The Association of Small Bombs (24 page)

M
ansoor heard about the blast the day it happened, but he didn't learn that Ayub was among the injured till he saw his face a day later on TV—Ayub, swaddled in blankets, on a rusted bed, croaking a few words into the microphone, the groove above his nose deepening; then Vikas Uncle (of all people!) taking over the proceedings with his trademark fluency and rapid-fire way of speaking. “The government has promised compensation,” he said. “But so far no one has even visited these people in the hospital. Nor has the emergency protocol changed and improved—it took two hours for an ambulance to come to Sarojini Nagar and then too it was not equipped with the right emergency machines.”

“Mama,” Mansoor said, muting the TV.

“Yes, beta,” she said from the other room.

“Something very bad just happened.”

________

When his mother saw Ayub on TV minutes later, the news segment recycling itself, she shook her head sadly, but also, Mansoor felt, not urgently or empathetically enough.

“I've had a feeling that something bad was about to happen,” Afsheen said. “I've been having headaches.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Do his mother and father know?”

“I don't know if anyone knows,” Mansoor said. “If
he
knows. I should go right away to the hospital. But it's good that Vikas Uncle and Deepa Auntie are there. Poor fellow—he's about to get married, and Papa said he
came only two days ago to the office and was wondering why he hadn't phoned.” He could understand now, in a way he couldn't before, the point of Vikas Uncle and Deepa Auntie's association. He hadn't known they got involved
this
early in a bomb's unraveling.

His mother insisted on coming along with him to the hospital and he didn't refuse.

In the car, Mansoor, resting against the door, marveled at the oddness of the situation—the way in which life had come full circle, so that he was the well one now, with strong arms, a skullcap on his head, a prayer on his lips, visiting
someone
else
who'd been injured in a blast. He must have met thousands of people over the course of his life and none, save for Tushar and Nakul, had been injured or killed in a blast. Ayub, as the poorest of his friends, was the most likely to end up in a public space overrun with flames.

Of course, by the time Mansoor got to the hospital, propelled forward in his car by the driver, the city comforting him with its exciting colors and music—the soundtrack to
Godzilla
on the stereo casting its own spell—he'd forgotten all about this circularity and was taken up with parking, finding the reception desk, moving to the right ward, behaving like an adult to the correct degree. His mother was beside him, covering her mouth, put off by the hospital.

“I was also in a hospital like this and I was OK,” Mansoor said, referring to his first visit to the hospital after the blast to get the shrapnel out of his arm.

“But you didn't
stay
in the hospital, beta. We took you home. These days a lot of antibiotics are being dumped in our rivers—I've read drinking river water is like drinking Crocin. All the bacteria are resistant to medicine. You should cover your nose. Most people die in these hospitals from staph infections and pneumonia.”

You should have been a bloody doctor, he thought, but kept his mouth shut. He noticed people staring at him because of the skullcap and broadened his chest in defiance.

Passing through the ICU, they found Ayub lying on his own bed (most
of the other victims were doubled or tripled, head to foot, on beds). “Ayub bhai,” Mansoor said.

Ayub smiled weakly from his metal bed and held out a bandaged hand. He did not actually feel so weak anymore but knew it was crucial to act the part. After the explosion, the pain, the loss of his left eye, which had sliced the world in half, tunneled it, he'd woken up in the hospital surprised and frightened—though he'd been told, during training, that such an outcome was far from extraordinary. Terrorists were always being blown up by their own bombs; if he were injured, he'd been told, he was to play a confused victim and supply a Hindu name.

Now he waited, in panic, for communication from Shockie or Tauqeer.

“Do you know they're calling you Mr. Galgotia?” Mansoor asked. (Ayub had named himself after his favorite bookstore, Galgotia & Sons.)

“They're confused about everything.” Ayub waved it away. “Hello, auntie.”

“Hello, beta,” she said. After ascertaining he hadn't talked to his parents, she said, “Do you have your mummy and papa's phone number? We should call them. Otherwise your pain's under control? We can make arrangements to transfer you to a private room.”

“That's a good idea,” Mansoor said. “The state you're in, it might take you ten more days, and you'll feel better if you have a room of your own.” He felt self-conscious offering this privilege to his Gandhian friend. He sighed. “I couldn't believe you were in a blast, yaar. I thought I was imagining it. But your eloquence was undiminished.”

“It's like what you had said. One remembers nothing.”

“Something about the intensity of the sound and the speed with which things get rearranged,” Mansoor said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “It's like being sucked into a tornado. The mind doesn't know how to process it. But you should have phoned us, yaar. That couple who came, the ones who run the association, they're family friends.”

Ayub's neck twitched. He had recognized the couple—but they had not recognized him—and he'd been very uneasy the whole time he'd been
speaking to them and into the camera. Yet he'd gone ahead with the interview in hopes that his comrades would see that he was injured and that he'd given away nothing. At the same time he worried about his parents watching him on TV. “I would have called but I couldn't remember the number and my mobile—I don't know where it is.”

“The hospital has a directory,” Mansoor said. “But believe me, I understand. I couldn't remember my own home number when the blast happened,” he said, looking triumphantly at his mother. All these years and they had never believed his story!

“Your mummy and papa's number?” Afsheen repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking around the shabby ward. The place was heady with the stink of sweat.

“Even that I can't remember,” Ayub said, smiling.

“We'll talk to the doctor and get you moved,” Afsheen said. “If you give me their name—”

This was the thing about his mother, Mansoor thought. Financial troubles or not, she was extremely generous.

“Mr. and Mrs. Azmi,” Ayub said, unable to lie anymore. “Of Azamgarh. And no need for the room, auntie.” But he did not push hard. Better to be put out of public view.

________

“What was he doing in the market?” his mother asked as they left the hospital in the car.

Mansoor knew there was a kernel of suspicion buried in her generous soul. He coughed. She'd never really cared for his friend, had been suspicious of his antecedents, his needlessly long stay. “He's not from a rich background,” Mansoor said. “That's why he was shopping in Sarojini Nagar. I told you—he's a very impressive guy. He did his engineering and then he came to Delhi and decided to do social work. Can you imagine someone from our background doing that?”

She smiled and shook her head absently. Noticing her nervous tremor, he was angry, sad, afraid. Life was an endless parade of tragedies: solve one thing and another rushes to take its place. He was consumed by the idea
that his mother, this noble creature with her dark thick skin and mauve lips and particular motherly creases, was going to die. He put his hand over hers. “But it's bad luck for him,” Mansoor continued. “He doesn't have much of an income and I think he's the only son in India, so it'll be tough for his parents.”

“We'll take care of him,” his mother said, smiling.

“It's so ironic,” he said to her. “He was the one in my NGO who was the most staunch believer in nonviolence. He's the last person it should have happened to.”

________

Ayub, left alone in the ward, began to palpitate and lose his nerve. He'd always had a weakness for mothers, feared their telepathic abilities and felt that no matter what he said, Mrs. Ahmed would see through it. “She knows,” he thought. “That's why she wasn't smiling, and that's why she came—out of curiosity.”

Before, for all his planning, he was an innocent, pure potentiality. Now, he was a murderer and a terrorist—worst of all, he was injured and in pain, which prevented him from thinking clearly about what he'd done. Why had the bomb gone off so quickly? He'd been told Shockie was the greatest bomb maker of his time.

Thinking of Shockie, he got inexplicably angry for a second and clutched the rusted nail.

Then he turned over on the bed. He knew that the people around him were here because of his efforts, that their wounds and tears were
his
doing—he'd heard the fat man who'd been talking on the mobile in the market moaning—but for that reason, it was satisfying that he too was hurt. He hadn't exempted himself from the suffering he'd caused others.

The doctor had told him he would make it out with a slight limp if he did the right exercises. Ayub had smiled through his comments, aware of having hardened. So this is how it feels to be bad. Cold and sober.

Riding the flare of this feeling now, he got out of bed and started walking away. “Where are you going?” a nurse asked, calming another patient, but when he put up his pinky in the universal salute of wishing to pee, she
looked away and he kept trudging. He came to a door that led out of the ward, amazed at the blindness of the doctors and the patients—a blindness like that of the shoppers he'd killed. He slipped out of the main entrance into the shameless afternoon light.

Buses, angry and green and gray, with oleaginous windows and robotic grimacing grilles, were blowing lightly down the road.

Originally, he was supposed to meet Shockie at the park after the bombing; he wondered how Shockie had responded when he, Ayub, hadn't shown up. Did they think I was a double agent, that I went to the police? But, then, the bomb did go off—surely they heard about that. Would a double agent really set off a bomb?

The bomb had only killed fifteen and injured thirty. He wasn't sure how to feel about it, except to say to himself, “It's Indian propaganda. It was much bigger.”

Ayub passed a phalanx of dozing ambulances. But when he got to the lip of the hospital complex and hailed a rickshaw, he realized, with the despair of a man who has almost escaped, that he had no money. Someone had taken it from his pocket when he was lying in the mud, bleeding.

________

Mansoor came again in a few hours with his father, who fussed over Ayub and had him moved to a private room (Ayub had come back to the ward). “They've started making arrests already,” Sharif told Ayub. “The Indian Mujahideen has taken credit.” It pained Sharif to have to talk about yet another group of Muslims responsible for terror. He really did feel, as they moved Ayub to his room, that the world was closing in on him and his family, that it was bad luck to be back here again.

Ayub was frightened to hear about the arrests. “Did they say who did it?”

“You think there's a reason?” Sharif said, mishearing. “They hate everyone, especially themselves.”

“You'll appreciate this, uncle,” Ayub said, settling into his new bed, now echoing Mansoor's statement to his mother. “I fought for the rights of people arrested for terror but I've never been on this side.” Suddenly, seeing his body, the whole injured extent of it, he was comforted. “One
understands how the victims must feel about terrorists. They're looking for revenge. They don't want to listen to reason. What happened is so irrational that it makes people irrational.”

“Which is exactly what the terrorists want,” Sharif said. “How's your eye?”

“It's OK, uncle. One eye is nothing.”

“Better than the brain, I suppose.” He smiled weakly, saying the wrong thing as usual. “I should have had you start work that day itself—then you wouldn't have had time to do shopping.” Sharif smiled again.

“I only went because I had to buy gifts for my family. They all like brands. Maybe this is a lesson for me not to buy brands,” he said, smiling.

“My missus called your parents,” Sharif said, remembering what he'd been told to say. “They said they're coming. I made a booking for them through my travel agent.” He didn't mention how surprised Mr. and Mrs. Azmi had been to hear their son was in Delhi, how they hadn't heard from him in weeks.

“They're both becoming blind,” Ayub said sadly, his eyes curdling with tears. “They won't be able to come.”

“They didn't tell me that.”

“They're very polite.”

Seeing them now in his mind's eye—seeing the disappointment they would feel if they ever discovered he was a terrorist, his heart crumpled. I hope the train crashes and they die happily, he thought.

________

When Sharif went out to make a call—he was always making calls on his mobile—Ayub said to Mansoor, “I have to tell you something. Close the door for a minute.”

Mansoor lowered his big head and shut the door.

Ayub said, “I'm going to be arrested.”

“What?”

Ayub craned his head toward the door. “I don't want your father to know.” Now he told him a story he'd thought up earlier. For all his pain, Ayub's ability to fabricate hadn't gone away; it had got better with
desperation. He said he had enraged so many policemen over the years with his activism that they had vowed to take revenge on him; one had come by and threatened him with arrest.

“Which one?” Mansoor asked.

“I wish I knew his name. He was a sub-inspector with the Delhi cadre. But he said they can take me away under POTA anytime.”