A few minutes later, the boys strolled around Lajpat Nagar together, Tushar teasing Mansoor and slapping his back and Nakul carrying himself proudly, combing his hair and fine-tuning it with his fingers like a radio. “And that’s the framing shop where we got that Founder’s Day photo framed,” Nakul said. “We bought Sorry and backgammon from the shop behind it.”
“They sell classy English willow bats there,” Tushar chimed in, though he was a terrible cricketer.
Mansoor, unused to being out on his own, took in the sights and sounds. The crowds consisted of a particular kind of Delhiite Mansoor recognized immediately. This sort of Delhiite was slightly malnourished, wore shiny polyester clothes, grew a black mustache, had a fondness for stud earrings, kept his pants hitched too high, let his fingers roam his nose, used slightly loose, lackadaisical hand gestures, and had a cynical dumb face that could never seem grave (the women looked the same, but with lighter mustaches and cheap floral saris).
“Where are we going?” Mansoor was asking when an explosion ripped his sentence in two and stuffed half of it back in his mouth.
________
Later, everyone reported seeing a gushing white star, and there was a long silence before the screams started, as if, even in pain, people watched each other first to see how to act.
________
When Mansoor woke up, the market was burning. People lay in positions of repose. Mothers were folded bloodily over daughters; office-going men were limp on their backs with briefcases burning beside them; and shopkeepers crawled on their elbows while cars burst into flames inches from their faces. Through a woman’s ripped kurta Mansoor spied his first breast. His own wrist was oozing blood but the sensation was far from him, like something hidden in another corner of the market.
People began climbing over the corpses with the guilty looks of burglars, their hair frazzled and wild and faces half-black. Mansoor, lifting himself up too, saw Tushar lying on the ground and staring up at the sky, his lips wet and open, his curly hair full of sand, or another whitish substance blasted off a wall. Nakul was next to him with his arm over his face like a worker dozing in the sun.
“Tushar! Nakul!” He was unable to hear himself. But when he crawled over to shake them, a sharp pain erupted in his hand and he looked up to see a torn leather shoe pressing down on it and then a disfigured man disappearing over him and the bodies.
“Uncle!” Mansoor screamed. But the man was gone and others—gory, bleeding—kept coming.
Then a hand gripped Mansoor’s shoulder. “Get up, son,” the disembodied voice said—a kindly voice, the voice of the earth, full of pity and groaning patience. But an old instinct about not talking to strangers took hold and Mansoor ran from the burning square.
________
By now Afsheen Ahmed had become very anxious about her son’s absence and had called Deepa Khurana.
“He’s still not reached?” Deepa said, cramming the phone between her ear and shoulder and gazing out the windows, her hands covered in cake mix. “They must have got stuck in a jam on Ring Road—there’s lots of construction happening near Ashram. And the boys were supposed to go to Lajpat Nagar after dropping Mansoor. It could be that they went there first. They’re all such independent boys already.”
When Afsheen heard this, she turned cold. “Deepa, there’s been a blast there.”
“Rush hour is still going on,” Deepa said. “They should be reaching just now.”
“A bomb.”
“I see,” Deepa said, surprised at how stern she herself sounded. She’d always believed that misfortune was brought on by those who worried it into existence.
“I heard it on the radio. I was in the kitchen and it was playing on the servants’ radio.” Afsheen was now crying.
“Afsheen,” said Deepa, softer.
Soon after, Deepa got off the phone and went to the landing of the flat and looked down the stairs. No sign of her husband. “Go find sahib,” she instructed Hari, the servant, who took off quickly, his Hawaii slippers thwacking. Deepa washed her cake-smeared hands, absently running a palm through her hair and leaving a white streak there, like Indira Gandhi. Then she went down in her faded kurta to the gate. When she saw the car was missing, she swore loudly. Where had her husband gone and when would he return? He couldn’t be trusted. He was absentminded.
She strode to the main road and hailed an auto herself. It never occurred to her to ask any of Vikas’s relatives in the complex for help.
________
In any case, Vikas—deep in the disinfected, bloated governmental belly of the hospital—beat them all to it. He found Tushar and Nakul laid out flat on a dhurrie amid other bodies. Nakul’s pretty eyes were blasted open in fright. Tushar slept peacefully, as he always had. Getting down on his haunches, rocking on his heels, Vikas pressed their cold, burned cheeks and wept, adding his fluids to theirs.
When he looked up (hours later, it seemed), Sharif and Afsheen Ahmed were standing over him—Sharif, fat and hassled-looking, with his black disordered beard, his checked shirt and black pants swelling around his belly; Afsheen, dark, her oval face ruined with tears, her slim body wrapped in an elegant chikan salwar, the whiteness of her clothes out of place on this tarmac of death. Vikas’s own clothes had long ago turned the color of soot, of radically vaporized skin and bone. “I’m so sorry,” Vikas said—his first words in the morgue. “I’m so, so sorry.”
________
Mansoor was still walking.
When the explosion had happened, he had panicked and run away from the burning square and into the shacks. Then, as he searched for a PCO to call home or a stranger to lead him to a phone (he prayed for his phone number, which had vanished from his mind), the dark, sunless alleys distending with people swarming away from and toward the explosion, he panicked again. He’d never been alone anywhere in Delhi, let alone a market after an explosion.
“Did someone’s LPG cylinder burst?” a woman asked.
Mansoor was unsure if he was being talked to.
“Must have been Arora’s compressor,” another man, this one with a terrible tumor growing out of his neck, said.
“They shouldn’t have installed it. The wires here can’t take the load, but they don’t listen even if they’re being told at the association meeting.”
Another boom came from the market—perhaps an actual LPG cylinder going up in a blue column—and the men and women packed together in the alley screamed and there was a muscular pushing and everyone surged out to the main road, where Mansoor, coming across the fresh, untouched life of the city, its towering buses and belts of filth and mud, felt suddenly acute with life, with smoke.
“Bhaiya, you’re OK?” an auto driver asked, walking away from his vehicle with his hands on his hips, but Mansoor instinctively moved away from him, trying to stanch the bleeding in his right wrist with his left hand. He wondered if he had gotten his tetanus booster on time. He had always wondered about the efficacy and necessity of these injections, but now he was grateful.
The auto driver’s top few shirt buttons were undone; a locket flared in the light amid the drowsy sparse chest hairs. “I’m fine, uncle,” Mansoor said for reasons he could not understand.
From the jammed roads—the crowds gathering there and pooling around a stopped bus, pointing—he could tell something exceptional had happened. Then a woman who could have been his grandmother said, “A bomb just burst here.”
A bomb. He had survived, witnessed, walked through a bomb blast. He couldn’t believe it. He had heard of bomb blasts before, of course—they were always in the news and had been recently because of the 1996 World Cup; some of the matches scheduled in Sri Lanka had been canceled because of bomb threats by the LTTE, an organization his father called “ruthless.” “In this country, they’re always accusing Muslims of terrorism,” Sharif had said, bringing his soft paws together—he was a fat man with un
emotional features that were childlike, even pitiable, in their conviction—“when the most dangerous terrorists have been Hindus and Sikhs. You know who blew up Rajiv Gandhi? Hindus. A woman from the LTTE, the same group that set off the bombs in Colombo that so scared the Australian team. You know who killed Rajiv’s mother, Indira? Her sardar bodyguards. So when people say—” He shook his head. “It makes me angry when the proof is right there, the statistics are there, and the journalists won’t consult them.”
“Gandhi-ji’s assassin was also a Hindu.”
“Yes,” said Sharif. “We’re very lucky that that was the case. Your Nana-ji was in Aligarh when it happened.” Sharif’s grandfather had been a freedom fighter, an associate of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan; Sharif was proud of this fact, and loved telling Mansoor about it. Mansoor, though not interested, liked sending his father into raptures of open-ended conversation so he could daydream about the girls he loved in school. He was, he felt, a tragic romantic hero. He stared at girls shyly and gave them poems that he claimed to have written but that he had copied from his mother’s thick Emily Dickinson anthology; she had an MA in English from LSR and had been a theater actress and a counselor at Air Force Bal Bharati School before becoming a housewife.
How far he’d come, in the space of a few hours, from that home life!
Mansoor, tired, bleeding, walked on Ring Road, past a mandi with its nauseating smell of rotten, overripe fruit and covering of blue tarpaulin. After spending a few minutes on the jammed road outside the market, listening to people speculate about the bomb, whether it had been planted by Muslims—listening, in other words, to people intent on gossiping about the tragedy rather than heeding a victim passing before them—he had made the decision to walk home. Of course, he only knew the city from the insides of an air-conditioned car. How far was home from here? Fifteen, twenty minutes? The streets with their bracing angles scrolled and zagged in his mind’s eye, unfurling at whatever speed the vantage of the car provided.
By the time he was outside the mandi, he was exhausted, and worried about how he would navigate the thundering pitiless straight-shooting traffic on the main road. His body tensed; he held his bleeding wrist, disgusted by the stickiness, and walked on.
It became easy to avoid oncoming traffic; he pressed close to the edge of the mandi, often standing in the way of cursing, bell-ringing cyclists, and he only had to jump out of the way when a cow browsed toward him (he had once been knocked down in Bhogal by a bull, losing a milk tooth, and that had been the end of his mandi-going ways).
Dusk deepened, coloring the sky a polluted pink; birds wheeled restlessly overhead, as if waiting for rush hour to end so they could head down to collect their spoils. Mansoor ambled past a school on his left; crossed between hawkers smoking peanuts in black vessels on the sidewalk; dodged cakes of cow dung; and wondered, with a half smile, if his parents would be impressed with his presence of mind, his ability to navigate the city after the shock of the explosion. Then the smile fell away as he remembered Tushar and Nakul. What had happened to them? Were they—dead? And why had he run? If he were to go back and play the thoughts running through his head at the moment he had left them, they would have been something like this: They’re brothers. They can take care of themselves. Or: Didn’t I tell them I didn’t want to go to the market? Why did they force me?
Men and women and kids and dogs passed by, unaware of who he was, why he was bleeding, why he stood in his upper-class shorts alone on a city sidewalk. Their faces were sweaty and private in the Petromax lights switched on by the street carts.
“Sir,” Mansoor said to one man in his twenties, but Mansoor was too feeble and the man passed him by.
“Uncle,” he said to another man who walked by, licking an ice cream. And this man stopped and studied Mansoor with eyes that were either surprised or glaring. He was middle-aged and paunchy and mustachioed and his tongue shot out to keep the sides of the softie from melting.
“Talk,” the man said.
Mansoor told him what had happened: the blast, the market, the boys, the walk.
Perhaps because he lacked another option, the paunchy man with the unblinking, ambling eyes kept licking the sides of his ice cream, sculpting it into a manageable shape with his tongue.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“South Ex,” Mansoor said.
“In part one or two?”
“Two.” How was this relevant?
“Your parents are at home?”
“Yes, uncle.”
“And your friends’ mummy and daddy?”
“At home also, uncle.”
He shook his head seriously. Then he said, “Will you have some ice cream?”
The man was much more at ease with the ice cream out of his hands. Taking a hankie out of his pocket, he wiped his face and then his forehead. “There’s a PCO nearby. We can phone from there.”
As they walked in the direction Mansoor had come from, Mansoor having gratefully demolished the ice cream (even as he dreaded the germs he’d imbibed), the man said, “You’re badly hurt, yaar. Maybe we should go to a hospital first. My car is parked nearby. Come with me.”
Till this point, Mansoor had been happy to walk with the man, but as soon as talk of the car came up, he recoiled. “No need, uncle. Let’s make the phone call.”
“But, son, the car’s right here. In the time we make the call we can get you treated.”
“But, uncle, my friends are in the market.”
“Let me open my car.”
Mansoor wanted to tell him about the traffic jam, but something came over him and he ran.
“Son!” the man shouted.
He ran fast, kicking up dirt with his heels; when he stopped, only a little beyond where he’d first spied the man, he was winded and ashamed. He looked over his shoulder to see if he was being pursued. He felt he’d done the right thing. He had grown up in a city full of stories about kidnappings and disappearances; had heard from his mother about how one maid dressed up her ward, a two-year-old, in rags, blackened his face, and took him out on the street to beg. The parents of the child were always wondering why the child was so tired when they came back home; then one day the mother was driving on the road and—Ah!
Mansoor walked with urgency. He did not want to be pursued by the fat kidnapper. He cursed himself for not having asked a lady for help.
His house was still at least a kilometer away and he’d made little progress. Heavy black smog sat over the road. A stranded ambulance screamed in traffic. Beyond, blinking, he could make out Moolchand flyover, and beyond that, the mirage of South Extension—smoke and haze and the familiar congested approach to home.
________
The Ahmeds were convinced their son was dead. Leaving AIIMS hospital, where Afsheen’s cousin promised to keep vigil, they headed to Moolchand hospital. One by one, in this manner, they made a desperate tour of the hospitals of South Delhi. Afsheen was sick and crying throughout. “Be positive,” Sharif said, as he watched his high-strung but sweet wife dissolving. “There’s no objective evidence that anything has happened.” He was at the steering wheel of the car. “He might be at someone’s house.”
“How could they do that? How can you be so irresponsible with someone else’s son? How many times have I told them I don’t want him to go out?”
“They’ve lost two kids.”
“They should lose two kids! They should lose everything!”
“Afsheen,” he said. But the truth was that he felt the same way.
The hospitals yielded nothing. But that night Sharif felt he’d come closer to the reality—and suffering—of the city than ever before: the tired grief-soaked expressions of patients; the exhaustion of nurses; the crumbling medical infrastructure; the weak tube lights flickering and clicking; the way in which doctors became bureaucrats the moment they were questioned. Sharif felt he ought to wash
his hands of this country, this place he had fought so hard to make his own, enduring the jibes of his family members who claimed to lead happier lives in Dubai, Sharjah, Bahrain, Lahore.
By now the tears had dried up; husband and wife sat at the dashboard in rage-filled silence. “Let’s go to the police,” Afsheen said, half-crazed. “We should register a criminal case against the Khuranas.”
“We should have gone to the market earlier,” Sharif said, slapping his forehead.
They had gone to the market briefly before coming to AIIMS, springing through the debris, calling out for Mansoor. In doing so, they’d realized they were far from the only people searching for a relative in the market: half of Delhi seemed to be out in this dung of destruction, though, in the end, the death toll would be only thirteen dead with thirty injured—a small bomb. A typical bomb. A bomb of small consequences.
“Let’s go home first, in case he’s there,” Sharif said.
Home. The last time we’ll come back and be able to call it that, he thought, pulling up in his Esteem, the dark colony illuminated with the dirty electricity of the city. But as soon as he parked, he saw two individuals outlined in the light of the front landing.
Afsheen got out of the car and ran over and hugged and then slapped her son. The servant, who was sitting next to Mansoor, got up excitedly.
“How could this have happened?” Afsheen wept. “Why didn’t you phone us immediately?”
Sharif hugged his son tightly on the landing. He only now realized how tense he was, how much he loved his son. “Bring me some water,” he told the servant when he was inside, trying to control his emotions, the three of them holding each other in an odd huddle.
“We have to go help the Khuranas,” Afsheen said, looking up from her son.
CHAPTER 2
Vikas’s concern for Mansoor had long since given way to grief over his sons. It became his priority—and his wife’s—to spend as much time with them as possible, to not abandon their corpses for even a minute. It was as if, having failed to protect them in life, they felt double the responsibility to fulfill their duties in death. Still, the cremation, which happened the next day at Nigambodh Ghat, stunned them both. They howled as the boys were crushed to ashes.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 2