For the first time Vikas noticed how properly filed her nails were, though they were bloodless and devoid of nail polish. The fingers were fragile-looking and wiry and veined with bluish-green vessels, and when Vikas looked at her face again he could suddenly see the vessels crisscrossing her large forehead, throbbing things like the pressings of stems in a scrapbook, the skin of the forehead already crinkled. She was just a mesh of blood, he thought, with pity. A fragile biological creature.

Vikas said, “Have you seen any films by Bergman, by the way?”

“Bergman? Let's see.
Scenes from a Marriage. Persona. Virgin Spring
.
Through a Glass Darkly
. So yes. Four.”

Vikas was truly amazed. “That's more than I've seen, man! I've just seen
Scenes from a Marriage
and
Persona
.” He said, “He's a total genius, no?”

“I agree.”

He went on, “Sorry—I don't know why I brought him up. I just thought, given that you liked Scorsese, you might like Bergman.” This was nonsense and he knew it. He had brought up Bergman because
Fanny and Alexander
was playing at a festival at Kamani, and he wanted to see if she was going, but he had lost his courage. “Anyway, I'm glad you like Bergman; it makes me happy someone else watches him also.”

“I think he's quite famous, no?”

“Not here,” he said, indicating the CAs.

She smiled at him with her eyes and nodded back. It took Vikas a second to realize that she was gesturing about her approaching boss. “Chalo,” he said. “We'll talk later.” But then he didn't move. He was past embarrassment. The boss came and went. Six months later, they were
married.

T
he bomb became the most significant thing that had happened to Mansoor, cleaving his life into before and after. His hearing got worse for a while, cleaned out by the violent finger of the bomb. He wore a cast on his right arm for two months.

Mansoor's pain came in enormous fuzzy waves in his arm, doubling him over in his bed. At other times it was a claw of lightning, rapacious and singular, turning his limbs wet from the inside as he walked about the house in his pajamas. When he lingered with his parents at the dining table, a constant drizzle of electricity shocked his arm, and in the mornings his muscles turned sluggish with cement, and wet sand filled the gap between tendons.

When he recalled the day of the bomb, his eyes filled with tears. He hadn't known till then how selfish he was, and when he felt bad for the boys, it was undercut by a feeling that he was performing for God. And because he felt God could see him he was doubly guilty.

It was lucky, his parents said, that the blast happened in the middle of the summer holidays, giving him time to heal. But maybe, Mansoor would think later, when he was older, his life in ruins, maybe it wasn't. Had he been forced back to school, forced to confront the mundane dribble of homework and unit tests and weekly exams, he might have recovered faster. Instead he stayed home that summer—disturbed, upset, coddled, winched by nightmares, remembering the bomb, the boys as they lay next to the twisted car door, dropped and broken, and of course their faces before, the
moments before, when they'd all been trudging through the market like heroes, talking about the prices of trump cards and bats, and he'd felt irritated at Nakul for acting so certain and authoritative.
I know you're not rich
, he'd wanted to say.
Why do you act it
? But he'd said nothing. His mind whipped back to the bomb, the meaninglessness of it.

His parents took him everywhere that summer—mosques, dargahs, the Bahá'i temple. Before, they had believed in nothing; now they believed in everything. He was happy to be escorted to these places in the air-conditioned Esteem, but when he found himself in a crowd his heart thundered, his palms sweated, and he looked around at the swirling faces of the devotees. “Mama, please let's go home,” he begged.

“Of course, beta,” she said, shouting for the driver, who always appeared with a knowing smirk on his face, as if he did not respect his rich young master's problems.

After that, the holy men trooped home: fakirs, maulvis, sufis, vaids, and the like. Mansoor, his thin legs tucked beneath his knees, said prayers with all of them, letting them press their old-man hands to his head for benediction and drinking whatever potions they offered.

He liked staying home, in the ground-floor flat in South Ex with its emporium-like drawing room crowded with exotic teak furniture from Burma and Indonesia (Afsheen's father had been in the foreign service and she had grown up partly in Burma). He had no desire to venture out again into the misery of Delhi. When news of the blast welled in the papers, he avoided it, scrambling the pages in a nervous blur till he was at
Garfield
and
Beetle Bailey
.

Then, just like that, one day, school began. He was twelve and had places to be.

On the first day of school, he was driven from home in a car by the driver, his parents lapsed on either side of him, his father's head tilted back and fingers on his lips as he looked out the burning window, a man fulfilling his duty with seriousness and without ceremony, his mother more involved, upright and relaxed and cooing, bringing her cold and fragrant Nivea hands to his forehead. Mansoor smirked proudly as the car gathered the
familiar landmarks on the way to school: AIIMS, Bhikaji Cama Place, the sandstone nub of the Hyatt Hotel. He assumed this was special treatment, bound to be suspended in favor of the school bus the minute he was settled into his routine, but when he got ready the next morning, the driver was waiting for him again.

The bomb had killed his friends. But it had improved his life.

________

The children at Vasant Valley School had by now gone through several phases with regard to the bomb, not so different from society itself. Nor were they strangers to bombs, the idea of bombs. Every year some joker called the principal's office, said a bomb was hidden in a classroom, and everyone poured into the field till the threat had been neutralized. It was always the most memorable day of the year.

So—the children, on summer holiday, had heard about Mansoor and been shocked, or rather tried to act as shocked as their shocked parents; had been bewildered or not based on their experiences with death; and then had forgotten. When they got to school, many were convinced that the deaths of the Khurana boys and Mansoor's injury were just rumors, like those you sometimes heard about fast senior girls having sex with hoodlums who had finished school. These children were soon proven wrong, giving rise to another round of bewilderment: What could this small Muslim boy have to do with the exploding market? How could he have survived?

“Bhainchod, did you set it off?” one senior with a bobbing Adam's apple asked.

Mansoor looked at him with confused, cautious eyes.

________

Mansoor's panic attacks in public spaces did not go away—they got worse. It was absurd, he told his mother, that there was no security in school to protect against terrorists and miscreants, and he was constantly on the lookout for suspicious bulging backpacks; he started violently if a football smashed against the grilles on the churchy windows, grilles designed specially to repel such invasions. In the break period he showed the wound on his right arm to his friends—a long smear of fibrous reddish skin hanging
over his veins with the glistening clarity of egg white. Classmates surrounded him at all hours in the brick buildings of the school. It didn't bring popularity but rather a sort of bland notoriety. He felt like a freak. He was still the only Muslim in school and he wanted to hide.

He got the chance with physiotherapy. In a clinic in Safdarjung Enclave, he lay in a cube of curtains, tortured by tinny Hindustani classical music as a slight woman in a lab coat lathered his wrists with cold goo and ran the feeler of an ultrasonic machine over them. Adults with decomposing bodies moaned around him in adjacent cubes. In this house of pain, he too was a grown-up. His physiotherapist was a South Indian lady named Jaya—his first experience with South Indians apart from Deepa Khurana. “You're Muslim?” she asked, clearly startled. “You don't look Muslim.” But she relaxed when he mentioned the blast. “It's very bad. These days one can't live in this country.” She was one of those people who are lost within themselves. She told him the same story over and over about how her brother worked in information technology in Houston and how she had visited him there. “There is a very high standard of living there,” she said. She asked the same questions every time, as if discovering anew that there was a patient there. “You also want to study IT, no? There's a big scope in it.” He lay impatiently in bed. Afterwards, he went with his mother for a walk through Deer Park, happy among the vaguely caged animals—deer, peacocks, rabbits, the moving rubbish of stray dogs and cats, the mynahs with their minimal beauty.

________

When the terrorists were arrested, Mansoor asked, “But Papa, what if they get out of jail?”

“There's a strict sentence for terrorism,” Sharif reassured him. Though he himself was wondering whether the right men had been captured; there was already talk among the Muslim intellectuals he knew, professors at Jamia, that the police had rounded up innocents as “terrorists”; that they had planted a stepney, a spare tire, in the room of a couple of papier-mâché artisans in Bhogal and arrested their fourteen-year-old cousin, who
had come for his summer vacation to Delhi from Srinagar; that the other arrested men had been in custody even before the blast.

“Look, the thing is, they didn't do any of the arrests with an independent witness present,” Rizwan Ali, a professor at Jamia, told him. “Without that, the case falls apart. There's zero credibility. Now, Sharif-sahb, we also want that the people be brought to book—that's the goal. But I have a fear, having seen these cases before, that you'll find the same problem here.”

“Bhaijaan, it's none of our business. We're just happy that our son survived.”

But when Sharif went home from this gathering in the Zakir Bagh apartments and saw his son, he became fearful. He sat behind Mansoor on the floor as he played his Mega Drive (his wrist had healed just enough that he could click a controller) and parted his son's hair in the peculiar way his own mother had once parted
his
hair, closing his fingers together into a spoon and running them from the part to the ear over and over again.

“Can you scratch a little also, Papa?” Mansoor asked, not turning around.

“Of course!”

That night, Sharif told his wife, “Watch your spending—we should send him to America for college when he grows up.”