The Association of Small Bombs (21 page)

“Yaah,” Mansoor said. “But God will show a way out.” Suddenly embarrassed, he asked, “How was returning home for you in other respects?”

Ayub was disarmed by the question. “It was good. My father is trying to sell organic vegetables. He's ahead of his time, but it was good to spend time with him. It humbles you, to be with your parents, to realize you're not as original as you think. I had always thought I was being a big renegade by being an activist, but it's probably a bigger rebellion to sell organic goods in Azamgarh. Now he wants to provide updates to farmers through his mobile.” He smiled. “The only problem is that both him and my mother are becoming blind. They both had diabetes but they got into this naturopathy business and didn't do any of the things the doctors told them. As I say this I realize their attitude isn't so different from mine. I too probably would have done something like that, with my suspicion of science. I guess what I'm saying is that I'm my parents' child.”

“What about your brothers?” Mansoor asked.

“They're both in Dubai. They send money to my parents but they hardly come. I don't blame them. When you grow up in Azamgarh, all you want to do is escape it. People are confused why I came back.”

Why did you? Mansoor wanted to ask, but said nothing.

Ayub put a hand on his forehead. “I feel feverish.” But what he meant to say was, How did it happen? How did my gift for speech suddenly return?

________

Mansoor tried to bring Ayub along to the Peace For All meetings, but Ayub refused. Mansoor thought, “He'll come around; it's God's will.” In the meantime, the two men prayed together, with Mansoor happily leading the way.

________

It was turning out to be a hideous October, an October of dengue and death, and the waiting grew longer and Ayub's days as a guest stretched on. He was only allowed to contact Tauqeer through a cybercafe using a new Hotmail account every time, but he was given no answer beyond: wait.

“How long is your friend staying?” Sharif asked Mansoor one day.

Mansoor snapped, “How does it matter?”

________

Ayub visited many parts of Delhi, did all the sightseeing he'd never bothered with before, and wondered if this waiting too was a kind of test—to
see if he would give up and go to the police. Certainly he'd had a lot of time to consider what he was doing—and he'd come to the very reasonable conclusion it was indefensible, and that Delhi would respond to a bomb the way it responded to everything: with indifference. He saw the point now of a large attack like 9/11. It guaranteed you were taken seriously. It made sure death wasn't wasted, as Tauqeer had implied. But what would a big attack, a 9/11, look like in this city? As he contemplated these ideas in Mansoor's house in South Ex, he felt he was losing his mind, splitting in two, the difference between his polite exterior self and the violence inside growing too great. He felt an actual line passing through the center of his face, splitting it into left and right.

“My job search has still not yielded anything,” he said for the millionth time after coming home from a day of sightseeing.

“Maybe I can help you,” Sharif said one day over dinner, in a rare moment of relaxation. He had just put his fingers in his mouth to cleanse them of the last bits of food and was leaning back heavily in his chair. “What kind of job would you like?”

As Ayub answered, Sharif said, “Arre, Mansoor should have told me earlier—you should work for me.” Sharif ran a consulting business out of an office in Zakir Nagar; he was a plastics engineer and helped companies set up manufacturing and packaging plants in the country.

Ayub had wondered, more than once, why he'd been embedded so conspicuously in an alien family, where his inertia and lack of direction would be instantly noticed, where he was, in a sense, already under trial, being studied by Mansoor's parents, not just as an individual but as a specimen of their son's interests—it is through the osmotic medium of their children's friends, after all, that parents accidentally learn the most about their own children. And now he'd been noticed to the point of awkwardness. Being offered a job was a kind of ultimatum. “No, no, uncle—you should get someone more qualified,” he sputtered.

When he looked at Mansoor for help across the table, Mansoor smiled back encouragingly, his eyes kind under the dense eyebrows.

“It's this kind of attitude that's preventing you from finding a job,”
Sharif said, thumping him on his back and revealing his large hollow-looking teeth in a smile.

“Thank you, uncle,” he said. But hadn't Mansoor told him the business was suffering?

________

“I have to leave,” he thought later, when he was back in the den. Tauqeer and co. have sent me here, tricked me into staying for weeks with the promise of an attack, and now I'm going to jeopardize my friend and his family's position even further by becoming his father's employee.

That night, from the cybercafe in South Extension, he wrote another e-mail to his comrades—aware, as he typed, of the strangeness of sneaking out to write e-mails (he had told Mansoor he was going out to buy cigarettes) when he could easily write them from his friend's fancy Pentium, which Mansoor used mostly to surf Islamic message boards. “It's funny,” Mansoor had said before he'd left. “It makes sense that Islam would benefit so much from the Internet. In a way, Islam was an early form of the Internet—egalitarian, allowing anyone of any class and race to connect to anyone else, breaking down traditional hierarchies.”

“But what about the role of pornography?” Ayub had asked, unable, as usual, to put the full force of his mind into the conversation.

Mansoor continued. “I know that that's why the Internet was probably started and where all the technological leaps happened. I've read this book,
Reefer Madness
; it was written by the same chap who wrote
Fast Food Nation
—have you read it? I think you'd like it. Anyway, in this book, he talks about the porn industry, but the point is—” How the tables have turned! Mansoor thought. Just a few months ago
I
was being lectured by this confident, self-contained, self-possessed sandy-haired pink-lipped hero and now
I'm
lecturing
him
! Though he didn't see it that way; he felt only that Ayub was one of those people in his life who brought out the best in him, a rock around which conversation could smoothly bend and flow—a sympathetic ear. So he went on about porn, Islam, and the battle between the two for the pneumatic soul of the Internet.

“I don't feel right taking the job,” Ayub said at the end of this
conversation. “I've put your father in an awkward position. And also I know you're in financial duress.”

“He needs a person he can trust,” Mansoor said. “Actually he's been asking me to work with him, but he's too bad-tempered and I fight back. That's the only thing I would warn you about. Consider it short term. You should look for another job. When you mix friendship and business, sometimes both can go sour.”

It was with these thoughts raging in his head that Ayub wrote Tauqeer an impassioned e-mail from the cybercafe.

________

Two more days passed. Nothing. No reply. Should I go to the police? Are they trying to frame me? he wondered. Finally, disobeying orders, refusing the job, he left the Ahmeds' residence in South Extension and went to stay in a cheap hotel in Daryaganj.

“He's a very nice boy, your friend Ayub, very well mannered, well brought up,” Afsheen finally said—as if his niceness was more apparent when he was gone.

“Yaah, very decent chap,” Sharif said.

“I told you, you shouldn't have offered him a job,” Mansoor said. “He's too self-respecting.”

“That's why he doesn't
have
a job,” Sharif said. “This, let me tell you, is a problem with so many young Muslims. There's discrimination, yes; it's a fact of life—but at the same time there's a lot of arrogance. Sometimes it's better to start from a low place and then win trust and work your way up. Instead someone like your friend Ayub, he rejects things preemptively—” That word! Mansoor thought. How it had entered the lexicon! “Then he complains about this country.” That was Sharif's proud side emerging—he was proud of having made it in a hostile environment.

“But it is very difficult to be constantly rejected,” Mansoor said. “You build a wall around yourself. Sometimes it's a wall of arrogance.”

“Maybe, maybe,” Sharif said, not listening.

“Razia!” Afsheen said, calling the servant. “Bring the food.”

________

Cast out from Delhi, fleeing Azamgarh, rejected from bourgeois society, severed from the terrorist group—this is how Ayub felt in his hotel room with rats running up and down the corridor and drunk men in lungis lying near the entrance and making fun of whoever passed. Why is this my fate? Or is this too a sort of test? It occurred to Ayub that he had never really been alone—he always ran from one thing to the next. To be alone meant being alone with your thoughts, your consequences, your actions—it meant letting danger wash against your feet and holding steady on the beach of time even as the waves sucked the sand from under your toes. In the sordid room, centuries away from the palatial “den,” Ayub thought of that wonderful feeling of being on a beach, with the earth sliding and emptying beneath you, the soles of your feet caked with black cement-like sand. How he had loved the openness of the ocean the one time he had been to Bombay! It had rained the day before, so the ocean was overfull and boiling, but the sun came out and the beach, with its coconut and pav and chickpea vendors, steamed, and all of Bombay was ripe and bright as it sat around the ocean in a semicircle—he felt he could look through windows kilometers away. Such a shattering vista he'd never seen—the ocean bunched up and tilting and delivering boats toward the shore. He sweated profusely. He was a vain man and he was worried about whether his spray-on deodorant was working. Tara, at his side, made tracks on the beach with her clawlike feet. She had a waddling, confident way of walking. He loved putting his head in the cleft between her neck and shoulder and taking in her flat clean smell. They did touristy things—drinking sharifa milk shakes at the Haji Ali Juice Centre and then walking at low tide, past the curled-up medieval beggars, the touts selling religious books and trinkets, to the religious dome of Haji Ali. The path was slippery, beaten by waves. The shrine, like everything else, was under construction, wrapped in the fresh skeleton of a scaffolding, while behind it, on the low black wet rocks, people sat running their hands through the seawater.

His eyes were closed and he inhaled deeply on his hotel bed. He was lost in the movie of his past.

He read the papers the next day. No news of the “Indian Mujahideen,”
which is what the group was called in the press. No news of arrests—when the police made even the slightest progress, they immediately gloated to their sidekicks in the media, subpar individuals who were thrilled, like all Indians, to be instructed and beloved by institutions, people who had lost the ability to think for themselves. It was the media he hated even more than the police, when he thought about it. The police the world over are ruthless, corrupt, brutal. He had read the biographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He knew what the blacks suffered in the U.S. But even there, in that unequal country, with its million injustices papered over by money, there had been a notable organ like the
New York Times
bearing witness, journalists who had written about Martin Luther King. What about here? How many times had Tara and he contacted some absent-looking, dead-eyed, dead-souled, half-listening journalist at a major newspaper, one of those people who nodded and took no notes and then shook his head and said, “But what's the story?”

What's the story? The story is that thousands of innocent Muslims are being killed in plain sight, that innocent Muslims are being harassed in America for a crime they didn't commit, that innocent Iraqis going about their business now wake to hear American armored vehicles razing the sonic towers of the muezzin with their sirens while gangs of disaffected young men in office clothes shoot back from the alleys, reloading their AK-47s—and here is a group that has found a nonviolent way to address the problem of our times, that's throwing aside partisan concerns and inviting activists of all castes and colors and creeds to march alongside it, a new movement on a par with the independence struggle.

What would Gandhi do if he were alive today? Ayub wondered. Would the press even notice him or would it quickly slink on to stories of starlets spreading their legs in hotels the minute a protest came to nothing? The future of the country is in the hands of the media. But the media is blind and thinks its future is in the hands of consumers, and so it gives them what they want—sex and violence. And that's why, to punish all of them, to show them the end result of this strategy, I've come to plant a bomb.

________

That day he received an e-mail from Tauqeer, outlining the plan.
“I'm sorry we were so delayed,”
it went.
“But we were solving logistics for the chocolate shipment. So it was best not to contact you.”
Was I under watch? Ayub wondered. Was the man selling corn outside the Ahmeds' house paid to see when I was coming and going? Did I pass their test?

Tauqeer went on to tell him how to call and what would be required.

Ayub read it all with a sense of wonder and excitement. “Allahu Akbar,” he said for the first time in days, praying from the very bottom of his lonely heart that nothing would go wrong.

A
yub felt much better already when he met Shockie—he was relieved to see him; it canceled days of headaches immediately. They met in a park full of children playing cricket amid roving swarms of mosquitoes. Shockie, paunchy and coachlike, in his trademark sleeveless sweater, touched his curly sweat-soaked hair. His green eyes blurred and multiplied the greenery around him.

They sat next to each other on a concrete bench—a cool surface for this time of year.

“You didn't get too scared, I hope,” Shockie said.

“No, sir, the question didn't arise. My main concern was that the people I was staying with shouldn't get suspicious.”

“They're people with money, no?” Shockie asked. “They should have no problem with hosting one guest.”

“Yes, sir, but the rich are the most stingy,” Ayub said, trying to appear (for an imaginary audience) as if he were looking at and talking about the cricket match unfolding before them. “Howwazzaat!” a cricketer exploded. “They're screaming more than playing,” Ayub said. Shockie had been smoking; Ayub could tell from the ash crumbling on his black pants.

“That's how it is with this country's sportsmen,” Shockie answered, rubbing his hands together to get rid of the ash on his palms. “Also with the politicians, leaders, wives—everyone.” That was the other thing about his hands, apart from the missing fingers, that Ayub noticed—they were rounded and swollen; the heels of the hands were like hillocks.

“Sir, if you don't mind my asking, what was the logic of making me stay there?” he asked again. “You could have e-mailed and I would have moved.”

“There was no logic.”

Ayub went quiet, spreading his arms on the bench.

“You have to obey what you're told, that's all.”

Illogic, Ayub thought. Yes, there was something deeply illogical about how the group functioned, how it was organized, how it held its meetings—it
prided
itself on irrationality. He was the one still stuck in the old system of rationality.

“Nothing contributes to being caught or saved,” Shockie went on. “No precautions. Nothing. It all depends on loyalty between members. Most people—they notice nothing. You can assemble a bomb in front of them, set it afire, and they wouldn't realize what had happened till they're dead. Look at how openly I'm talking to you in this park. That's trust. If we trust each other, anything is possible.

“When I've set bombs in Delhi,” Shockie continued, “I've come from every direction, wearing every sort of disguise. I've made big mistakes. Once the bomb didn't go off. I had to come back. A lot of people saw my two friends and me. In those days they used to do a lot more prosecution on circumstantial evidence—so we used to travel in groups. To be illogical. The more illogical you are, the better you are at this game. The shopkeepers even saw and noticed us—they told us to move—but later, no one could remember our faces.”

This is why innocents are in jail, Ayub thought, his old self surfacing for a second.

“People get too wrapped up in themselves,” Shockie said. “And you know what happens when a bomb goes off? The truth about people comes out. Men leave their children and run away. Shopkeepers push aside wives and try to save their cash. People come and loot the shops. A blast reveals the truth about places. Don't forget what you're doing is noble.”

Ayub nodded. “You know, the friend I was staying with—did Tauqeer tell you? He was injured in a blast you set off in 1996.”

“I didn't know,” Shockie said, his green eyes suddenly flicking on.

Was there a power struggle in the group? Ayub wondered, scratching a nail into the concrete of the bench. Had Shockie been demoted to aging coach against his will?

“That's how I met him,” Ayub continued. “He was in that group that gave legal aid to Muslim undertrials. I mention him because what you're saying is right—when the blast happened, he had gone with his friends. And instead of helping them he just walked off. He says he was in shock and doesn't remember why he did this. He didn't even phone home—he was only a boy then, twelve—but he kept walking. And if you look at him today, his entire personality can be extrapolated from that one incident. He likes to pretend nothing bad has happened. To date he's suffering pain in his wrists from your blast,” he said, glossing over his own role in Mansoor's recovery.

“It is too bad a Muslim got injured.”

“Don't worry too much. They're quite unreligious, the people in that family.”

“Still. This is one thing we must avoid,” Shockie said. “Where our illogic must not extend. We need the support of our people. Accidentally blowing them up won't help.”

From his expression, it appeared he had done this a lot. How many people had this man killed over the course of his life? Ayub wondered. Had it achieved anything? Kashmir, where he started, was as ravaged by violence as before, with little shift in the needle of negotiation. And in this country Muslims were still killed, detained, fired, disappeared. How did this man justify his life to himself? Ayub looked again at the tipless fingers and thought, I supposed he has suffered too, having gone through immense pain—and that has hardened him.

With these preliminaries over, Shockie began to sketch out the plan.

________

The plan was to cause as much damage to the economy as possible—for this reason, the blast was to be set off in the week before the festival of Diwali, at the end of October. Ayub was to drop off a bag with a bomb in Sarojini Nagar, a crowded open-air market where people shopped for fake
branded T-shirts and clothes. “This Logus T-shirt is from there,” Ayub said, pointing to his chest.

Shockie smiled. “So it's a good target, then.”

“Why not one of the malls?” Ayub asked.

“There's too much security,” Shockie said, shaking his head and looking around with an intelligent alert scanning gaze, his arms thrown over the cement bench. Ayub noticed that a heart had been carved into the rough billion-peaked concrete. How did they do it? With knives? This mania for defacing things—he had never understood it.

“But the security at these malls isn't so good,” Ayub said. “If you look upper-class, they let you through anywhere. The Ansal Plaza in Khel Gaon, especially.” He would feel less guilty, he thought, killing the rich rather than the poor.

“It's your first time,” Shockie said. “Next time we'll look at the malls. First do this. It sounds easy to you, but it's not. A million things can go wrong and they're never the things you expect.” He put up his hands. “You see these fingers? I lost them in an explosion in Jaipur. As for the Lajpat Nagar blast, where your friend was hurt, the first time it didn't go off. We were so worried about being seen, spent so much time putting on disguises, that we didn't even think this could happen.” His mouth curled; he had a lost, self-pleased look on his face. “Do this first and you'll learn yourself what your capabilities are.”

Ayub withdrew a little from Shockie on the bench. Ahead, in the park, the game of cricket was ending. An argument had broken out between teams. How could I have worried they'd notice anything? They barely notice they're
playing
, they're so busy fighting
.

“Fine, boss,” Ayub said, nodding.

________

In the end, his role was so small, he felt foolish about the buildup, the training, the waiting—is this all it came to? Dropping off a bag at Sarojini Nagar, a market so crowded it was surprising no one had set off a bomb there? Some people will die, he thought, that's true. But they'll expand the market's security after the blast. The MCD will push the encroaching shops
back from the road. And the crowds will be funneled through one of those security doorways you see at cinemas and airports. No—I'm only doing the inevitable. If not me, then someone else. I'm pointing out the flaws in the system. Terror is a form of urban planning.

Back in his hotel room, he remembered that Mohammed Atta, the famous World Trade Center hijacker, had been a student of urban planning in Hamburg, in Germany. Was there a connection between the two things—terror and planning? It was possible. Atta, in his religious way, had wanted to design the perfect Islamic city—his thesis was on Aleppo, in Syria. In the end, though, his urge to design took a different form—he brought down the twin monstrosities of the towers over Manhattan, and there, in a single day, he accomplished what no other planner could have, erasing the cold shadows of those vile boastful buildings from the sun-filled streets of the city. Did Atta think of his task this way? Did he realize he was doing in death what he could never do in life—putting his degree into practice?

As Ayub sat on the hotel bed, his hands became damp. He felt he was intimately connected, in that moment, to Atta—felt that he might even
be
him, the dead man's spirit somehow invading his. And what is the difference between him and me? he thought. Atta too had a gaunt, Tauqeer-like, Skeletor look about him. A young student abroad, alienated from German society, he had strong convictions and beliefs about his home, Cairo, but no way to implement them. So, growing from within, leaping angrily across the Atlantic, he smashed the high locks on the gates of the West—but for what, exactly? Ayub had thought about this often since joining the group. Earlier he'd felt the attack was just revenge against American imperialism, but now he'd come to see that the reasons for such aggression would have to be idiosyncratic, personal. Did Atta wish to make a name for himself in history? Did he think this was the only way to enter al-Qaeda's name into American consciousness? Or did he feel—as Tauqeer suggested about India—that America, in beginning two retaliatory wars, would end up ruining its economy and self-immolating? Was it
really
economic? As Ayub thought these things through in the hotel, with its softly thudding rats and
the throttled, overused soap visible in the bathroom on its steel holder, he was convinced this could not be the case. There was too much blood involved—blood tossed against the mile-high windows of the WTC like a libation—for the reasons to not be emotional and hotheaded, even if it took the hijackers a year of training to accomplish their goals. Killing others and then yourself is the most visceral experience possible. Atta must have felt himself full of sexual hate for the people piled high in the towers, bodies in a vertical morgue. He saw the opening between the two towers as a vagina into which to shove the hard-nosed dick of the plane. Sitting at the controls, his curly hair tight on his skull, eyes rubbery, underslept, blackly circled, he must have seen someone appear at the window and look at him—a woman, maybe, a blond American woman. At that moment he got an erection. At that moment he slammed into her alarmed face.

________

On the day of the blast, Ayub went to the local mosque and prayed, worrying the entire time that he was being noticed. He wanted to phone his parents, but he'd been expressly forbidden from making contact. He was to play it safe, treat it like any other day, and for this reason, after he'd prayed and the sun was up and the day had begun in its thousand polluted particularities, he called Mansoor and told him that he had thought about it some more and he would like to talk to his father about the job after all.

“OK, boss,” Mansoor said, his heart leaping at how far his friend had sunk. If Ayub worked for his father, then he was truly not competition anymore; he had been removed from the nervy world of activism. “Just remember, he's a little brusque sometimes. He shouts at people who work for him but he's well meaning. And because of the court case, I'm not sure how much he'll be able to pay you.” Actually the case was beginning to go well. After a year of threatening and frothing and refusing to show up for hearings, the Sahnis had phoned Sharif the other day and asked if he would consider settling out of court. At first, Sharif, injured and doubly cautious, refused to engage with them. “How do we know it's not a trick?” he asked Afsheen. “Last time we trusted them you know what happened. And this must mean we're winning—that they're coming to us with their
tails between their legs. No. I don't want to talk to them. Let them spend their money on the case.”

“You're spending your money too,” Afsheen said. “We should at least talk to them.”

“What, so you can accuse me of being pushy? I don't want to. I want to follow the law of the land this time.”

But he was only being petulant, both Afsheen and Mansoor knew. He would come around eventually. He was famous for always saying no and then coming around. So the family was in a good mood when Ayub called.

“Tell him to come today itself,” Sharif said when Mansoor informed him about Ayub's request. Even he, Sharif, could barely suppress his good mood.

How guilty he'd felt in the past few months! Guilty about having made such a big mistake with the family savings and guilty about not letting Mansoor return to the U.S. Actually, the reasons for making Mansoor stay were not only financial. Had they wished to continue his education abroad, they would have found a way—Sharif had enough goodwill with his fellow Muslim businessmen to take loans—no, he'd kept Mansoor back for the sake of his wife. Though she had always been eager for her son to study in the U.S., she'd become distraught after his departure, and this despairing state had been exacerbated by the news that Muslims were being targeted and mistreated in the U.S. “But he's on the West Coast,” he said. “And on a campus what can happen?” To which his wife had responded by finding a clipping in a newspaper of a Muslim student beaten up in Berkeley. “It's one incident,” he said, though he knew he was losing the debate.

Over time, though, he had begun to regret sending Mansoor to the U.S. He had one son. He'd almost died at the age of twelve—suffered a trauma few people experience in their lifetimes. Why set out to lose him again? So, when Mansoor came back quite suddenly one winter, he thought of ways to broach the subject with him, considered (to use the language of consulting) presenting him with a package of incentives to stay. The unfolding of the property drama was propitious in at least one way, then: he could act
as if he were leaning on his son, as if he needed his help in this difficult emotional and financial time—oh, it was underhanded, opportunistic; he knew that nothing came of such behavior, but what could he do? He didn't feel guilty except late at night when he feared he might be punished in some exceptional way for keeping his son home: Mansoor might die in a car crash, or some other tragedy more obviously native to India rather than the U.S. Twenty-five years of marriage and Afsheen and her hypochondria have rubbed off on me! And he banished the thought from his head and tried, in the way he knew best, to be close to his son, squeezing his shoulders, mussing his hair, hearing him talk. Unlike his wife, he had no desire to interfere in Mansoor's development; he felt only that he should be present for the stages his son was passing through.