The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  “Thank you so much,” she said when he was done.

  “Of course.”

  But when Mansoor went back to typing at his terminal, he heard her stirring again.

  “Hi, I’m Emma,” she was saying to the curly-haired white boy on the other side of her—a boy also in a tank top, playing Quake on the screen.

  “Daniel.”

  That was all. The next day Mansoor complained to his friend Irfan at the campus Starbucks. “To them I’m either a computer programmer or a terrorist.”

  Irfan was a stocky boy with a limp that made him look oddly rakish and wise for his age. “American women are like that,” Irfan said, twirling a wet Frappuccino bottle. “You have to fuck them first before they talk.”

  Irfan had a particular way of making his disaffection cool, and Mansoor hung out with him for a few weeks, before tiring of his misogyny and his habit of wanting to borrow Mansoor’s problem sets. Soon after, Mansoor returned to programming with a vengeance.

  ________

  He worked steadily for the next year. He had decided to become an exceptional programmer on par with Bill Joy and Steve Wozniak. Keeping a copy of The Fountainhead by his side, he rapped away at the keyboard into the night.

  Then, one day, during his sophomore year, while programming Boggle for a Programming Methods class, his wrists started to ache.

  His wrists had ached off and on ever since the Lajpat Nagar blast—Jaya, in her pedantic way, had warned him that such deep-seated pain, at the level of the tissues, where the cells and nerves themselves had been singed, did not go away easily, and he was supposed to keep up his wrist and arm exercises, lying on a yoga mat and lifting one-kilogram weights in contorted poses. Of course, he hadn’t. Exercise bored him—why run if you weren’t being chased?—and he’d been caught up in the ardor of college. Now the flaring pain sent vectors of electricity up and down his right arm. In the unintelligible void of his muscles danced a thousand pins and needles. “Don’t panic,” he told himself. But what scared him was that the left wrist, weak from all that typing, could barely continue on its journey along the valleys and plateaus of the keyboard. His neck ached.

  After a few days of this (within three days, he was totally unable to type) he went to see the physiotherapist at the campus health center. Sitting among fragrant potted plants, amazed by how similar the place looked to the physiotherapy center in India, though the two countries were ten thousand kilometers and eons of income apart, he was careful to explain how it had happened, his history with the bomb—careful to separate himself from the other namby-pambies who came to see her. The physiotherapist, a bright and squat pregnant woman with blond hair and enormous overworked arms, put his arms one at a time in a hot bath of wax, so that a skin of hot wax hardened on them. It was like having another skin. “The heat will be good for you,” she said. After a while, she cut the wax away softly with a butter knife—it was a pleasing sensation—and she gave him printouts showing exercises and different relaxation techniques and told him he would be totally OK.

  But Mansoor’s pain didn’t get better. It got worse. A few weeks after his visit to the physiotherapist, he woke up in the middle of the night with his arms radiant and loud with electricity. The massive hunk of Eddy from San Antonio snored in the upper bunk. When he got up to go to the bathroom, sparks shot up his sciatic nerve and numbed his leg, and he stumbled.

  “You’ve got tons of microtears in your wrists from typing,” Laurie, the physiotherapist, concluded, when he went back to see her. “These things build up over years. You get injured, you develop a compensatory posture when you type, and bam!—years later you have herniated discs. When did you start using a computer?” she asked.

  “Twelve,” he said. He had got a 486 right after the blast—he had got so much after the blast!

  “There you go—all those years of sitting still, hunched over, not taking breaks.” She told him he had carpal tunnel, an incurable condition. “Though it can be controlled and improved,” she assured him.

  He was essentially crippled. Walking around the bright campus in a daze, he felt his right leg and right arm and left wrist go numb.

  Free from India and still plagued by pain! After all these years! He’d changed his mind about the bomb so many times. Of course it was a curse to have witnessed that explosion, to have suffered so vividly—to have so many things opened to him at once: death, a woman’s hanging breast, the cowardice of men and women who ran screaming from the market. At other times—the blast had improved his life, hadn’t it? He’d eked a spectacular college essay out of it—the dean himself had congratulated him on it when he’d arrived. Now he played the essay back in his mind: those homilies and banalities he’d penned about terror, the death of his friends, communal harmony—bah! Maybe that was why he was suffering now: he’d tried to take advantage of a tragedy. His mind darkened. When it comes to cause and effect, he thought, I really do believe God exists; I really do think God is watching, drawing his conclusions, doling out consequences. Sometimes I don’t even know I’ve committed a sin till a punishment comes along.

  After all, he wouldn’t have been typing so much if he hadn’t been in the U.S., where everything ran on computers, where the Internet was available on tap and the electricity never went out. And he wouldn’t have been in the U.S. without the essay. You have to stop thinking like that, he told himself. You did almost die. He saw again the small child with flaring red-hot fragments around him, the screams, the stampede, the cowardice of a whole society stripped bare. Most of the people who had learned these lessons about their country and city died seconds later, as if the bomb existed to prove to them, in their final moments, that they had lived a useless life in a useless place.

  But the pain did not go away; it got worse. In the middle of his third semester in college, unable to function, he returned to India to recuperate.

  CHAPTER 12

  “How can it still be there?” his mother asked the doctor at the clinic in Safdarjung, blinking furiously.

  The doctor was a stately Sikh who dressed in white shirts with matching white turbans; he worked with a lot of embassies. The great endorsement of anyone in Delhi: he works with embassies.

  “Sometimes it takes years to heal,” he said, clearly occupied by other problems: financial ones, maybe; he had an undoctor-like anxiety in his eyes.

  “I don’t understand why it’s coming back now, at this moment. The last time we came, if you remember, the checkup said everything was OK.”

  Mama, Mansoor wanted to say, it’s not his fault.

  The patient sardar doctor gave a long explanation about pain and muscle growth and computer usage.

  And so Mansoor was consigned again to the cube of curtains, back again with Jaya telling the same proud, unbelieving stories about her brother in Houston—only this time he was older and taller, five feet seven, the bed barely fitting under him. And he felt not comfort in the balmed air as he had in the past, but panic—panic that life was passing him by.

  ________

  It was at this time that the Khuranas invited Mansoor over for tea.

  “Why do they want to meet me now?” he asked, suspicious, in pain, churlish.

  “They’re curious about you,” his mother said. “You’re a grown-up now. They want an individual equation with you.” She became dreamy speaking about the Khuranas.

  “Yaah but—” Mansoor was not convinced. He argued and debated the visit with his mother. Finally, on a windswept, befogged afternoon, the sort in which all of Delhi is wearing a sweater of atmospheric dirt, he went over with the driver to see the Khuranas.

  The Khuranas still lived in the old flat in the Khurana complex, with the large windows looking out onto the mansions of Maharani Bagh, and the sofas rearranged to create an illusion of progress. The Khuranas welcomed him with a big tea—samosas, pakoras, granular chutneys. They hadn’t aged much either—tragedy had
given them an odd guilelessness, Vikas Uncle looking hyper as ever with his large buzzing forehead and thinning hair, the black pencil mustache imported from the Kissan Ketchup commercials, which, Mansoor now remembered, he had directed; and Deepa Auntie thin and shy and self-effacing, constantly wiping her upper lip with the end of her sheer dupatta, smiling, her crooked teeth showing through the cloud of cloth. As for Anusha, she must have been five now. Round-eyed, cute, a tiny black twist of a bun spilling out from her boyish hair, she walked about with her back excessively curved, slapping the ground hard as children do.

  It was weird to be back here, accepting tea, flinching from the pain in his right wrist.

  After asking him about his injury, the Khuranas, obviously glad to talk to someone who didn’t need background, filled him in on the details of the trial, which was still going on—in its sixth year. The adjournments were ridiculous, they said. The government had let them down repeatedly. The prosecutor had been arrested for sexual assault. One session was called off because a stray dog wandered into the court and bit a policeman. Worst of all—“No word about the compensation.”

  “Still?” asked Mansoor, his teeth jumping from the overly sweetened tea, the dust of the city pouring into the drawing room from all sides in long mineral sunlit shafts. The glaring sunlight of Delhi—he had not missed this in the U.S., not one bit.

  “Ask your papa,” Vikas Uncle said, snorting. “Nothing. He and I’ve both gone many times to the thana. But the blast happened at such a strange time—the BJP had only been in power for a week and they were gone a week later—that no one took responsibility for it. That’s also luck.”

  “But it’s not that much, is it?” Mansoor said and immediately regretted it. They were not as well off as he was.

  “It’s a matter of principle,” Vikas Uncle said.

  Though he looked devastated.

  “Yes, of course,” Mansoor said, feeling bad. “I should look into it as well. I was so small then, I had no idea what was happening.”

  “They should be paying you for these wrist problems you’re having,” Deepa Auntie said, piping up from her large sofa chair. “We would get them to pay for Uncle’s back problems but he wasn’t present, so it doesn’t count.” Mansoor had heard about Vikas’s back—how he suffered debilitating pain. But he didn’t connect it with his own pain.

  Mansoor sat shaking his tense head, ingratiating as always.

  Suddenly, Deepa Auntie started crying.

  “Auntie,” he said.

  “It’s OK,” she said, wiping her nose with the back of her hand.

  He bent over his tea, his wrists aching. He knew he brought back memories of her boys—how could he not? His whole existence was a rebuke to the idea that their deaths were inevitable. Why them and not him? Why two of them and zero of him?

  “You’re wrong,” his mother had said, when he’d said this to her before leaving. “They want to see people who remember the boys.”

  “Their classmates remember them too.” The Khurana boys and he had been in different schools. This was one reason they were friends. Mansoor, when he saw them, was free from the baggage of reputation that attached itself to him in school, where he was taunted for being a Muslim, dubbed “mullah” and “Paki” and “mosquito.”

  “But you should go,” his mother had said. “Do your duty. Don’t worry about the outcome. When you lose someone, you think of them all the time anyway. You’ll change nothing. You’ll make them feel less alone, less crazy.”

  Mansoor remembered this now and yet felt uncomfortable. “Auntie, I should go home—Mummy likes eating dinner early,” he said in the dusty drawing room, the walls shaking from renovation and construction happening elsewhere. Mansoor knew the sounds so well from years of living in Delhi that he could picture the machines—large cement mixers and pile drivers. Delhi has no bird-watchers, only machine-listeners.

  “No, no, stay a little while more,” she said. Now he’d made her feel guilty about crying. Fuck.

  Pulling back her graying hair, she brought out a photo album with a dizzying fluorescent green and maroon cover. “Here are pictures of you and the boys at the Sports Day in Maharani Bagh,” she said, opening to a plastic page with two photos jammed at sad angles inside it. But her eyes were blurry; she left the pictures open too long; she was lost.

  When Mansoor was leaving, Vikas Uncle said, “I want to give you something.” They went to the bathroom together. This was Vikas Uncle’s studio, a space that had been converted after the boys’ deaths—what was the use, after all, of two toilets? Above, water bled gauntly through the pipes, and notebooks lay in an abject circle on the floor around the toilet column. The bathing area was a chaos of equipment—black pieces of angled metal, tripods, cameras in their plastic hoods. From this pile Vikas Uncle fished out a bulky Minolta camera with a silver focus. “I’d kept it for the boys,” he said. “But I want you to have it.”

  “No, uncle. Where will I use it?”

  “Take it,” he said. “I know digital is in fashion these days, but the quality you can get from this is unparalleled. I’ve photographed some very beautiful ladies with this camera, when I was doing shoots for Cosmo.”

  ________

  Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself.

  “But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently.

  ________

  “They gave you another thing?” his mother said when he came home. “They shouldn’t have. Anyway, their finances aren’t so good. Deepa was saying that these days, because there’s a new distribution system, it’s very difficult to get financing for art films.”

  “I’m so old now,” Mansoor said, which was neither here nor there.

  “Let me keep it,” she said, taking the camera from him.

  He knew what would happen—it would disappear, like all the things Vikas Uncle had given him over the years. His mother had immense empathy for the Khuranas, but like so many people, she was superstitious about death, cautious about not letting it sneak into her house.

  CHAPTER 13

  Now, for the first time as an adult, Mansoor became curious about the Lajpat Nagar case. Then one day, on the way back from physio, having read in the newspaper that a hearing was scheduled in Patiala House, he directed the driver to take him to the court.

  Mansoor had never been to the courts before—those barracks of Indian life crammed behind the colonial facades of Lutyens’s Delhi—but he had a chacha who was a lawyer and had heard a great deal about the institution. When his parents rang him on his mobile, he silenced it. He wanted time to himself.

  He got out of the car and, after lightly acknowledging the guard at the entrance, walked through the open bricked corridors with their searching blind fingers of dead trees, their groggy supplicants in red and white sweaters. Through his swimming nervous vision he saw signs indicating the names of the courtrooms. Finally, he entered a courtroom the size of a classroom. At the front of the room, two lawyers in their penguinlike garb, their backs turned to the audience, were murmuring to the judge, who bent his head down from his high boatlike desk. When Mansoor sat down in the last row, his wrists almost spiritual with pain, one of the lawyers twisted around for a second and then went back to talking. A few moments later, several hassled-looking men with sweat-soaked shirts appeared at the door, carrying what seemed to be a Chinese changing screen, the type behind which naked women are always banished in old movies. Now the lawyers turned around comple
tely. The men began to set up the screen near the front of the room.

  “The proceeding is in camera,” the judge said suddenly.

  There was a commotion and throat-clearing in the aisles next to Mansoor.

  “In camera,” he repeated, irritated.

  People began to rise.

  “You have to get up,” a woman in a smart pantsuit instructed Mansoor.

  Perplexed, having exited, Mansoor lingered now by the tea stall outside the Sessions Court, watching the dhaba-wallah fry samosas in a deep wok. He was in a philosophical mood, thinking back to the stories the Khuranas had told about the adjournments.

  “You good name?” a voice interrupted him.

  Mansoor turned around to see himself facing a man with a squashed, eager look about him; a neckless fellow with crooked teeth bejeweling his gums. Mansoor recognized him from the courtroom.

  Mansoor mumbled, “Hello.”

  “My name is Naushad,” the man said quickly, placing a palm on his chest. “I work for an NGO, Peace For All.” Peace For All, according to Naushad, focused on “communal harmony” and was looking to provide a just, speedy trial for the men arrested for the 1996 blast. “You’re a journalist?” he asked Mansoor.

  “No, no—just a visitor,” Mansoor said, smiling slightly, now understanding the reason for his forwardness.

  “You have a relative in the case?” Naushad asked in Hindi.

  “No.” Mansoor smiled again. He crushed the paper cup and chucked it into a bin, where it parachuted into a ridge between other crushed cups. “I just wanted to watch. Anyone can come. But I should go.”

  “But people don’t really come just like that—that’s why I was asking. But you’re a Muslim, no?”

  “Yes,” Mansoor said, amazed at this religious clairvoyance. But he was gifted with it too; he had somehow known Naushad was a Muslim before he announced his name. “Actually I was a victim of the blast,” Mansoor said. “But I don’t have any connection with the case.”