The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  “I think he’s quite famous, no?”

  “Not here,” he said, indicating the CAs.

  She smiled at him with her eyes and nodded back. It took Vikas a second to realize that she was gesturing about her approaching boss. “Chalo,” he said. “We’ll talk later.” But then he didn’t move. He was past embarrassment. The boss came and went. Six months later, they were married.

  MANSOOR AHMED’S RESPONSE TO TERROR

  MAY 1996–MARCH 2003

  CHAPTER 10

  The bomb became the most significant thing that had happened to Mansoor, cleaving his life into before and after. His hearing got worse for a while, cleaned out by the violent finger of the bomb. He wore a cast on his right arm for two months.

  Mansoor’s pain came in enormous fuzzy waves in his arm, doubling him over in his bed. At other times it was a claw of lightning, rapacious and singular, turning his limbs wet from the inside as he walked about the house in his pajamas. When he lingered with his parents at the dining table, a constant drizzle of electricity shocked his arm, and in the mornings his muscles turned sluggish with cement, and wet sand filled the gap between tendons.

  When he recalled the day of the bomb, his eyes filled with tears. He hadn’t known till then how selfish he was, and when he felt bad for the boys, it was undercut by a feeling that he was performing for God. And because he felt God could see him he was doubly guilty.

  It was lucky, his parents said, that the blast happened in the middle of the summer holidays, giving him time to heal. But maybe, Mansoor would think later, when he was older, his life in ruins, maybe it wasn’t. Had he been forced back to school, forced to confront the mundane dribble of homework and unit tests and weekly exams, he might have recovered faster. Instead he stayed home that summer—disturbed, upset, coddled, winched by nightmares, remembering the bomb, the boys as they lay next to the twisted car door, dropped and broken, and of course their faces before, the moments before, when they’d all been trudging through the market like heroes, talking about the prices of trump cards and bats, and he’d felt irritated at Nakul for acting so certain and authoritative. I know you’re not rich, he’d wanted to say. Why do you act it? But he’d said nothing. His mind whipped back to the bomb, the meaninglessness of it.

  His parents took him everywhere that summer—mosques, dargahs, the Bahá’i temple. Before, they had believed in nothing; now they believed in everything. He was happy to be escorted to these places in the air-conditioned Esteem, but when he found himself in a crowd his heart thundered, his palms sweated, and he looked around at the swirling faces of the devotees. “Mama, please let’s go home,” he begged.

  “Of course, beta,” she said, shouting for the driver, who always appeared with a knowing smirk on his face, as if he did not respect his rich young master’s problems.

  After that, the holy men trooped home: fakirs, maulvis, sufis, vaids, and the like. Mansoor, his thin legs tucked beneath his knees, said prayers with all of them, letting them press their old-man hands to his head for benediction and drinking whatever potions they offered.

  He liked staying home, in the ground-floor flat in South Ex with its emporium-like drawing room crowded with exotic teak furniture from Burma and Indonesia (Afsheen’s father had been in the foreign service and she had grown up partly in Burma). He had no desire to venture out again into the misery of Delhi. When news of the blast welled in the papers, he avoided it, scrambling the pages in a nervous blur till he was at Garfield and Beetle Bailey.

  Then, just like that, one day, school began. He was twelve and had places to be.

  On the first day of school, he was driven from home in a car by the driver, his parents lapsed on either side of him, his father’s head tilted back and fingers on his lips as he looked out the burning window, a man fulfilling his duty with seriousness and without ceremony, his mother more involved, upright and relaxed and cooing, bringing her cold and fragrant Nivea hands to his forehead. Mansoor smirked proudly as the car gathered the familiar landmarks on the way to school: AIIMS, Bhikaji Cama Place, the sandstone nub of the Hyatt Hotel. He assumed this was special treatment, bound to be suspended in favor of the school bus the minute he was settled into his routine, but when he got ready the next morning, the driver was waiting for him again.

  The bomb had killed his friends. But it had improved his life.

  ________

  The children at Vasant Valley School had by now gone through several phases with regard to the bomb, not so different from society itself. Nor were they strangers to bombs, the idea of bombs. Every year some joker called the principal’s office, said a bomb was hidden in a classroom, and everyone poured into the field till the threat had been neutralized. It was always the most memorable day of the year.

  So—the children, on summer holiday, had heard about Mansoor and been shocked, or rather tried to act as shocked as their shocked parents; had been bewildered or not based on their experiences with death; and then had forgotten. When they got to school, many were convinced that the deaths of the Khurana boys and Mansoor’s injury were just rumors, like those you sometimes heard about fast senior girls having sex with hoodlums who had finished school. These children were soon proven wrong, giving rise to another round of bewilderment: What could this small Muslim boy have to do with the exploding market? How could he have survived?

  “Bhainchod, did you set it off?” one senior with a bobbing Adam’s apple asked.

  Mansoor looked at him with confused, cautious eyes.

  ________

  Mansoor’s panic attacks in public spaces did not go away—they got worse. It was absurd, he told his mother, that there was no security in school to protect against terrorists and miscreants, and he was constantly on the lookout for suspicious bulging backpacks; he started violently if a football smashed against the grilles on the churchy windows, grilles designed specially to repel such invasions. In the break period he showed the wound on his right arm to his friends—a long smear of fibrous reddish skin hanging over his veins with the glistening clarity of egg white. Classmates surrounded him at all hours in the brick buildings of the school. It didn’t bring popularity but rather a sort of bland notoriety. He felt like a freak. He was still the only Muslim in school and he wanted to hide.

  He got the chance with physiotherapy. In a clinic in Safdarjung Enclave, he lay in a cube of curtains, tortured by tinny Hindustani classical music as a slight woman in a lab coat lathered his wrists with cold goo and ran the feeler of an ultrasonic machine over them. Adults with decomposing bodies moaned around him in adjacent cubes. In this house of pain, he too was a grown-up. His physiotherapist was a South Indian lady named Jaya—his first experience with South Indians apart from Deepa Khurana. “You’re Muslim?” she asked, clearly startled. “You don’t look Muslim.” But she relaxed when he mentioned the blast. “It’s very bad. These days one can’t live in this country.” She was one of those people who are lost within themselves. She told him the same story over and over about how her brother worked in information technology in Houston and how she had visited him there. “There is a very high standard of living there,” she said. She asked the same questions every time, as if discovering anew that there was a patient there. “You also want to study IT, no? There’s a big scope in it.” He lay impatiently in bed. Afterwards, he went with his mother for a walk through Deer Park, happy among the vaguely caged animals—deer, peacocks, rabbits, the moving rubbish of stray dogs and cats, the mynahs with their minimal beauty.

  ________

  When the terrorists were arrested, Mansoor asked, “But Papa, what if they get out of jail?”

  “There’s a strict sentence for terrorism,” Sharif reassured him. Though he himself was wondering whether the right men had been captured; there was already talk among the Muslim intellectuals he knew, professors at Jamia, that the police had rounded up innocents as “terrorists”; that they had planted a stepney, a spare tire,
in the room of a couple of papier-mâché artisans in Bhogal and arrested their fourteen-year-old cousin, who had come for his summer vacation to Delhi from Srinagar; that the other arrested men had been in custody even before the blast.

  “Look, the thing is, they didn’t do any of the arrests with an independent witness present,” Rizwan Ali, a professor at Jamia, told him. “Without that, the case falls apart. There’s zero credibility. Now, Sharif-sahb, we also want that the people be brought to book—that’s the goal. But I have a fear, having seen these cases before, that you’ll find the same problem here.”

  “Bhaijaan, it’s none of our business. We’re just happy that our son survived.”

  But when Sharif went home from this gathering in the Zakir Bagh apartments and saw his son, he became fearful. He sat behind Mansoor on the floor as he played his Mega Drive (his wrist had healed just enough that he could click a controller) and parted his son’s hair in the peculiar way his own mother had once parted his hair, closing his fingers together into a spoon and running them from the part to the ear over and over again.

  “Can you scratch a little also, Papa?” Mansoor asked, not turning around.

  “Of course!”

  That night, Sharif told his wife, “Watch your spending—we should send him to America for college when he grows up.”

  CHAPTER 11

  Years passed. In 2001, at the age of seventeen, Mansoor left Delhi for the US, excited to pursue a degree in computer science, which had become his main passion after years of confinement in his home. He was more intimate with his 486—and then his Pentium with Intel Inside—than with any person in Delhi. After all, to see other people meant you had to leave your house, and this made them accessories to danger.

  He had also become a decent programmer and web designer, building a tennis website, Sampras Mania, with a friend, which, though it plagiarized its stats and player summaries from ATP and ESPN, presented them in a (he thought) more orderly fashion.

  He won second-place trophies in class eleven in the computer quizzes at ACCESS and MODEM, where he was, he noted, the only Muslim in attendance, the Azim Premji of the gathering, if you will.

  The fact of the bombing, the exceptionalism of his last name in Hindu Punjabi society—these things filled him with an odd pride.

  He became aware of the oppression of Muslims as the BJP tenaciously clung to power all through the late nineties. His mother never stopped being alarmed. “They’re still angry about something that happened fifty years ago,” she’d say, thinking of partition, and returning again and again to the images of party workers swarming the domes of the Babri Masjid, gashing the onionskin of cement with hammers. Mansoor concurred. He believed, like his father, that the imprisoned men might be innocent. “Is there anything we can do as informed citizens?” he asked, parroting the vocabulary of his earnest civics textbooks.

  “In this country they prefer deformed citizens to informed citizens,” his father said drily. “And how will the Khuranas feel?”

  “They also want justice.”

  “Who knows what they want?”

  The families, in the years since Anusha’s birth, had grown apart. The Khuranas had stopped calling the Ahmeds for social gatherings—which they still organized—and often didn’t return Afsheen’s monthly, inquiring, concerned calls.

  “Ulta chor kotwal ko daante,” Sharif said, bungling the context of the homily. This is case of the thief scolding the watchman. “They should be thankful to us and to Mansoor. If he hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have known what happened.”

  Since the first few visits to the market, the Khuranas had recovered scraps of cloth they were sure came from the boys’ shirts. They’d found the exact spot where the boys had died from Mansoor’s memories.

  “You can’t get inside people’s minds,” Afsheen said. “But their situation also isn’t good.”

  She had her own theory: their marriage was in trouble. She had heard it from a common friend. But she did not think it right to gossip about this with her husband.

  ________

  When Mansoor was set to leave for the U.S., though, the Khuranas came over with Anusha and everyone was together again. An anxious serenity pervaded the air.

  “Have a wonderful time abroad,” Deepa Auntie said, rubbing her nose, as she did when she wanted to convey emotion, and presenting Mansoor with a fragrant envelope of rupees, rupees, which, of course, would be useless the minute he stepped on the plane.

  “Thank you, auntie.”

  “You must visit the museum where they keep Eadweard Muybridge’s first film.” Vikas Uncle was full of advice about the U.S., though it wasn’t clear he’d ever been there.

  Anusha ran over and gave Mansoor a hug at the waist and then went back to deftly polluting a notebook on the ground with the unnatural jumping colors of sketch pens.

  She was four now, the daughter of the bomb.

  ________

  Mansoor arrived in August on a farmlike campus in Santa Clara that was wide open and safe and he settled into his dorm, getting to know Eddy and Chris, his roommates, one a Hispanic football player from San Antonio, the other an Armenian-American tennis player from Los Angeles, each creature alien to the other in build and form (Eddy massive, Chris tall, Mansoor slight but hairy), the alienness canceling into a common brotherly bonding.

  “Dude!” “Dude!” “Dude!” they said, addressing each other, and Mansoor had never been happier. He developed a routine of working hard on his C++ assignments by day and then loitering in the cool California air by night as freshmen stormed the campus, singing their dorm chants.

  He was like a person who, thinking his vision perfect, puts on glasses for the first time to discover he has been going blind.

  Then one day he was brushing his teeth in his dorm sink when he heard a commotion—a rare sound for this time of the morning. Wiping his mouth, he went down to the main lounge, a wide rectangular room broken by driving asbestos-smeared pillars. Boys and girls were draped on the sofa in their athletic wear—shorts, sweatshirts, T-shirts—watching TV. They had smiles on their faces, which Mansoor quickly realized were the tight expressions that came before tears.

  Planes had crashed into the World Trade Center.

  “Shit,” Mansoor said, though he couldn’t really feel anything.

  ________

  Things began to change immediately on the pristine campus with its clear fountains like lucid dreams of the earth. People discussed the hijackers, who were all Muslims (the hijackers had made no effort to hide their identities, which had been radioed back by the flight attendants, who knew their seat numbers); and talked about Islam and its connection to violence. Mansoor felt uncomfortable, felt he was being looked at in a new way, but also felt he ought to stay clear of the debate. When he said hello to acquaintances as they marched past in the dorm, they didn’t wave back.

  “Are you OK my laad? My son?” his mother asked on the phone.

  “I’m in California, Mama, nothing’s happening here.”

  “They’re saying al-Qaeda wants to blow up the Golden Gate Bridge. Don’t go there.”

  “No one walks on the bridge. It’s very far from my campus. People drive on it.” Like many immigrants, he too had felt let down by the bridge.

  Still, back in the dorm, the little confidence he’d gained was gone—the wit wilted away from sentences and he was entrapped by his own thickening accent, which people suddenly found impossible to understand. He wanted to tell them about his own experiences with terror, but in those days after 9/11, when panic ruled the campus, and administrators warned students not to even accidentally drink water from a public faucet, since al-Qaeda was planning chemical warfare next, he did not get the opportunity.

  Then one day, he was sitting in the dining hall with Alex, a polymathic Jewish boy from Boston who was interested in all the international students and also liked
flooring them with his intimate knowledge of their countries, when he began speaking. Alex had been quizzing Mansoor about Sikh separatism. “It’s strange for me to hear all this talk about terrorism,” Mansoor said. “I was actually in a car bombing when I was young.” Once he started, he couldn’t stop. The story poured out. Telling it to a foreigner, in another language, having to put it in context—this made it small, exotic, alien, and terrifying. “The shop fronts had mirrors on them,” he said, realizing how odd it had been. “It was a fashion. And the mirrors blew up and the shards cut up people’s faces. I was very lucky. The worst thing that could have happened long term, apart from losing a limb, was damaging my ears. Your eardrums get blown out and you develop tinnitus, where you can hear a buzzing sound constantly. That didn’t happen. But I did get a similar kind of pain in my wrist and arm. It was like a buzzing.”

  “Shit, Mansoor-mian,” Alex said, spooning his hot pea soup. “Do you still have it?”

  “No, thank God, though it took years to heal.”

  ________

  After that, Mansoor thought things would change for him, but nothing did. People did not care about a small bomb in a foreign country that had injured a Muslim, and why should they? They were grieving. Three thousand of their countrymen had perished. Why would they look outward? Mansoor stopped talking about it and concentrated on his work.

  One night in the computer cluster in the basement of the dorm—a rank space that had clearly once been a boiler room; one wall was a jungle gym of gurgling pipes—a girl sitting next to him, a thin black-haired girl in an alluring tank top and shorts that had SANTA CLARA U stenciled on the buttocks (he had seen it when she got up to adjust the shorts), turned to him. She asked if he knew how to retrieve e-mails from the trash in Pine. Her manner was neutral and friendly and Mansoor was overjoyed. “Of course,” he said, and leaned over the desk. “Just click here.” She held back from the screen, blinking liquidly.