The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  Shockie allowed a half smile as the man’s arms went around him. He knew the eyes of twenty girls were on him.

  “Welcome back,” Abdul said, straightening up and thumping his shoulders. “I was worried about you. When did you arrive?”

  “Just yesterday,” Shockie said. “Should we go outside?”

  “Of course, of course.”

  As they walked to the carpet shop (another of Abdul’s businesses), Shockie crossed a puddle and was reminded of the deep lilac pool of mountain water from the morning.

  The bomb—all bombs—seemed far away.

  In back of the carpet shop, Shockie talked about the operation in Delhi. “You need to give us more funds,” he said. “When I first made the chocolate, no one would eat it. I tried feeding it on the nineteenth, but the shopkeepers refused. I had to take it back and bake it again. Then only it went off on the twenty-first,” he said, breaking code without realizing it. “Everything OK?” he asked, with irritation. “You look distracted.”

  “Yes, yes, but I have good news.”

  “What?” Shockie said, mildly irritated by the inattention.

  “You are going to meet the leader of the Hubli Faction.”

  The Hubli Faction was a terrorist group based in South India. For years, the members of the JKIF had been trying to extend their links to other terrorist outfits, but without success; Shockie, who had joined the group when he was twenty, and was now twenty-six, had been a chief proponent of this networking. Still, he tried to not show too much enthusiasm. “First listen to me,” Shockie said. Speaking slowly, he finished his story about the chocolate in Delhi, sprinkling it with unnecessary details. Eventually, though, he said, “Tell me about the Hubli Faction.”

  Abdul now gave a confusing story about how he had dealt with several middlemen to finally get in touch with an agent who was running a training camp in the forests near Hubli.

  Shockie’s mind was elsewhere. He was looking at the objects in this back room: rolled-up carpets, old plastic chairs, buckets. What was he doing here? Were they cracked to have such delusions of grandeur, to think they could shake up India from a carpet shop? And now they were going to meet the Hubli Faction? “When do you want me to go?” he asked.

  “Tomorrow,” Abdul said.

  Shockie fell silent.

  “What?” Abdul asked.

  “Can Malik come with me?”

  Abdul laughed. “You’re being serious?”

  “Yes.”

  Abdul laughed again and shook his head.

  ________

  Malik had a reputation as something of a thinker in the group. This wasn’t a positive appellation: he was regularly derided by the others as being effeminate, confused, contradictory, ineffectual, and eccentric. He offered the most fantastic ideas at group meetings at the back of the carpet shop. “We should write letters to the victims and families of victims of attacks,” he’d said once. “After all, what these victims go through is similar to what we all have gone through as Kashmiris. Something bad happens to them, they expect the government to help them and instead the government ignores them. Yesterday I was reading in the Hindustan Times that most blast victims don’t get compensation for two or three years. I’m telling you, all these people—eventually they turn not against us but against the government. If you want a true Islamic revolution in this country—not just fighting selfishly for our small aims—then we need to win over these people, show our solidarity with them, tell them that our hands were tied, we were only trying to expose to them the callousness of the people they have chosen to elect.” There were tears in his eyes, as usual, from his own eloquence. “Only then can we depose the central government.”

  “Anything else, Malik?”

  “Yes,” he’d say, continuing, everyone watching with bemused expressions and grinning quite openly at each other.

  Malik did not appear to notice. But Shockie always felt a little bad for his friend. “You aren’t appreciated here,” he often said. “You should have been a professor.”

  “But I can contribute much more as a writer here.” Malik was the publisher and propagandist in the group and very proud of it.

  Poor innocent Malik! Shockie thought. What could he contribute? He was only tolerated because Shockie was his protector and benefactor and Shockie was the top bomb maker in the group. And yet Shockie loved him. Being in the group meant eschewing relationships with women and this was the closest Shockie could come to re-creating the tenderness one felt toward a woman. They were roommates and Shockie often asked what Malik was reading. Gandhi, he might say. Or Tolstoy. Or Pushkin. What does he make of himself? Shockie wondered. Does he really have no idea how pathetic he is? But Malik appeared innocent about his own oddness. Perhaps the injury to his leg and penis had made him a little blind, had given him the aspect of a holy fool, as if that were the only way to deal with the horror that had been inflicted upon him—Shockie had seen this with other cripples, too: a strange light, maybe the light of death, bleeding around the edges of their dull corneas.

  ________

  After his meeting with Abdul, Shockie went to his room. When he came in, Malik was praying on a mat laid out between the two charpais. He was a religious person—religion, Shockie thought, that crutch of the weak.

  When he was done praying, Malik sat at the edge of the bed, and Shockie told him about the meeting with Abdul. Malik listened with his hands tight around a copy of Gandhi’s Autobiography, nodding at odd moments.

  “You’re listening?” Shockie asked. Why were people never listening to him?

  “Yes, yes.”

  “Do you want to come?”

  “What will I do, bhai? You know how these people treat me.”

  “This is an opportunity to change that,” Shockie said. “You’ll get a little practice. Otherwise our missions are too dangerous for a first-timer. But you don’t have to. You can keep letting these people call you a coward.”

  “It’s not that I’m afraid,” Malik said. “I think I can be more useful here.” He tipped his head toward a cyclostyle machine and some letter-block printing paraphernalia in the corner of the room. As the “publisher” and “propagandist” he churned out pamphlets, posters, manifestos, and warnings against civilians and army officers to be posted on the walls of village houses and GPOs and thanas, all of them written in an overblown apocalyptic style that Abdul said gave him a headache, and that Shockie, as Malik’s guardian, always edited.

  “Suit yourself,” Shockie said.

  But he was sad.

  That night he stayed up thinking of his mother and imagining a series of girls he had been infatuated with in his village. Where were they now? Was that horrible ox of a weaver really fucking Faiza? (This did not stop him from picturing the act; he liked imagining the private lives of others.) Was Sahar really a mother of two, putting oil on her round stomach? And what about Asma . . . ? In this way, he began to fall asleep. But right when sleep was coming, he got up and said, “You’re lazy.”

  Malik, curled on his charpai, his back against the wall, reading, his toes visible and dirty, said, “What?”

  “You should come with me. You have no idea how disrespected you are in the group. They mock you openly. When I told Abdul I wanted to bring you, he laughed and forbade me from doing it.”

  Malik said nothing.

  “When you were talking about Gandhi the other day, they were all laughing. I even tried to signal to you but you were so lost in your conversation. You need to do something. Your position in the group is insecure. If something happens to me, what will you do? That’s why I want you to come with me. That way we can be together if something happens.”

  He felt he had made such a good appeal that he was surprised by Malik’s reply. “Maybe you’re the coward.”

  Shockie said nothing.

  “Inflicting violence is cowardly. We’ve
talked about that. If we were brave we’d walk into the street and be martyred.” He pointed to the Autobiography. “You know what Gandhi said Jews should do when faced with the Nazis? Commit mass suicide. Think about that.”

  Shockie shook his head. “You’re cracked.”

  “So what? What do you think these attacks are going to achieve? Today when you were complaining about the blast not being big enough, I was thinking: It doesn’t matter. It’s all wrong. Blasts are a way of hiding. If you want to be a hero you have to be a martyr.”

  “Why don’t you propose this to Abdul?”

  “Maybe I will.”

  ________

  After Shockie went to sleep, Malik read by the milky tube light fixed over his bed. He read about Gandhi’s childhood, his suicide attempt with datura seeds, the shame he felt over the fact that he was having sex at the moment his father died, his weak vegetarian constitution, his struggles with pain and sexual urges—he read all this and thought, “But this is me.”

  In the morning, when he woke up, Shockie was gone.

  ________

  Shockie took a shared jeep taxi from Kathmandu to Bhairawa, on the border with India. At Bhairawa he boarded a bus to Gorakhpur, where he spent the night again in Das Palace.

  Then, after days of traveling by train—this was his real profession, wasn’t it? Traveling?—he came to Hubli.

  The Hubli Faction was a small group of Keralite Muslims who planned attacks from a safe house in a forest. They took him to a clearing and wanted to talk about Marxism, revolution, Naxalites, water politics—anything but the issue at hand, which was: arms. Finally they showed him a stash of the most derelict-looking AK-47s Shockie had ever seen and grenades covered in thick dust. Nothing. It was pointless. This was playacting. The country spread around them in the form of a thousand animal sounds: crickets, bats, birds. He thought about what it would mean to die, right now, here—who would remember him? His mother, maybe; possibly Malik—but anyone else? No.

  He felt lightheaded in the clearing, in the dry dusk air of the forest, with birds leaping about in the space between trees. A wood fire was going and the members of the Hubli Faction, who got their cues from Rambo, were dressed in black and smoking around this fire.

  The next day Shockie took a train back to the Indo-Nepal border. He was in a contrite mood. “I must apologize to Malik,” he thought. He never got the chance.

  ________

  Instead, four days after Shockie left for Hubli, Malik was swept up from his lodgings and arrested.

  Malik was brushing his teeth by the open tap when the police came. The four men handcuffed his thin wrists before he could put pants over his underwear.

  “What have I done?” he asked.

  The police would tell him nothing.

  Still, once he was placed in the lockup, he began to relax.

  Kashmiris were always being hassled in Nepal for bribes, one oppressed race expressing its particular brotherly cruelty toward another; and besides, the investigator who came to ask him about his recent whereabouts was amiable, distracted.

  It was only when Malik caught sight of two bearded Sikh Indian policemen in the crowd of blue Nepali uniforms that he became worried.

  The Sikhs were stout and talking fast and Malik put all his fingers in his mouth.

  Then the station suddenly emptied and a Nepali policeman keyed open the lockup. “Am I free?” Malik asked.

  “In a sense. Very much. Come with me.”

  Instead, Malik was led to a windowless police van parked outside in the dirt and shoved into the back. He found himself in a metallic cavern, the outside world visible only through small stripes in the metal, the paint on the inside of the van scratched by desperate inmates.

  When the Sikhs got into the front and started the ignition, Malik knew he was being taken to India as a suspect for the bombing.

  ________

  Crouched uncomfortably on the floor of the van, handcuffed, his back against the metallic crown of a tire, Malik watched Nepal disappearing from view, photographing it mentally for what he expected would be years of imprisonment. He had read that the only way to endure solitary confinement—if that was your sentence—was to retreat into your own memories, to open and reread the books stocked in the library of your mind.

  He began to cry.

  Later, through the openings in the van, through the small grille, Malik saw a clear stream of water—a thread, really; a reel of light and fluid on the earth—and was reminded of his outing with Shockie to the pond two days before. It would be his happiest memory for many years.

  CHAPTER 5

  Malik was placed in police custody in Delhi on a Sunday. He was tortured for ten days straight.

  A month later, he was produced in a Sessions Court in Delhi and united with a group of arrested Kashmiris he didn’t recognize. The men stood like scolded schoolboys before the judge, each with a personal police escort at his side. Malik had feared, after all the torture, that he might find himself facing another co-revolutionary who had broken down and come clean. But this wasn’t the case.

  Gaunt, underslept, hungry, dressed in good clothes (for the sake of appearances), Malik peered out at unfriendly faces in the crowd.

  Where’s Shockie bhai? he wondered again, as the bald, lipless judge, a man in his sixties, exchanged a few words with a lawyer. Arrested? On the run? Around the room no one looked familiar. But Malik would not have put it past his more impulsive friend to disguise himself and walk into an Indian courtroom and spray the crowd with bullets.

  But what if Shockie was the informant? Shockie, in his whining, complaining, dissatisfied way, had talked a lot about defection, though this had been just that: talk, a way to fill the existential space between explosions.

  A fat, bespectacled, avuncular, wheezing policeman in slippers (Why were all the policemen in slippers? As if they had just rolled out of bed?) clutched Malik’s wrist; he smelled of sweat and gutka.

  The smell of sweat had become Malik’s relentless companion in the past month, in the heat of Delhi, in his small cell that he shared with ten others. This is the difference between being free and not. Freedom (at least temporarily) from the sweat of others.

  Everyone in the courtroom fell silent. The hustle and bustle of the judge’s various assistants died down, and only the judge’s voice and the stenographer’s thwacks could be heard. The judge made a few remarks and read a list of charges against the men. Malik and the others stood in front of the judge, facing him, but all Malik could think about was his hunger. He had been fed his breakfast at six a.m. as usual, but had been given his “lunch” at seven thirty a.m. That was because you could not eat outside the jail. He was dying of thirst and hunger. “Barbarous actions . . . Civilization . . . The killing of innocents,” the judge said.

  “Bread. Pizza. Chow mein,” Malik thought.

  MR. AND MRS. KHURANA’S RESPONSE TO TERROR

  1996–1997

  CHAPTER 6

  Deepa and Vikas and Sharif and Afsheen were in the crowd.

  When they had heard about the arrests, they’d been excited, passionately angry, each person exercising his or her fantasy of murder and revenge. Deepa imagined scalding the terrorists’ faces with cooking oil. Vikas smashed their heads with blunt metal rods. Afsheen thought, improbably, of delivering injections to their eyes. Sharif, who, in person, was the most bad-tempered of the lot, was the most subdued in his imagination. Slitting their necks quickly would do the trick, he thought.

  But when the four victims, or kin of victims, sat in the court and saw the terrorists, observed the state of the room in which they were being processed—the cobwebs blousy in the corners, the guano dissolving the floor, the twitchy fan above barely containing the fire of the afternoon—they became dispirited.

  Vikas put his arm around Deepa’s narrow frame and pressed her bones. She sat next to him on a plastic cha
ir, tense and perched forward. She had been a good, diligent student and he half-expected her to bring out a notebook and sublimate her rage with flowering handwriting.

  The men—bearded, gaunt, fair, dressed in sports windbreakers (as if they’d come from cricket practice)—looked middle-class, harmless. Unlike the criminals the Khuranas had seen in the court complex, they were not even handcuffed. Each man was held at the wrist by a paunchy policeman. One of the prisoners seemed to be on familiar terms with his escort and was laughing and showing his yellow teeth.

  Were these the people who had killed her children? Deepa wondered. Their personalities did not add up to a bomb.

  She became thoughtful and pensive, confused, shouted back to reality. She was aware, suddenly, that the death of her children was not a metaphysical event, but a crime. A firecracker set off by uncaring men in a market. She did not trust the government or the courts to do anything.

  After the adjournment, the Khuranas and Ahmeds rose and went out into the heat. “If the next hearing is in September, how long does that mean the case will go on?” Deepa asked. The court complex pressed on them from all sides. In tiny huts sat lawyers amid alcoves of dusty tomes, cracking jokes. Tall British buildings hogged the sky. Men of various sizes and speeds threw their legs along the winding medieval streets, chatting, exchanging information.

  Sharif, strolling plumply in slippers, said, “In the past these cases have gone on for five, ten years.”

  “Because the blast was in Delhi, it’ll be faster,” Vikas said quickly.