The Association of Small Bombs (13 page)

But the pain did not go away; it got worse. In the middle of his third semester in college, unable to function, he returned to India to recuperate.

“H
ow can it still be there?” his mother asked the doctor at the clinic in Safdarjung, blinking furiously.

The doctor was a stately Sikh who dressed in white shirts with matching white turbans; he worked with a lot of embassies. The great endorsement of anyone in Delhi: he works with embassies.

“Sometimes it takes years to heal,” he said, clearly occupied by other problems: financial ones, maybe; he had an undoctor-like anxiety in his eyes.

“I don't understand why it's coming back now, at this moment. The last time we came, if you remember, the checkup said everything was OK.”

Mama
, Mansoor wanted to say,
it's not his fault.

The patient sardar doctor gave a long explanation about pain and muscle growth and computer usage.

And so Mansoor was consigned again to the cube of curtains, back again with Jaya telling the same proud, unbelieving stories about her brother in Houston—only this time he was older and taller, five feet seven, the bed barely fitting under him. And he felt not comfort in the balmed air as he had in the past, but panic—panic that life was passing him by.

________

It was at this time that the Khuranas invited Mansoor over for tea.

“Why do they want to meet me now?” he asked, suspicious, in pain, churlish.

“They're curious about you,” his mother said. “You're a grown-up now.
They want an individual equation with you.” She became dreamy speaking about the Khuranas.

“Yaah but—” Mansoor was not convinced. He argued and debated the visit with his mother. Finally, on a windswept, befogged afternoon, the sort in which all of Delhi is wearing a sweater of atmospheric dirt, he went over with the driver to see the Khuranas.

The Khuranas still lived in the old flat in the Khurana complex, with the large windows looking out onto the mansions of Maharani Bagh, and the sofas rearranged to create an illusion of progress. The Khuranas welcomed him with a big tea—samosas, pakoras, granular chutneys. They hadn't aged much either—tragedy had given them an odd guilelessness, Vikas Uncle looking hyper as ever with his large buzzing forehead and thinning hair, the black pencil mustache imported from the Kissan Ketchup commercials, which, Mansoor now remembered, he had directed; and Deepa Auntie thin and shy and self-effacing, constantly wiping her upper lip with the end of her sheer dupatta, smiling, her crooked teeth showing through the cloud of cloth. As for Anusha, she must have been five now. Round-eyed, cute, a tiny black twist of a bun spilling out from her boyish hair, she walked about with her back excessively curved, slapping the ground hard as children do.

It was weird to be back here, accepting tea, flinching from the pain in his right wrist.

After asking him about his injury, the Khuranas, obviously glad to talk to someone who didn't need background, filled him in on the details of the trial, which was still going on—in its sixth year. The adjournments were ridiculous, they said. The government had let them down repeatedly. The prosecutor had been arrested for sexual assault. One session was called off because a stray dog wandered into the court and bit a policeman. Worst of all—“No word about the compensation.”

“Still?” asked Mansoor, his teeth jumping from the overly sweetened tea, the dust of the city pouring into the drawing room from all sides in long mineral sunlit shafts. The glaring sunlight of Delhi—he had not missed this in the U.S., not one bit.

“Ask your papa,” Vikas Uncle said, snorting. “Nothing. He and I've both gone many times to the thana. But the blast happened at such a strange time—the BJP had only been in power for a week and they were gone a week later—that no one took responsibility for it. That's also luck.”

“But it's not that much, is it?” Mansoor said and immediately regretted it. They were not as well off as he was.

“It's a matter of principle,” Vikas Uncle said.

Though he looked devastated.

“Yes, of course,” Mansoor said, feeling bad. “I should look into it as well. I was so small then, I had no idea what was happening.”

“They should be paying you for these wrist problems you're having,” Deepa Auntie said, piping up from her large sofa chair. “We would get them to pay for Uncle's back problems but he wasn't present, so it doesn't count.” Mansoor had heard about Vikas's back—how he suffered debilitating pain. But he didn't connect it with his own pain.

Mansoor sat shaking his tense head, ingratiating as always.

Suddenly, Deepa Auntie started crying.

“Auntie,” he said.

“It's OK,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

He bent over his tea, his wrists aching. He knew he brought back memories of her boys—how could he not? His whole existence was a rebuke to the idea that their deaths were inevitable. Why them and not him? Why two of them and zero of him?

“You're wrong,” his mother had said, when he'd said this to her before leaving. “They
want
to see people who remember the boys.”

“Their classmates remember them too.” The Khurana boys and he had been in different schools. This was one reason they were friends. Mansoor, when he saw them, was free from the baggage of reputation that attached itself to him in school, where he was taunted for being a Muslim, dubbed “mullah” and “Paki” and “mosquito.”

“But you should go,” his mother had said. “Do your duty. Don't worry
about the outcome. When you lose someone, you think of them all the time anyway. You'll change nothing. You'll make them feel less alone, less crazy.”

Mansoor remembered this now and yet felt uncomfortable. “Auntie, I should go home—Mummy likes eating dinner early,” he said in the dusty drawing room, the walls shaking from renovation and construction happening elsewhere. Mansoor knew the sounds so well from years of living in Delhi that he could picture the machines—large cement mixers and pile drivers. Delhi has no bird-watchers, only machine-listeners.

“No, no, stay a little while more,” she said. Now he'd made her feel guilty about crying. Fuck.

Pulling back her graying hair, she brought out a photo album with a dizzying fluorescent green and maroon cover. “Here are pictures of you and the boys at the Sports Day in Maharani Bagh,” she said, opening to a plastic page with two photos jammed at sad angles inside it. But her eyes were blurry; she left the pictures open too long; she was lost.

When Mansoor was leaving, Vikas Uncle said, “I want to give you something.” They went to the bathroom together. This was Vikas Uncle's studio, a space that had been converted after the boys' deaths—what was the use, after all, of two toilets? Above, water bled gauntly through the pipes, and notebooks lay in an abject circle on the floor around the toilet column. The bathing area was a chaos of equipment—black pieces of angled metal, tripods, cameras in their plastic hoods. From this pile Vikas Uncle fished out a bulky Minolta camera with a silver focus. “I'd kept it for the boys,” he said. “But I want you to have it.”

“No, uncle. Where will I use it?”

“Take it,” he said. “I know digital is in fashion these days, but the quality you can get from this is unparalleled. I've photographed some very beautiful ladies with this camera, when I was doing shoots for
Cosmo
.”

________

Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle's movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived
enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They're so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle's sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself.

“But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently.

________

“They gave you another thing?” his mother said when he came home. “They shouldn't have. Anyway, their finances aren't so good. Deepa was saying that these days, because there's a new distribution system, it's very difficult to get financing for art films.”

“I'm so old now,” Mansoor said, which was neither here nor there.

“Let me keep it,” she said, taking the camera from him.

He knew what would happen—it would disappear, like all the things Vikas Uncle had given him over the years. His mother had immense empathy for the Khuranas, but like so many people, she was superstitious about death, cautious about not letting it sneak into her house.

N
ow, for the first time as an adult, Mansoor became curious about the Lajpat Nagar case. Then one day, on the way back from physio, having read in the newspaper that a hearing was scheduled in Patiala House, he directed the driver to take him to the court.

Mansoor had never been to the courts before—those barracks of Indian life crammed behind the colonial facades of Lutyens's Delhi—but he had a chacha who was a lawyer and had heard a great deal about the institution. When his parents rang him on his mobile, he silenced it. He wanted time to himself.

He got out of the car and, after lightly acknowledging the guard at the entrance, walked through the open bricked corridors with their searching blind fingers of dead trees, their groggy supplicants in red and white sweaters. Through his swimming nervous vision he saw signs indicating the names of the courtrooms. Finally, he entered a courtroom the size of a classroom. At the front of the room, two lawyers in their penguinlike garb, their backs turned to the audience, were murmuring to the judge, who bent his head down from his high boatlike desk. When Mansoor sat down in the last row, his wrists almost spiritual with pain, one of the lawyers twisted around for a second and then went back to talking. A few moments later, several hassled-looking men with sweat-soaked shirts appeared at the door, carrying what seemed to be a Chinese changing screen, the type behind which naked women are always banished in old movies. Now the lawyers turned around completely. The men began to set up the screen near the front of the room.

“The proceeding is in camera,” the judge said suddenly.

There was a commotion and throat-clearing in the aisles next to Mansoor.

“In camera,” he repeated, irritated.

People began to rise.

“You have to get up,” a woman in a smart pantsuit instructed Mansoor.

Perplexed, having exited, Mansoor lingered now by the tea stall outside the Sessions Court, watching the dhaba-wallah fry samosas in a deep wok. He was in a philosophical mood, thinking back to the stories the Khuranas had told about the adjournments.

“You good name?” a voice interrupted him.

Mansoor turned around to see himself facing a man with a squashed, eager look about him; a neckless fellow with crooked teeth bejeweling his gums. Mansoor recognized him from the courtroom.

Mansoor mumbled, “Hello.”

“My name is Naushad,” the man said quickly, placing a palm on his chest. “I work for an NGO, Peace For All.” Peace For All, according to Naushad, focused on “communal harmony” and was looking to provide a just, speedy trial for the men arrested for the 1996 blast. “You're a journalist?” he asked Mansoor.

“No, no—just a visitor,” Mansoor said, smiling slightly, now understanding the reason for his forwardness.

“You have a relative in the case?” Naushad asked in Hindi.

“No.” Mansoor smiled again. He crushed the paper cup and chucked it into a bin, where it parachuted into a ridge between other crushed cups. “I just wanted to watch. Anyone can come. But I should go.”

“But people don't really come just like that—that's why I was asking. But you're a Muslim, no?”

“Yes,” Mansoor said, amazed at this religious clairvoyance. But he was gifted with it too; he had somehow known Naushad was a Muslim before he announced his name. “Actually I was a victim of the blast,” Mansoor said. “But I don't have any connection with the case.”

“
You
were injured in the blast?” Naushad said, pointing a finger down at the ground in surprise.

Mansoor nodded. “I was small. But I got shrapnel in my arm.”

At that moment, Mansoor felt he had pulled out a trump card; that he had absolved himself of suspicion in the eyes of the dhaba-wallah, who had been listening to the exchange in an absent way; sopping up the conversation the way his samosas were sopping up oil.

“Don't take this the wrong way,” Naushad said, clearly excited. “But you can really help us.” He launched into an explanation. “We've been working for two or three years for people to give attention to the locked-up men. Everyone knows—even the judges—that the wrong men have been arrested. You can read it in the documents: there was no independent witness present when they were arrested. That's why they keep adjourning. But the issue is that after 9/11 and the Parliament attack, no one wants to help these people. ‘They're bloody terrorists; let them rot,' they say. But, bhai, they haven't even been proven to be terrorists! One is a papier-mâché artisan. Another was a student in class eight when he came to Delhi to stay with his brothers. And the last one, he used to work with his family in a carpet shop in Kathmandu. These people's lives have been ruined, and now six years have passed without a trial. So we're making an effort to bring out the story in the press. And look, if someone like you, an educated person, a victim—if you say something, imagine how much more of a difference it'll make. Let me write my name and e-mail and phone on a chit”—he had already taken out a tattered lined paper and was pressing a pen into it against a timber column in the tea shop—“and if you want to help please phone us or e-mail us. Here you go.” He handed Mansoor the chit. “As salaam aleikum,” he said.

“Wa aliekum as salaam,” Mansoor said.

________

Mansoor liked that the man did not press him, but it was also one of many encounters during a sullen winter and he did not make much of it. Instead, at home, Mansoor focused on coaxing his injured limbs to life, dipping his arms in alternating casseroles of hot and cold water and pulling up his sweater sleeves, his feet feeling cuffed to the marble floor. When he doused his arms in the water, his back ached; his body parts jostled and screamed
for attention. When one part improved, the other took on the mantle of pain. Jaya explained that the computer, because of the intensity of attention it demanded, turned the muscles into hard microchips.

He was in the middle of this ritual when he got a call from his friend Darius.

Darius had been a schoolmate of Mansoor's, but not someone he'd been particularly close with—whom had he been close with?—and so when Darius came on the phone, Mansoor was oddly excited.

“How are you, Mansoor?”

“Fit, yaar,” he said, turning back into the anxious-to-please second-tier-popular student he'd been in school.

They talked for a while about an elderly art teacher who had recently died of a stroke—she was a chain-smoking radical leftist who had made them paint antinuclear signs (
INDIA: NO CLEAR POLICY
) for half a year after the Pokhran tests—and then Darius said, “So I'm calling because you met my friend Naushad.”

It turned out that after a year at St. Stephen's studying history, Darius had become an activist. “Anyway,” Darius went on, “he told me about his idea of getting you involved and I think it would be excellent. In fact I had told him about you at one point but I didn't know you had come back to Delhi.”

Mansoor felt a dip in his mood. “Yaah, it's a health issue.”

“Anyway,” Darius said in his unhearing way, “it's a great group of people, very smart, and you'll like Tara, who runs it. A Dipsite but she's very eloquent. Anyway, I think these people are making quite a bit of difference. Wouldn't hurt to come for at least one meeting.”

________

Mansoor didn't want to go, but he had never really learned to say no, even after what had happened in the market with the Khurana boys, and so, on a rainy afternoon, he went over to the nursing home in Defence Colony where the group met—Tara's mother, a doctor, ran the hospital.

The nursing home was a wide dish of a building smarting of disinfectant; the smell seemed to have struck dead the stunted palms in the front. Shivering, Mansoor climbed the stairs past the rooms with their sounds of
conspiring patients and came to a bare room full of men and women sitting cross-legged in a circle. “You can sit down anywhere,” a woman said, her sharp canines visible. She was attractive, in a fair vampirish way, and must have been Tara.

Darius and Naushad got up and introduced Mansoor, who put his palms together, like a politician.

There were twenty people in all, most of them his age, some wearing checked shirts and pants, the women in modest salwar kameezes, a few heads dotted with skullcaps, gol topis, the Muslim women identifiable by their coquettish pink head scarfs.

Tara, after a brief explanation of what the group did—she said it had first formed in response to the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat earlier that year—asked Mansoor to speak. He suddenly became confused about why he was there. “I actually don't know that much about the blast. I was quite small when it happened.”

“But you were hurt, right?”

“I was injured. And that's why I've come back, for treatment. The bigger issue was that my two friends died.” The room hushed; Mansoor hadn't mentioned this to Naushad—nor, apparently, had Darius, who, like many people Mansoor knew, had forgotten the aching detail of the two dead boys. The bomb survived through the living, not the dead. “Tushar and Nakul Khurana,” Mansoor said, savoring the Hindu names in this secular atmosphere. “I'd gone with them, and when the blast happened, near the framing shop, they died instantly. I had to run back all the way to my house in South Ex.” Sensing that people were impressed, he went on. “I was in a lot of pain—even my fillings in my teeth had fallen out—and I also felt a lot of guilt, even though I think they died instantly. I was twelve. I'm not sure what I could have done.”

“Poor boys,” one woman said, shaking her head.

“Yaah, but what's more horrible is that other innocents are suffering,” Mansoor said, suddenly finding the thread. “That's why I came.”

The group filled him in on what, exactly, they'd achieved with regard to the 1996 blast. Through filing petitions and engaging public litigation
lawyers, they'd managed to bring the case before a board that dealt with TADA and POTA cases. They were also selectively targeting corrupt policemen who arrested former informers and innocent Kashmiris whenever there was a terrorist event. “The police aren't happy about that, and they're going to come after us,” a man named Ayub said, clearly looking forward to this drama. He seemed like one of the leaders of the group—a tall man with impervious dark skin, sandy hair, and an unplaceable class background, though Mansoor assumed he was lower class. “But the thing you can do for us,” Ayub went on, “is write petitions and editorials. You know, the hardest thing in this media environment is getting a word in the papers or the press. But someone like you, eloquent, studying abroad, a nonthreatening Muslim—people will be interested to hear what you say.”

Mansoor wasn't sure if he should be flattered by the word
nonthreatening
, but he straightened his posture and looked at Tara, who was picking at her bare feet, the heart-shaped frond of hair on the top of her head visible, crisscrossed by several partings.

Everyone but Mansoor was barefoot in the cold room, with its single bed pressed against the wall, suggesting it had once been a guest room. The shelves were empty except for weirdly out-of-place religious tomes in Sanskrit, bound in red. “I can consider that,” Mansoor said, though he instantly tensed up, thinking of what the Khuranas and his parents would say.

________

At the end of the meeting, Tara and Ayub came up to him.

“So you're based in the U.S.?” Tara asked. Ayub stood a little behind her, smiling.

“Yeah.”

Tara said she had studied abroad too, at Carnegie Mellon, where she'd majored in psychology. “What I loved about the U.S. was how open it was to the humanities. I would not have developed any consciousness had I not gone there.”

He liked how unpretentious she was. “Me as well.”

Ayub now stepped forward. “How long are you in Delhi?” he asked.

“A few months,” Mansoor said, standing up on his toes; Ayub was taller than him.

“Then you should come with me tomorrow,” Ayub said.

________

The wives and mothers of the accused had long since moved to Delhi from Kashmir to lobby for their husbands' or sons' release, and so the next day, setting off with his driver, Mohammed, Mansoor picked up Ayub from outside Tikona Park and they drove together to a small alley in Batla House overflowing with mud and gravel smeared on the ground from abandoned construction. At the far end of the alley, schoolboys, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, poured out of an unfinished concrete building in their tired school uniforms, their socks drooping, their bags like the surreal burdens of soldiers. Their presence in the alley created an alertness, an impression of a herd of blind, ambling animals, of uncontrolled life, and for a second Mansoor was nostalgic for his school days. But looking at the boys again, their smallness, their jutting confidence, their scramble of limbs—restless, pumping, pointing, shooting everywhere, gesticulating for no reason, grabbing cones of chana from each other—their tense flowing energy, the symphony of gestures, all this filled him with fear and sadness: how ill equipped one was to deal with pain at that age! The ghosts of Tushar and Nakul flashed through the crowd: fat and thin, retiring, sharp. All crowds of a certain age contained them. Mansoor found himself praying for these poor Jamia schoolboys.

After leading him to another alley, Ayub ushered Mansoor into a small room that looked like the waiting area of a homeopath. When they'd been driving over, Ayub had told him he was taking him to the office of a friend's Islamic venture capitalist fund, which the friend allowed Ayub to use on weekends. “What does Islamic VC mean, exactly?” Mansoor had asked.

“It's a normal venture fund,” Ayub said, “but you only invest in Sharia-approved companies. So, for example, if a company is involved in processing pork, you won't invest in it.”

“What about a company that generates interest?”