“Was the car close by?” Meraj asked, turning it over.
Taukir looked away.
“Give me some water and go get a key made,” Shockie instructed them.
________
While Taukir and Meraj had the key made at a shop (this was a flaw in the 800’s design; the key used to open the petrol cap could also be used to start the car), Shockie feasted at a local dhaba and admired the women at the tables with their gluttonous husbands.
He wanted to ram his penis into their wives. He imagined pinning the dhaba owner’s wife on a table and ripping off her kurta. Soon after, he went up to her and asked for another paratha. “Just one?” she said. She wore a nose ring and was obviously recently married.
“Yes, madam,” he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.
________
Meraj and Taukir returned with a new key.
But in the morning, when the three men walked down the alleys to the spot where Shockie had found the blue Maruti, it was gone.
“Bhainchod,” Shockie said. “I thought it belonged to that shopkeeper. It must be in the lane behind this one.”
But after looking for a few hours, searching the neighborhood in an auto, they had still found nothing.
So now, their mental scores settled, they did what they would have normally done—went to Nizamuddin, a rich neighborhood; found a shabby car orphaned outside a fancy house; stole the petrol cap; had the key made (at a different shop) and returned the next day and drove it away.
________
In an alley near Taukir’s house, they removed the license plates from the stolen car, packed wires in the bonnet, and put the LPG cylinder in the back. Like a person sprinkling petals on a bed, Shockie grimly filled the dicky with nails and ball bearings and scrap. He rued the lack of ammonium nitrate—it would have been good to visit the agro fair and buy a sack. Fertilizer was more explosive than natural gas.
This part of the operation was the most dangerous—scarier than running amok in Delhi with the police possibly at your back. Bomb makers, like most people, are undone not by others but by themselves. Shockie knew countless stories of bomb makers who had lost eyes, limbs, hands, dicks to premature explosions; knew operatives who’d succeeded in blackening and burning their faces so that the skin peeled off for months and ran down their backs in rivulets and they looked like hideous ghouls, unable to do the anonymous work of revolution without exciting the pitying, curious stares of onlookers—the same looks you hoped to elicit for the craters you left behind.
Even the greats were not immune to this curse of bomb makers, Shockie knew. Take Ramzi Yousef. He flew to New York in 1993 without a visa, snuck into the country after being let go from an immigration prison in Queens (it was overcrowded), and then, after setting off practice fertilizer bombs in the New Jersey countryside, hired a man at a local mosque to drive a rented van packed with explosives into the basement of the World Trade Center.
The night the bomb went off, buckling but not capsizing the first tower, injuring thousands but killing only three, Yousef flew first class on Pakistan International Airlines over the plumes of his explosion. All good. But then he got to Pakistan and tried to assassinate Benazir Bhutto and ended up in the hospital with burns (the pipe bomb he’d been preparing exploded in his face as he tried to clean the lead azide in the pipe). The police suspected him and he had to run away. A year or two later, he found himself in Manila. His plan was now to assassinate the Pope, who was visiting, and Bill Clinton, who was coming to one-up the Pope. His comrades and he had robes and crosses with which to Christianize themselves. On a plane from Manila to Tokyo, testing out a new device, he attached a tiny explosive fashioned from a Casio Databank watch under his seat. When he got off at Seoul’s airport, the stopover, a Japanese businessman took his place. In midair, en route from Seoul to Tokyo, the seat exploded, painting the inner ribs of the aircraft with the guts of the businessman. The plane, weaving wildly through the air like a gutless firework rocket, did not crash.
So now, back in his Manila flat, Yousef—invincible, a genius of terror, perhaps the greatest terrorist who ever lived—cooked a virulent soup of chemicals on the stove. Or no. He was cooking to get rid of the evidence. But as the chemicals vanished, huge clouds of smoke appeared and his comrades and he fled the apartment in fright, leaving behind chemistry books, canisters of fertilizer, passports, wires, Rough Rider condoms.
Yousef escaped to Pakistan but was arrested later in a hotel in Islamabad as he puffed his hair with gel and stuck explosives up the ass of a doll.
A genius of terror. Shockie’s heart pounded. He wanted to be like Yousef, the Kashmiri Yousef, but even Yousef, who had shocked America—who had almost toppled a building that seemed to snick heaven like a finger, who had tried to blow up jetliners over the Pacific and kill the Pope—even Yousef was fallible.
Shockie prayed as he attached the wires in the corroded belly of the car. Like so many rich people’s cars, it was poorly maintained.
He blew the dust from the machinery with his mouth and inhaled the rich petroleum blackness. He made the other two men stand with him as he risked his face.
________
The bomb did not explode during assembly. But afterwards he was tired; he had a headache and his arms hurt—more so than when he had violently tugged the scab of the petrol cap from the rump of the Maruti—and he stayed up all night on the bed of the spinsters, his head throbbing and the city mocking him with its million nocturnal honks, wondering: What will it be for? Am I ruining it by not sleeping? Will my nerves be too shot to pull off the blast?
________
They drove the car to the market the next evening. They were all bathed, and they had all gone to the mosque and prayed—even Shockie, who found prayer distasteful and feminine. They were in good clothes and disguised with thick spectacles and false mustaches (Meraj wore dark glasses, for contrast). If anyone asked them, they were to say they had come to buy clothes and gifts for their sister’s wedding. They’d even brought pictures of a woman in a fake marriage album (not one of Taukir’s sisters but a random pinup girl ripped from the walls of a seedy photography studio) to show how they were trying to buy wedding bangles that matched her dupatta.
Shockie, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, had masturbated to this woman, completing the fantasy that had begun with the dhaba owner’s bride.
The market was packed—just as he had hoped. It was a Sunday. Driving carefully through the obstacle course of pedestrians and cyclists and thelas, they entered the central square of Lajpat Nagar Market—if you could call it a square. Encroachment had softened the sides and the corners of the market; there were buildings and shacks on all sides, and a park in the middle with a rusted fence and rubbish collecting on the brown mound where grass had once grown. Shockie was pleased with this choice of venue. He’d visited Lajpat Nagar on his previous trip to Delhi and had decided, with his friend Malik, that it would make an excellent target.
They parked the car in front of Shingar Dupatte, a women’s clothing shop.
Afire with nervous tics, they came out of the car. Shockie smoothed his hair, Meraj put on his dark glasses, and Taukir dusted off his tight black jeans.
Quite suddenly, a man appeared before them. “You can’t park here,” he said.
“Sir?” said Shockie.
“My son has to park his car here.” The man was the owner of Shingar Dupatte—a short bald fellow with a mustache and a granitic head that appeared to hold every shade of brown.
“And who’s your son—the king of Delhi?” Taukir asked.
“Come on, it’s OK,” Shockie said.
At first he was appalled that Taukir would risk searing himself into the man’s memory with an argument, but later he was grateful: Taukir had behaved as any rude Delhiite would, and besides, they were disguised.
Now
, getting back into the car and reversing it, Shockie said, “Next time be quiet.” This was already the worst mission he’d ever been on, he decided; his mind swarmed with images of the police, of torture, of life coming to a sudden end in Delhi. The only way out was to park close enough to Shingar Dupatte so that the nosy, rude proprietor—and his son—were killed. “You guys get out now and I’ll park. That guy is going to come after us again and ask us to move.”
They did as he instructed, and Shockie maneuvered the car in front of a framing shop.
Within the shop, he caught sight of oil paintings of mountains—things yellowy and oozy with paint; a golden Ganesh; a Christ on a cross; a Rajasthani village woman. It was like a flashback a man might have as he dies, all the odd significant objects swirling into view over the heads of humming, commercially active humans.
He parked, jumped out, and walked away. He pressed a small jerry-rigged antenna in his hand and activated the timer, set to go off in five minutes. The proprietor of the framing shop looked at him but Shockie smiled and waved back—as if he were a regular customer—and the man, seated fatly behind a counter, one of those counters that have a money drawer, looked confused and then smiled and waved back.
________
Shockie walked away from the central square. “Don’t look; keep moving,” he told the other men as he came across them in an alley. After a while they made it to the main road.
But the market—the market was noisy in its normal way. There was no disruption, no blast, nothing. “Shit,” Shockie said. “But let’s wait.”
They threaded their way through the dark alleys, sweating, bad-breathed, anxious, melting in the heat. “It must be the cylinder,” Shockie said finally, realizing the bomb had not gone off. “Let me go back and get it,” he said. “Something must have gone wrong.” He was ashamed. The eyes of his comrades were on him. Failure was failure—explanations solved nothing. His bravado had been for naught.
“We’ll come,” Meraj said.
“You should have helped when it was needed,” Shockie said. “Now what’s the point?”
“What if it goes off when you get in?” asked Taukir.
“Then do me a favor and say I martyred myself purposely.”
________
The car was still there when he went back. For effect, he entered the framing shop. “How are you?” he said, bringing together his palms for the proprietor.
“Good, good. Business is fine—what else can one want?”
The proprietor was fair and doggish, with worry lines contorting his forehead. He had a serious look on his face, as if being surrounded by so many frames had made him conscious of being framed himself, of being watched.
Shockie went back to the car. As he turned the ignition, there were tears in his eyes. Instinctively preparing himself, he put a palm over his dick.
So this was how it would end. Pulling the gears, he backed out of the spot.
________
“I know what went wrong,” Shockie said, when they were back in Taukir’s house.
“What?” said Taukir, now feeling much closer to Shockie.
Shockie pointed to the yellow wires that he’d clipped from the contraption in the bonnet, picking them up in a loop the way one may pick up a punished animal by the ears. They had frayed in the heat.
“Let’s just go tomorrow and try again,” Meraj said irritably. He just wished the mission to be over.
“We can’t,” Taukir said. “The market is closed on Mondays. But Tuesday is a big day because it’s the day after it’s closed.”
“We better send a message back to base,” Meraj said sleepily. “The election is in four days.” The bomb in Delhi was meant to be a signal to the central government about the elections they were organizing in Kashmir.
“Tell them that it was a wiring problem,” Shockie replied. “They’ll understand.”
But Shockie was chastened. They were all chastened and disappointed with each other. Like men who have failed together, they wanted nothing more than to never see each other again.
________
On Tuesday, Shockie went alone to the market. But there was no pleasure in it. It was all anticlimax. And he could see the faces of the framing shop owner and the owner of Shingar Dupatte, how they would react when the bomb went off; and he felt sad, the way one always did when one knew the victims even a little.
CHAPTER 4
After the blast, Shockie returned to Kathmandu, retracing his steps, reading the news whenever he could.
The Times of India featured a picture of a blasted stray dog.
When Shockie got back to the base in Nayabazar—he had separated from Taukir and Meraj, who had gone elsewhere, into hiding—he was surprised to find himself embraced as a hero. “You killed two hundred,” Masood said. “God bless you.”
“It was more like fifty,” Shockie said, immediately disgusted by his own lie. He tended to believe the Indian papers on this subject. They had no incentive to play down the horrors.
“Our reports say a hundred at a minimum,” Masood said.
Shockie did not say anything further.
It was only when he went out for a walk later with his friend Malik that he burst out, “I’m thinking of defecting.”
“Tell me why,” Malik said, exhaling deeply.
Once Shockie started, he couldn’t stop. He felt the leadership of the group was corrupt and in denial, prone to inflating figures to get more funding; that they were siphoning money to build big houses for themselves and sending their children abroad but not providing even the minimum for blasts in Delhi—why else had only thirteen died?—that they were ideologically weak, not realizing that one big blast achieved much more, in terms of influencing policy, than hundreds of small ones; that one of the militant leader’s sons was studying in England—granted, Ramzi Yousef had also studied in Swansea, Wales, but then he was from a rich Kuwaiti-Baluchi family. . . .
But mostly Shockie felt there was no innovation when it came to bombs.
“You just have a habit of complaining,” Malik said.
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true, yaar. Even if the blast had been huge, you would have complained. Now, what do you want? That the whole country fall to its knees? This isn’t America, bhai. There the people are rich and they wait excitedly for tragedy. You set off a small pataka and they cry.” Malik hadn’t been to the U.S., but he was a big reader, and this fluent authority brought tears of satisfaction to his eyes. “Whereas a city like Delhi—what can you do?”
“We could try Parliament, like I told Abdul.”
“Leave the Parliament. There’s too much security.”
“What about Teen Murti or IIC? FICCI. World Trade Center. Oberoi.”
“You are not getting my point,” Malik said, shaking his head. “Delhi is a Muslim city, with a Muslim history and Muslim monuments. If you want to shake people, you have to attack Muslim targets. It makes our decision to attack harder. And when you look at the new construction, it’s all Punjabi and awful. No one cares if it falls.” Happy with this irony, he smiled broadly.
“Whatever it is, there should have been more damage,” Shockie said. “I looked at it after I left. I shouldn’t have done that—it was dangerous—but the bomb only made a phut sound and I thought better to look than waste a month of work. Nothing happened, yaar. A few buildings fell. A few people were burning.” He looked at his friend, trying to gauge his response to this violent reenactment. “My personal philosophy is, if we’re fighting a war, we should try to kill people, not injure them. You’ve seen what injury does.” Malik had a limp from being severely beaten by the military years ago. It was a turning point for their friendship and their involvement with the conflict. Shockie had knifed a soldier on Malik’s behalf. From that time on they had been inseparable, tied to each other even if they didn’t quite want to be. Their re
lationship, really, was a kind of marriage, held in place by a massive history. “How is your foot?” Shockie asked.
“Fine, fine,” Malik said. “Pain is all in the mind.” Talking about his foot put him in a bad mood and he changed the subject. “Were you able to go to Sagar?”
Sagar was their favorite restaurant in Delhi.
“Not this time.”
Now they walked in happy silence, Shockie contemplating Malik’s injury and their joint past, Malik contemplating the road, the hills, the twisting smoke fires. He was a bright person with a wonderful eye for detail; the limp had slowed him down, but it had also slowed the world around him. He missed nothing and he remembered everything; when he closed his eyes he could re-create a landscape down to the smallest leaf.
This was how he calmed himself through moments of pain. He painted too—it was a good way to make use of his photographic memory.
The two men arrived at a valley packed with boulders of many sizes and a clear mountain stream and they stripped down to their underwear and swam. Malik felt the water against his penis, which had been burned and electrocuted during the torture. Sometimes he felt swimming in natural streams, with their rich purse of minerals, might solve his problems. Shockie, broad and muscled, made unnecessary strokes in the water next to him.
After they were done, they rested on flat rocks and let their bodies roast in the sun. They held hands like lovers, though there was nothing sexual about this.
How could it be that only four days ago I was in Delhi planting a bomb? Shockie wondered. And now I’m here? The birds overhead were fervent in their high-pitched complaints. A surge of brightness passed over him. He hugged Malik and briefly fell asleep.
________
After this excursion, Shockie went to visit Abdul, the leader of the group.
Abdul was a schoolteacher; when Shockie entered the classroom in the half-caved-in house that served as a school, Abdul was teaching the Sanskrit poet Kaˉlidaˉsa to a group of rapt ten-year-old girls sitting on the floor with plaited hair and black shoes and gray uniforms, hunched over notebooks. Water leaked from the ceiling to a spot between two girls but they didn’t seem to notice. Abdul’s hand moved up and down the blackboard and his mouth made mechanical sounds. Set among the schoolgirls, he seemed even taller and bonier than usual, his cheekbones jutting from his face and his fingers fragile and long, an unnecessary shawl around his shoulders. When he saw Shockie, he smiled a weak smile, cut off his lecturing abruptly, and without saying anything to the girls, went to embrace him.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 5