At home, unlacing his shoes, dumping out the sand that collected on the soles, feeling his stubble like a proof of advancing life, he did not sit down to calculate the odds of walking into a bomb. He knew enough about mathematics to understand it would only disappoint him. “I suppose I could speak to the police and to journalists about where they think bombs might be set off,” he thought, the old documentarian instinct asserting itself.
He saw Delhi as a city vibrant and roiling with possibility, with bombs as pockets of heat, geysers that sprayed up naturally.
He started visiting these markets at rush hour with his camera. There was the one limiting rule he set for himself, so that he not bore of the project, or simply go mad from the heat: he would film only at or around the time the boys had been killed in Lajpat Nagar. If this foreshortened the odds, so be it. As for filming, the act itself, he made sure he was inconspicuous; he did not want to scare away potential terrorists with his equipment. (He did not think, in his half-cracked state, that this way of thinking was extremely odd.)
His first visit was to Lajpat Nagar. Armed with a Betacam, entering the square, he set up a tripod in the ruined park in the middle. Immediately urchins and shopkeepers came up to him, asking what he was doing—people wild-eyed with the rushed newfound suspicion of bomb victims. When he told them he was the father of two victims, they quieted down, but they were obviously not pleased. Having suffered so much, they did not want to be filmed within the broken cages of their shops, shacks with the distended lips of shutters and fragmented beams.
From the park, Vikas took in the market in cinematic gulps, saw people traipsing over rubble, over blasted loops of cloth, old shoes—signs of the bomb that hadn’t been cleared away but were being compacted into the deep archaeology of the city. He thought of Tushar and Nakul, the parts of them that had been left behind here, merging with the earth.
After a while, he began to spread out. He went to GK, South Ex, Karol Bagh, Chandini Chowk, Sadar Bazaar, INA—places even denser than Lajpat Nagar, more eager to be blown up. He became a fixture in these markets, setting up his camera in the shacks of paanwallahs and tea sellers, buying their loyalty and canceling their grumbling with payments. He was making a movie about the bazaars of India, he explained. No, he was not with the police. To put them at ease, he described his other documentaries and exaggerated acquaintanceships with Bollywood stars.
“So why are you here if you know Raveena so well, sir?” one chaiwallah asked, referring to Raveena Tandon.
“Abe, what do you think, we can all sleep with her?” Vikas said.
There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.
And at these moments of light banter, it was possible to see a different Vikas emerge, one who had little do, at least externally, with the man who spent hours glued to his window as if it were a TV, looking for his boys out of powerful habit, his heart wrenched in place.
“It’ll be a tribute to the children,” he explained to his wife one day. “And one thing no one mentions is how brave the shopkeepers were,” he said. “After all, they have to go back to work right where the blast happened.” Though the record, in the case of Lajpat Nagar, at least in terms of bravery, had been mixed. Some shopkeepers had immediately leapt after their burning cars or their things, ignoring their injured assistants. The owner of the framing shop, a young macho Punju fellow with a lippy twenty-five-year-old wife and two young kids, had actually escaped the initial explosion and rolled into the alley between shops; then, overcome by greed, he had climbed through the burning tarpaulin to retrieve the cash from his box, only to be crushed by the falling A/C he’d had installed the week before.
But there were also instances of out-and-out heroism in this capitalist scramble. One of the shopkeepers, half his face blown off, had picked up a megaphone and warned customers to keep away. The assistants risked their lives to pull other assistants from the rubble. Mansoor ran away in fright but someone, some kind person, never to be named or found out, had taken the boys to the hospital; auto drivers, god bless their souls, had lined up outside the market, transporting victims to Moolchand and AIIMS for free. “I should make a separate documentary about them,” Vikas said.
He expected his wife to pick out holes but she said, “Don’t get killed in a bomb yourself.” Which, of course, was exactly what he wanted.
________
Deepa had not been idle during this period. Vikas came from a politically well-connected family—his grandfather had been an ICS officer and the chief commissioner of Chandigarh and a chacha had served as a cabinet secretary under Indira Gandhi; another cousin, Mukesh, was a friend of Venkaiah Naidu, the spokesperson of the BJP party.
Deepa, who had previously kept away from these family members on account of Vikas’s distaste for them (he hated anyone who didn’t flatter him about his art, who asked how he made money), now began approaching them for favors.
They were helpful. One of the more surprising moments at the chautha had been the appearance of Venkaiah Naidu—present at Mukesh’s behest—and now Mukesh said he would be happy to talk to Naidu again. “He’s not in power but I’m sure he’ll know the right person to talk to,” he said. Then, putting his paw on Deepa’s hand—he was a notorious groper of women, widely recognized as the colony’s lecher—he said, “Are you sure you want to meet the terrorists?”
She nodded. “Who knows how many years the trial will go on? Just once, I want to talk to one of them, to understand why they did this.”
“They wanted to disrupt the election in Kashmir,” Mukesh said, his eyes sympathetically grazing her grief-shattered face. “Will you have some tea?”
They sat in his office—he ran a construction business from a building across the street from the family complex—and drank tea. He reflected that it was the first time they’d ever sat together like this.
He’d always thought Deepa an exceptionally attractive woman, her exoticism enhanced somewhat by the fact that she was Christian and from the South, with sweater-gray eyes that seemed only a few nicks of color removed from her grayish-brown skin, a peculiar color that didn’t appear in Delhi, where the shades seemed to swing between black and white, Dravidian and Aryan (Mukesh himself was dark and hated the world for it).
Poor woman, he thought. Trapped in a doomed marriage with my depressed cousin (Vikas was ten years younger than Mukesh, but they were cousins)—a man who never knew how to handle women, who, with his nervous shifty mannerisms and sudden uncomfortable smiles, seemed to attract bad luck. You could see misfortune imprinted on people’s faces years before it hit them. Mukesh had always known that Vikas, the academic star of the family, would be a failure. Which is why he’d been surprised when Vikas had come one day to the communal drawing room with this sexy item at his side. Women work in mysterious ways; men do too. “Will you have biscuits with your chai?” he asked.
“No, no,” she said. “You have a nice office. Tushar and Nakul always wanted to see your construction machines and excavators.”
“You should have brought them.”
I thought you didn’t even own the machines, she wanted to say—you’re only a middleman—but she kept quiet. Mentioning the boys had opened up a door of mania and sickness right in the very center of her chest. She put down the tea.
Mukesh watched her sympathetically, his head slightly askance, as if looking at something around a curtain. His brows were distended with worry; he drummed the table in a way that suggested he was watching but that she was free to continue; that what she was going through was natural; he wasn’t going to draw attention to it, not until she wanted him to.
Deepa had always disliked Mukesh but she saw now that he had a certain natural comfort with women, surprising for such a bearish, hairy fellow, one who always
barked at servants and saluted everyone as he passed them on the street. “It’s been very difficult,” she said.
He remained quiet; she saw that the whites of his eyes were filigreed at the sides with red capillaries.
“We’ll make sure you meet the terrorists,” he said, standing up and coming around to her. He was behind her now, with his hands on her shoulders. “You don’t even worry for one second.”
________
Why did she want to meet the terrorists? She suspected it was because she was on the verge of parting from life, and she wanted all the loose ends tied up before she went, joining her boys wherever they were. So there was a galloping excitement within her: the thrill of meeting the men who had killed her sons; also, the thrill of her own death.
“Naidu won’t be able to help you,” Jagdish Chacha, the former cabinet secretary, said when she went to see him at his flat in the complex. “Mukesh likes talking. The person who can help you is Jagmohan or Kiran Bedi. I’ll phone them. But tell me: How is Vikas?”
“He’s OK, uncle. Busy with work.”
“Good. He has another film project these days?”
“Yes, uncle. A documentary.”
“It’s good that he’s outside,” Jagdish said. “Being outside I’ve found is crucial. Inside, one’s soul starts to get poisoned. When Indira-ji died,” he said, referring to Indira Gandhi, “I went and exercised every day. Now, tell me, what kind of meeting do you want?”
“Whatever is possible, uncle,” Deepa replied.
“You can meet them as people do in prisons—through a window in the meeting room. You go, queue up all day, and then you get to meet the person for five, ten minutes. If you go, you’ll see everyone has come there with tiffin boxes. Of course you won’t have to stand in the queue.
“But you can also meet them, or one of them, face-to-face in a room. Technically this is not allowed, but a jail is like a school—if you know the principal you can do anything. It might be that we’ll have to say you’re a journalist—can Vikas bring his press ID?—otherwise they, the terrorists, won’t want to meet you. Just to warn you, I’m not sure how much you’ll gain. When the militancy was happening in Punjab, I remember, many politicians wanted to meet the militants in jail, to shout at them. But the meetings were never satisfactory. They always found that the militants were reasonable men, which was even more difficult than finding out the opposite.” He was lost now in the halls of his past power, traversing them for impressive tidbits—Deepa had seen this before with Jagdish Chacha. She wasn’t friendly with him but knew his wife well and so had an idea of his idiosyncrasies.
When he was done, he said, “Now, you go rest. The family is behind you. All his life Papa-ji fought against this kind of fundamentalism from the Muslims. We’ll make sure you get everything you want.”
________
Funny, Deepa thought—how this kind of tragedy unites and energizes a family. I’ve not just asked these old men for favors; I’ve reinvigorated their lives with purpose.
A few days before the blast, Tushar had come into the kitchen in the morning to watch her at work. An earnest boy, he loved the hectic action of the kitchen. “And how much frosting do you have to make for the order, Mama?” he asked.
“Two or three kilos since it’s a bulk order,” she said. “And we’ll let it cool in the afternoon. Hopefully we’ll have electricity so it won’t turn green from mold. You want to mix it?”
He did. With the whisk tight in his hand, he churned the butter and the sugar. He was not as effeminate as his father made him out to be. It was a matter of context. In the context of the kitchen he was an expert. As he mixed the frosting, Deepa hugged his small frame from behind.
Later that evening Nakul played “Edelweiss” for her on the small guitar they had bought him. “Edel Vyes, Edel Vais, every morning you greet me,” he sang.
Now, back home from visiting Mukesh, Deepa reflected on the tragic oddness of her own life, how she’d grown up in a tiny family in Bangalore, the only daughter of a reclusive man who ran a famous bookstore and could talk about nothing but sixties rock ’n’ roll (he had not been a recluse before his wife died, though she could barely remember that); how she’d been a shy and frightened but persevering creature, doing well in school and ending up in Delhi and working for Arthur Andersen, the CA firm, thanks to a family connection—Delhi, that odd world, so much more spacious and rude than Bangalore; Delhi, a place where no one was firmly rooted and there was a sense that if a better city presented itself just fifty kilometers away, the opportunistic inhabitants would immediately quit the city, caring not a jot for the earth that had nurtured them. And, of course, out of all these Delhiites, these savage North Indians, she’d picked Vikas. Or Vikas had picked her. She’d liked him because, in the middle of the rude crush, he had the disarming gentleness of a South Indian—he was a Punjabi but he could have been sprung from St. Joseph’s. Calm, sympathetic, patient, he was a good listener, marked with none of the prejudices she imagined North Indians carried toward South Indian Christians (and she wasn’t wrong about these prejudices: years later, when she became a de facto Punjabi as well, she learned that most North Indians thought all Christian women were maids); and their courtship had an easy, light quality; they’d melted like two shy creatures into one another.
Tears came to her eyes remembering those early days—days of infatuation. After that everything had gone to ruin. Vikas slipped into a depression about his career as a documentary filmmaker from which he never recovered—angry first at his family for not understanding why he wished to be an artist rather than a CA (“There’s only one artist in the whole bloody family and they can’t even handle that!”) and then at himself for having chosen such a nugatory, ascetic path at a time when India was booming with money and rupees fell from the trees like soft petals, enriching even the fools of his family, whose property values shot up. How many times had she told him to quit? To go back to being a CA? To do something else? To sell his inherited lands in Patiala? But he refused. Descending into bitterness, surrounded by the braying, pointing, mocking audience of his family, he had become attached to his own pain. He did not want to make changes because that would mean losing his precious exchequer of bitterness.
And then there were the kids. He had, in his bitter, depressive way, been opposed to having any, but she had pushed him and pressured him, sending subtle messages through family members, thinking that children would rouse him from his emotional torpor, give him a reason to act. And, in fact, there was a change in him after Tushar was born. Vikas loved the boy in the obsessive, cuddly way he loved animals—constantly nuzzling against him, singing wicked, demented songs; he was energized (as many artists are) by his own creation.
But soon he lost interest in Tushar and Nakul and returned to his depressive state—in fact, he blamed the boys for exacerbating his depression. “We should never have brought them up here, with the influence of this family. They’ve also turned out to be Punjabi brutes with no understanding of art.”
“I’ve told you many times we could move to Bangalore or Bombay,” she said. “And the boys are much more like you than anyone else.”
“And who’s going to pay the rent, my dear? The fees for their school? This property is my curse. I’m stuck here. The property is probably my subject, though I’m not sure how to make a documentary about all these oafs.”
Such self-pity! She wouldn’t stand for it. “You have more than enough money locked up in lands. Why don’t you sell it?”
But Vikas was incorrigible. “Do you realize how complex it is? I’ll have to deal with Mukesh, Jagdish, Rajat, Bhim. It’s not worth it. Better to let a few of them die off,” he said viciously.
How had he become like this? Where had her husband—the sweet man she’d known the first few years—gone? She began despairing that this was his true self, that she’d been fooled those first few years. Such bitterness could not
be minted overnight; it had to be implanted at a young age. Maybe he wasn’t so different from the bad-tempered, cynical people in the complex that he despised—but whereas those people pinned their cynicism on the decline of the family’s reputation, he pinned it on the decline of his career. It was all the same, in the end; it produced the same results. It occurred to her that she could have been married to any one of the shrieking, sniggering fools on the family campus. That she was like Draupadi, wedded to the family, not to a person. “You used to be different,” she had said at the end of that conversation about selling the lands, trying to keep herself from cracking.
“No,” he’d said. “I was just on a break from being myself.”
________
Then, one day, in October, five months after the boys’ deaths, they went to Tihar Jail to meet a man named Malik Aziz. Malik, it was said, was the ideologue of the JKIF, the man behind its violent philosophy. A bookish student of chemistry at the University of Kashmir, he had turned out to be a dangerous, charismatic figure in the student protest movements, egging his fellow students on from stone throwing to kidnapping a vice chancellor of the university to assassinations and finally terrorism. “According to RAW, he’s one of the most dangerous terrorists in the country,” the police escort whispered as he walked beside Deepa through the winding inner roads of Tihar, small paths canyoned on either side with high dirty yellow plaster walls, the walls overlaid with snaps of shattered glass and barbed wire.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 8