The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  Ayub gestured to his motorcycle and Mansoor got on behind him. He was still racking his brain for an excuse when the motorcycle gunned to life. Mansoor clutched Ayub’s waist, which was fleshier than he’d expected, and prayed. Please. He had never been on a motorcycle before and as it shot through the Delhi streets, the city close and vivid as it had been during that walk home after the bomb, he was sure he would die, and his heart raced crazily and he pressed his feet on the silver twigs of support jutting out from the chassis. Ayub wasn’t wearing a helmet and kept turning around and talking and Mansoor nodded, terrified, his wrists filling with cold liquid. Why hadn’t he said no? Because he was congenitally unable to. What would his mother and father think if Mansoor were found with his head smashed in, by a gutter? Why were you so reckless? Didn’t you learn your lesson?

  After a few minutes, the ride became exhilarating, the motorcycle making smooth crests against the road. He had always thought a motorcycle would be bumpy, but it felt instead like you were on a magic carpet. The pain in his wrists reached a sedative high.

  When they got to the mosque, Shahid and Tariq were waiting at the entrance, by a row of carts selling sharifas, chatting with other plump young men, who kept their hands behind their backs as they listened. Mansoor was so relieved he embraced them all, and then, walked with them to the back of the mosque and washed and went inside. The mosque, a box of concrete, was simpler than the one his father and he had gone to a few times—usually during Eid—and the crowd was younger, pious, serious, a mixture of office-going people in white shirts and young men with beards wearing kurtas. The alien bubbles of motorcycle helmets broke the flow of bodies. The imam was giving a talk about something vague, like medicine and not betraying others, and after the azaan ended, they all began to pray. Mansoor, who hadn’t been in the postures of prayer for years—who’d had to borrow a hankie to place on his head—was in pain, but also in a state of gratitude and relief. He hadn’t forgotten how to pray. As he went through the motions, he relaxed as he had during the motorcycle ride.

  Afterwards, when the prayers were over, everyone got up quickly and rushed out and Mansoor, Ayub, Shahid, and Tariq were pushed out onto the lawn.

  “Oye!” Shahid shouted at a fat fellow who almost knocked him over on the lawn outside the mosque. They stood there and laughed together at the funny, quizzical expression on Shahid’s round face.

  CHAPTER 15

  It was during this time that his father almost lost all his money on a property deal.

  What happened was this: as the days went by, Sharif had become more and more involved in the property search. He found a duplex flat in Asiad Village and began negotiating with the sellers, a couple who lived in Palam Vihar, to buy it. The couple kept asking for Rs. 50 lakhs, whereas he wanted to pay 40. Finally, predictably, they settled on Rs. 45 lakhs, with some adjustment for black money, and the deal went ahead.

  Sharif was happy about the property, relieved; but he also cautioned his family that they shouldn’t get too excited. “I’ve only given a deposit. They might still withdraw.”

  “You’ll love living there, beta,” Afsheen told Mansoor. “It’s right next to the Sports Complex and you can go to the driving range when your wrists get better.”

  Mansoor really couldn’t imagine moving; he had lived in the same house in South Ex all his life; had grown up there, suffered there, grieved there, recovered from the bomb there. In fact, soon after the blast, the Ahmeds had discussed moving—Afsheen had said the house itself had brought them bad luck; there had been a spate of injuries in the family, culminating with Mansoor’s—but they hadn’t been able to find anything. Now, years later, this opening appeared.

  The couple selling the property were acquaintances of Sharif’s college friend Mahinder; they were liberal and friendly and when they had met Sharif, they had talked enthusiastically about their various Muslim friends. “Do you know Arif Khan? He was the vice chancellor of AMU at one point.” These connections doubled Sharif’s relief.

  But as the day approached to meet and sign the actual deed and to transfer the full amount, problems began to occur.

  The Sahnis, who had been so warm and effusive when Sharif had met them, became hard to pin down. One week they were on vacation in Goa. Another week they were visiting their eldest son in Toronto, then the younger one in Singapore. They returned Sharif’s calls erratically, and finally, not at all.

  “Do you think they’re trying to cheat us?” Sharif asked Afsheen.

  “I don’t know,” Afsheen said. “You should ask Mahinder.”

  “They gave you a chit—so you don’t need to worry about the money,” Mahinder said when Sharif called him. “You’ll get that back. But the thing we need to find out is if they’ve found someone else who’s offering them a higher price. People are greedy. She’s a school principal but people who run schools are no better than anyone else. In fact, sometimes they’re even greedier than others because they think they’re being corrupt for a good cause.”

  “So what should we do?” Sharif asked.

  “Let me investigate,” Mahinder said.

  During this time, Sharif kept phoning the Sahnis to set up a date. He drove past the house in the Asiad like a despondent lover, wondering why these perfect situations didn’t work out for him. And he felt the loss of his money—which he hadn’t really lost, but was in limbo—keenly.

  Then Mahinder confirmed what they’d both suspected: the Sahnis had found another buyer willing to pay a higher price.

  ________

  Sharif now sprang into action. His lawyer served the Sahnis a show-cause notice for breach of contract. The Sahnis appeared in court, furious, no longer the mild paternal Punjabis they’d pretended to be. But then the Sahnis’ lawyer, a young woman in a suit, muddled things and admitted they’d taken money from two parties and the judge, snorting and shaking his head, issued a stay order.

  The Sahnis turned out to be horrible, unapologetic people.

  “How dare you take us to court,” Mrs. Sahni fumed at Sharif outside the court. “Is this any way to behave? You expect us to sell you our property now?”

  Strange woman, thought Sharif—she acts like the property is some kind of business partnership between us. When in fact, as soon as she sells me the property, everything will be over in our relationship.

  Sharif told the Sahnis that they had given him no choice. He had called about twenty times and been swatted away with excuses at every turn.

  “You’re too pushy,” Mr. Sahni said. “We told you it would take time. When you saw the property I told you we didn’t want the deposit till we came back from Canada. You only insisted.”

  But you accepted the money! Sharif wanted to say. Still, he kept quiet. He knew how to use silence; his goatee enhanced his impassivity.

  For a few days, the Sahnis blustered—on the phone and through their lawyer. Sharif, advised by Mahinder and his lawyer, kept his nerve and refused to respond to these provocations. Finally Mrs. Sahni called and said she would like to meet the Ahmeds at the Golf Club.

  “They’re trying to show their classiness,” Afsheen observed.

  They had underpriced the place, Mrs. Sahni told them when they sat down for coffee and biscuits and fizzing lime soda at the overly slick, cracked Formica table that is the hallmark of all Indian clubs. It was their mistake, she admitted. They had not realized that the scooter garage that came with the place was also worth a good ten lakhs. It was an honest blunder, she said; hence the confusion.

  Sharif was enraged. The cheek of these people! Caught red-handed trying to sell it to someone else, and now, instead of apologizing, they ask for more!

  “I’m very firm,” he said. “I’ve given the deposit.”

  But then Afsheen interjected. “We’ll think about it,” she said, putting her hand on Sharif’s.

  ________

  “What do you mean—we’ll
think about it!” Sharif thundered at her in the car. “They’re wrong.”

  “You do have a temper,” she said. “And you put people off with your pushiness. What’s ten lakhs in the long term? We like the property; we don’t want to fight—might as well pay it and get it over with.”

  Mansoor, when he heard both sides of the argument, agreed with his mother.

  But Sharif couldn’t accept it. He raged against his wife and son, against the Sahnis, and consulted his lawyer. Finally he decided that it would be cheaper to pay this ransom than to pay lawyers’ fees for decades.

  ________

  The money was exchanged; the deal was completed in a urine-soaked registrar’s office in Bijwasan on a cold December day.

  It was only when it was all over that the lawyer noticed a problem in the paperwork.

  The property came with a lien, a debt, on it. For Rs. 20 crores. Rs. 200 million.

  ________

  Mr. Sahni, when Sharif had first met him, had said he was in the export business—had boasted about how well he was doing, how he had two sons settled abroad, one in Toronto, another in Singapore. But there had been something off about the Sahnis from the start, Sharif realized. They owned this duplex in Asiad, in the heart of the city, but lived in a strange farmhouse-cum-bunker in Palam Vihar, an incomplete colony on the outskirts of Delhi, a crisscross of plots overgrown with thorny scrub and grass and keekar trees. There was something provisional about the house too—the furniture heavy and Punjabi, with no carpets covering the terrazzo floor and no art on the walls and twenty balloons up against the ceiling of the drawing room, the detritus of their granddaughter’s birthday, they’d said. But Sharif, who had been introduced to these people through Mahinder, was so grateful to have found a good house for himself, to find Hindus who would deal with Muslims, that he’d ignored all these signs and justified it to himself. And the Sahnis had justified it to Sharif too. “We want to give the money to our sons,” Mrs. Sahni had said in her sweet convent-educated voice. “It’s more useful to them, now that they’re living abroad. As for us, we like living in this greenery, away from the rush of Delhi. The drive to my school is just twenty minutes from here.”

  Now, of course, Sharif saw it anew. A couple pushed into bankruptcy, pushed to the edge of Delhi, plotting an escape to Canada, seeking to offload the huge debt they’d taken on when the man’s export business went under. And they had found a sitting duck in Sharif but gotten greedy and tried to lure another duck. But Sharif in his pushy way had insisted that he be the victim. It didn’t help that he had a shitty lawyer and bad instincts with property. And so he had landed himself in the biggest financial trouble of his life—sinking under a debt of twenty crores.

  ________

  The lawyer told him he could win the case in court. Sharif fired the lawyer and hired another one and settled in for a long legal battle. But he knew even before it had started that he would lose one way or another. After all, he should have looked at the papers before he signed. He had clawed his way into this tragedy.

  CHAPTER 16

  “Why do we have such bad luck?” Afsheen cried at home.

  “It’s that lawyer’s fault,” Mansoor said. “It’s his job to read the documents, to check them before signing. People in this country are incompetent.”

  “I told your father not to deal with such people, but he insisted.”

  Mansoor knew this wasn’t the case, but said nothing.

  “Don’t worry,” she said, catching herself. “We’ll get out of this.”

  ________

  “How do they think they can get away with this?” Mansoor asked his father later that day.

  “People get away with a lot more in this country,” Sharif said. Again, he had the sense—the sense he’d had on the day of the blast, back in 1996—that this was punishment for staying on in an obviously hostile country. Many of his relatives had fled to Pakistan after the 1969 Gujarat riots; only he, bullheaded, had stayed on.

  That evening, steeling himself, Sharif came up to Mansoor’s bedroom. Mansoor was sitting on the side of his bed, bent over, reading Deterring Democracy, by Noam Chomsky. When Mansoor had first arrived in Delhi, Sharif remembered, his muscles had been so tender that he couldn’t even lift a book, and Sharif had gone with him to a chemist in INA to purchase a reading stand—the sort apparently used by musicians—which held up books.

  “Yaah, Papa?” Mansoor asked.

  Sharif’s heart plunged. “Beta, Mummy and I think it would be best if you stayed in Delhi longer. There’s the financial issue and also it’s good if you get some rest. There’s no rush for college. We’d like you to be here with us. And Mahinder Uncle said he can get you an IT traineeship when you’re ready to type.” The words came out in a rehearsed flood.

  Mansoor had known they were in trouble, but this much? That they’d suspend their son’s education abroad? “Of course, Papa,” he said, his voice reedy. “I was also going to say that. And I’m enjoying the NGO work. One semester here or there doesn’t matter.”

  “Are you sure?”

  “Yaah.”

  Father and son considered each other across a void of total comprehension. Mansoor thought he was about to see his father cry.

  “Good,” Sharif said, slapping his thigh. “It’ll be nice to have you around.”

  After he left, Mansoor lay down on his bed and tried to not to cry himself.

  CHAPTER 17

  Why he should feel so bad, when he hadn’t even loved his life in the U.S.—where he’d made as few friends as he’d made in school—confounded him. But he was torn about what he wanted. He didn’t want to be in India or the U.S. He wanted to be in a place free of pain and tragedy.

  The discussions about the property went on at home; the tragedy became one of suspension; and Mansoor, after a gap of a few days, returned to the Peace For All meetings.

  But now, sitting among the group members on the floor with their lazily folded legs (as if they were sitting up in a bed, drinking hot tea) and listening to their earnest debates about the civil code, he was disoriented, distracted, felt he didn’t have anything to do with this world or these people, that he’d stumbled into it by accident, during a period of boredom, and now that the period of boredom had been declared his life, he must return to serious things like programming.

  “I’ll be staying on longer,” he told Tara and Ayub one day. “My health still hasn’t improved and the doctor has said I should rest another month.” This is the story the family had decided to share with strangers; they wanted to keep their suffering, their shame, private. “So I’ll be able to help in the next few months.” Though he felt and wanted the opposite: but the crucial thing, for Mansoor, was to get the announcement that he wasn’t going back out of the way.

  “I thought you were getting better,” Ayub said.

  “So it’s continuing repetitive stress injury?” Tara asked, not blinking her eyes much beneath her steel-rimmed John Lennon–style glasses, glasses that were so clear that they seemed like dividers separating one world from the next, the world of wealth and good skin (she had radiant skin) from the world of activism. As the daughter of a doctor, she was fluent in the language of sickness.

  “Yaah, I believe,” Mansoor said. “Carpal tunnel, repetitive stress, whatever you want to call it.”

  It was only later, when the other members had come and gone and the meeting was over, that Ayub said, “Will you take a walk with me?”

  “Of course.” Mansoor lifted the Bittoo notebook he’d kept on the floor next to him. He hadn’t even opened it once today and it was somehow glued to the floor and he had to pry it up. “Arre.” He laughed.

  Ayub, tall and hunched, bringing his palms together, laughed too, politely, eyes popping with delight a bit too late.

  The brick complex near the hospital contained the Department of Tourism and also several shops—Flavors Restauran
t, a toy shop, a kebab place; the normal assortment you find in a community center. Navigating the cool corridors, damp from mopping, alive with a potent lemony smell (one that must have been coming from a shop rather than the floor, since that was not the kind of mopping these places got) the air cold and making them shiver, Ayub asked, “So how long have you had these muscle problems?”

  “Six years. Since the blast.” He was hypnotized by the sound of Ayub’s slippers thwacking the ground: that urban music.

  “That’s a long time,” Ayub said. “What kind of treatment did you get?”

  Mansoor told him: the physiotherapy, the exercises, the ultrasonic machine, the biosensitization, the alternating baths, the splints, the weights, the Volini gel, the words coming out like verses of some elegant, enigmatic poem.

  “But what do the doctors say now?”

  “That it’s been a relapse. Basically, I was healing but I developed microtears in my wrists from typing too much.” He was so fluent in this language too.

  “I hope you don’t mind my saying,” Ayub said. “It shouldn’t be there after so many years.”

  Mansoor looked at him.

  “You see, I’ve been watching you since you came in,” Ayub said. “You remind me of myself. You’re sensitive to the pain of others but not so much to your own pain, isn’t it? But here’s the issue. Any pain that lasts this long—well, it can’t. Pain is supposed to heal. When an injury doesn’t go away at our age, it’s psychological, no matter the cause.” Standing tall in a striped blue Fabindia shirt—the stripes powerful and downward, red and green—wearing a gray woolen waistcoat over it, clapping his palms together, Ayub looked like both a politician and an abashed lover who has waited too long to make his declaration.

  Ayub scooped back his combed hair. For the first time Mansoor saw that, at the age of twenty-seven, Ayub was balding already. The hair was carefully arranged, in powerful forward strands, to cover up the terra firma of the pate.