The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  “I’ve had a lot of experience with the justice system,” Sharif said. “It’s all about un-law and un-care.”

  “The important thing is that they’ve been caught,” Afsheen said, her dark glasses lodged up on her head. “It’s terrible,” she said. “What these courts look like.”

  ________

  In the car, after they had parted ways with the Ahmeds, Deepa said, “When the terrorists come to the court in September I want to be there to speak.”

  “I’ll phone Jaidev and find out,” Vikas said obediently. He was marveling, through the windows of the car, at the orange midafternoon indifference of the city—the dropping trees, the flat blocks of government construction stranded in the haze in the distance, the canal by the side of the road with fresh black mud shoveled out on the sides. Everything felt closed after the hearing—all the sense of expectation and possibility was gone. “I wonder how Mansoor is,” he said.

  “He’s alive,” Deepa said.

  ________

  But, at home, when Vikas phoned Jaidev, a lawyer friend he knew from his evening walks, Jaidev told him what he had expected—there was little point in getting involved; the case would drag on; besides, they hadn’t been present. The best thing to do, Jaidev said, would be to focus on future events, on the effects of terrorism in society, in setting up a scholarship or a debating prize at the kids’ school. “There is nothing to be gained from being involved in the legal system, believe me,” Jaidev said, his voice dusky with gutka. “It’s barely worth it for us with the current taxation system.” Though Vikas knew he made crores.

  “Don’t you think a mother’s testimony will be powerful?” Vikas asked. He felt alienated from himself as he posed this question.

  “No, no. It won’t affect how quickly they prosecute,” Jaidev said. “That’s based simply on how much evidence they have. You know yourself, from having done your documentaries; here they arrest first and find evidence later. Now, that’s not to say that the people who they’ve captured aren’t guilty—these people are not any more competent than the police—but it depends on how they build the circumstantial case.”

  Vikas was at a loss. He did not know how to proceed.

  The next day Deepa and he visited the Lajpat Nagar police thana, a brutish bureaucratic place characterized by the powdery paint on the walls and heavy steel desks. Upon arriving, they were surrounded by several policemen who asked what they wanted, clearly sizing up their ability to proffer bribes. They were led into an inspector’s office, where, under the portrait of a dead policeman, they registered their statement.

  “Anything else?” the inspector asked, squinting. He had a cold. One broken epaulet stood up on his shoulder like a praying mantis, or the wick of a candle.

  “Will we get to speak in court?” Deepa asked.

  “It depends on the lawyer, madam,” sniffled the policeman.

  ________

  They returned now to the depths of their lives, awaiting the next hearing.

  The days went by, soggy with anticipation, with the implication of important things happening elsewhere. Deepa baked cakes in the kitchen, punishing herself with heat. The kitchen was the largest, most luxurious part of the flat; a space that could have easily serviced three households, not just the tiny one attached to it—a leftover of the old joint way of life. Amazing, Vikas thought, watching her, that we’ve been in the same house for all these years. If I had money, we’d move.

  But they were tied to the house. He’d inherited it from his father. He owned the flat jointly with his siblings, and it was difficult to imagine selling it: Who would want to live this deep in a complex full of Khuranas, even if the address were a posh one? Would his siblings allow it? (It occurred to him that, in the circumstances, yes, they would.) Mostly, it was difficult to fathom the complexity of selling, setting a price, transporting one’s stuff, homing in on a new place—tiring. When you came down to it, this flat was the only security they had, the only immutable thing, even if it were bloodied from the insides with memories of the boys, Tushar waddling about in his giraffe-patterned pajamas and ordering around the servant, Nakul lounging in his hep overlarge T-shirts, surprising Vikas with his catlike stare. It was because of the house that he’d stuck to Delhi and not moved to Bombay, where the film industry was concentrated. It was easier to make documentaries if you weren’t terribly strapped for cash and worrying about meeting the rent and if, by the luck of good inheritance, you had a decent address.

  Foolish, he thought. I should have risked it and moved. Then this would have never happened and it would have been better for my career, which withered in Delhi, surrounded by family—people who judged my choices and my way of life without trying to understand.

  Vikas had a fever. Since the day of the blasts, he’d been consumed by such what-ifs (the initial embargo on them, imposed for the sake of his wife, out of a temporary maturity that comes to a man when he feels he is in a historic phase of his life, having been lifted). Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.

  When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided. He blamed himself for all sorts of decisions: for turning down money (he’d been offered a commercial project on the strength of his documentaries but had rejected it on cranky artistic grounds), for not taking another job (his brother had offered him a position at his travel agency when he was particularly low, living off loans from the family), for cowardice (why had he been so afraid of trying his hand in Bombay, of fleeing his festering ancestral womb?). He blamed himself for selfishness (why had he persisted with this career that so clearly made his children ashamed? All the fathers of their friends were industrialists who took their kids on holidays to Jungfrau and bought them Parker pens for their schoolwork). But mostly, he felt trapped with his consequences in the flat, in this flat with its terrazzo floors and yellow post-partition walls and views across the street of the home of a technology czar, a sleek set of buildings muscled through with old, hard, thick Rajasthani-looking wood—a fashionable touch recommended by an architect, no doubt, the same one who had recommended that the pool be shielded from view of the prying neighbors. Are there any women in this house? Vikas wondered, coming to the window. He had vaguely known that the IT czar’s daughter was a classmate of Nakul’s, but he had never seen her or her mother—not even at the funeral rites for the boys, which the czar attended alone, looking freshly barbered and shaved in his white safari suit and designer slippers, slippers he carried in his hands out of fear of the shoe-keeper at the temple misplacing them.

  They must drive up in their tinted Mercedes and be docked directly into the air lock of the portico of the Spanish-Rajasthani villa, Vikas thought.

  What am I supposed to do? he wondered. How am I supposed to respond to this thing that has happened to me? A few weeks ago I was standing here, looking through this garbled, pearly whorled window for my kids on the street, seeing instead the servants skulking under the ashokas. Now they’re gone, forever, no matter how long I stay here like faithful Hachiko, from their English reader. And yet I have an urge to stay here forever. An urge to punish myself by looking, by scouring every inch of tarred road and glittering gutter and veined dust-sprinkled leaf, in every season, at all times, for my boys—to look till I go blind or mad, till my brain revolts, staging a headache in the space where I am trying to insert the entire city by looking.

  His heart moved like a rudder through the icy seas of his chest. Vikas was a tall man with a patrician forehead and a rude thatch of hair; he took it in his hand in wild bunches. He did not move from the window. His eyes—wide-set, mobile, vulnerable—blinked more than normal. His thighs, muscular yet thin, like pipes,
burned with tension. Outside, on the street, the wind unfurled a serpent’s tongue of dust through the colony, pushing the organic detritus a few feet, little bits of shattered leaf getting stuck in blisters of tar. Horns. No cars turning the corner. Leaping sunlight. No boys.

  ________

  The next hearing kept getting postponed. The government would set a date only to cancel it at the last minute and propose another in a month. Deepa began to slip. “Maybe they’re not even guilty,” she said one day, wiping her forehead in the kitchen. Behind her blazed the dismal kingdom of the countertops, the cracked surface strewn with cut-up ingredients, fossilized dhania, and powder. “I was reading in the Hindu,” she said, “that one of the boys they picked up was sixteen and he had come from Kashmir for the summer holidays, to stay with his brother, who sells papier-mâché things at Dilli Haat.”

  The Khuranas were cut-and-dried secularists and liberals. They took the left-wing position on everything. They read the Hindu, the Asian Age, and the Hindustan Times; subscribed to Outlook rather than the saffronized India Today; were among the special coterie of urbanites who counted the crusading P. Sainath as their favorite journalist; were partisans of DD-2’s The News Tonight under NDTV, which they felt had been better in its hour-long avatar as The World This Week; were opposed to globalization and the monstrous coming of McDonald’s and KFC (why do you need McDonald’s if there’s a Wimpy? Vikas wondered); were against the BJP, which had sprung to power for thirteen days right before the boys had died, the government lasting only long enough to encompass the blast. And of course, they had a few token Muslim friends, like the Ahmeds, of whom they were inordinately proud—whom they had cultivated partly (though not entirely) to give ballast to their secular credentials. Therefore, had they been on the other side of the blast, or rather not on any side, but outside its murderous circumference, they too would have doubted the speedy arrest of the terrorists, the conflicting but confident storylines offered by the police, the heartless manner in which the suspects had been held for a month before being produced for trial.

  Of course, being victims, they’d had to suppress all that.

  “What are they saying?” Vikas asked, buying time. In fact, he didn’t care whether the terrorists were guilty or innocent. The four men standing in the court were like the obligatory impurities in a paperweight: They were just there. A thing to hold down time. One more new room for the Khuranas to pass through. And how did it matter if they were guilty or innocent, if his kids had already died? How could the suffering of these suspects, even if it was greatly exacerbated by being wrongly jailed, approach his own? On the way out of the court, he had seen a woman with reddish hair crying, her head bent low, hands gripping the sides of the plastic chair, two crooked front teeth visible at the top of the cave of her glistening, depthless, open mouth—he had seen this woman and his heart had tightened and he had assumed she was a nameless mother of the nameless dead in the blast. Now he wondered if she was the mother of one of the young terrorists and his heart leapt again—not for the terrorists, but for her, for how alone she must have been in that courtroom, surrounded by people who hated her and her son.

  Deepa, in the drawing room, propped her head against him and cried.

  Afterwards, she said, “I made a mistake. There’s nothing we can do. We can never catch the people who did this. They’re a thousand kilometers away.”

  “Deepu, darling, you can’t believe just one newspaper report.”

  “But it’s the Hindu.”

  “It’s put together by people like me,” he said. “Look at me. Of course it lies.” As he said this, he cast his eye around the drawing room. What a decrepit room it was. A sideboard stood next to the dining table, full of generic award plates you see in doctors’ offices—prizes from meaningless film associations, trophies won by the boys on sports day, medals from galas at the Friends Club. Closer, past the cheap, laminated fake wood surface of the dining table, wood the color of dark ale, eagerly foaming up any white impurity or dirt, lay the centerpiece of the shabby sofas pushed against the windows, windows that faced the adjacent building and were alive with dust, birds, chirping, the horrible guttural fever of sunlight. A maroon, moth-eaten, uneven carpet covered the floor. Somewhere, out of view, hiding behind a book on the sideboard, a clock ticked. Deepa was on her knees before Vikas now, crying. He had an erection—not from desire, but from a kind of excess vividness, the noises of the complex (the birds, the projecting hawkers, the grumbling servants, the hammering of new construction in the neighbor’s plot), building symphonically around the central instrument of the crying woman: he wanted to fuck the house, to fuck every little particle he could see.

  The house changed shape and color with passing clouds, like a woman angrily putting on and taking off clothes in a changing room. “Don’t cry,” he told his wife, inhaling the smell of cakes from her hair, and then he cried too.

  ________

  The trucks came every day at eleven, emptying their bricks and cement pipes and the load of construction workers before the snazzy gates of the neighbor. Vikas watched it from the window, drinking tea, tending to a fire in his stomach. Since the day of the blast, he had eaten very little—had come to subsist, like so much of the starving subcontinent, on tea; he loved tea, loved caffeine, felt naked without a cup at the end of his long fingers, giving him a reason to drop from his height and drink; he felt there was no harm now in indulging his worst habits—what was the worst that could happen, you’d fall sick? Tear away your stomach lining like the great French writer Balzac, so that you’d have to snort lines of coffee, chew tobacco? Bad things were going to happen to you anyway. Humans, especially bourgeois humans, were not meant to handle this kind of stress.

  He had not worked on his film project since the day of the bombing—Scenes from a Marriage, a documentary about divorce in India, so named in tribute to his favorite auteur, Ingmar Bergman (how would Bergman’s sharp bourgeois melodramas hold up against a bomb? he wondered). He couldn’t bring himself to do it, couldn’t tear himself from this window, which was like a portal into heat, death, futility, irritation—and also a stage. What had happened to him was so real, he couldn’t reenter the world of make-believe—yes, that was the work of a documentary filmmaker too: make-believe. It was artificial as anything else. You found a location, staged a scene or an interview, blocked out your story beforehand (after months of pleasant research on the subject), and then edited and reshot for effect. But all this seemed now to Vikas like a kind of tedium. He couldn’t look at the footage from Scenes from a Marriage, listen to the complaints of married women, try to carve a meaningful narrative from their frayed individual stories. To make a documentary out of many stories was to make a family out of inmates in different cells of a jail. It wouldn’t work. Or it would, but it would have the same sickly futile simultaneity of jail.

  “I just want to be here with you,” he told his wife when she expressed concern about him. “And how will it matter if I don’t work for one or two months? It’s not like I make any money. You make a lot more money than me—in fact, I should be your assistant.”

  “You’ll get more depressed being home,” she said.

  “I’ll read,” he said with a smile. “I’ll catch up on various things.” But there was something off and light and overly optimistic about his tone and he knew it too.

  When Deepa started crying again, he said, “What’s the matter, Deepu?”

  Throughout their marriage, he had marveled at how little she cried, how she never used tears to blackmail him, and in the past few weeks, there had been something particularly awful about watching this lovely, tough woman reduced to a shivering mess. But now, strange as it was, he was getting tired of it. He only had enough space for his own grief.

  “I’ve lost not just Tushar and Nakul but you too,” she said.

  Vikas hugged her and made a savage mental note that they shouldn’t be left alone like this, that t
here should be a relative present at all times to diffuse their grief into politeness. But he couldn’t argue with her. He was growing distant from himself, floating away above his body. Sometimes he felt, when he was in front of the window, that he wasn’t standing there but was looking down at the entire city from a blimp in the stratosphere, seeing the blackened roofs and the water tanks and the trees and the roads as one sees them on architectural plans: not dirty and ruined, as in reality, but clean and serene, occupied by no one.

  ________

  He started going again for his evening walk, his heart murmuring, his legs wobbly; it was his attempt to get back in touch with his body. But his mouth would be dry by the time he’d walked to the T-junction, and he’d turn back and go home. Each time he saw a neighbor, he bolted into the safety of his flat. He’d become a proper recluse. At the same time, since his wife had planted the seed, the idea of work was in his head. How to make a documentary about terror?

  The thing was, he didn’t want to make a film about the aftermath; he was living the aftermath. No—he wanted to make a film about the moment itself, when there was a hush as the bomb shut off humans and machines in the vicinity and then viciously rearranged everything. Yes, he wanted to film the moment itself, slow it down, open it up like a flower over time, like the ultraviolent bomb dreams that filled his nights.

  The dreams had been growing. At first he had seen the eye, bloody and syncopated and concocted, opening. Then the visions had become stereoscopic, his mind racing out in many directions to places like Sadar Bazaar, Faridabad, Indranagar, Rohini, Gurgaon, Sabzi Mandi—places where the news of the bomb turned into muddy rumor, as if his mind wished to establish a circumference for his grieving, come back with all the places that didn’t know about it, that certified its smallness.

  And yet there was something these dreams couldn’t approach. How to be present, he wondered, for the moment itself? How to know when a bomb was about to go off? A few years ago, during a lull between documentaries and commercials, he had become interested in the functioning of futures markets, and he wondered now: Was it possible to put together a futures market for bombs? Surely there were people with information about terrorism that a market would happily sponge up. No, Khurana, don’t dream. He’d have to be more specific than that, more practical. Surely there were times of the year and markets (real markets, not the abstract entities of economics textbooks) in which blasts were concentrated. Crowds attracted bombs. So did festivals and political rallies. There were festivals almost every day in Delhi—festivals of life, death, birth, benediction, and general sorrow and repentance, staged by obscure sects of Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Christians.