“I’m not saying your pain isn’t real or the injury isn’t real. I’m simply saying that the pain remains after the injury has healed.” Ayub clapped his palms together again, as if it helped maintain his balance, as it were the steering wheel or joystick of the conversation. “When I was your age and I moved to Delhi, I had a bad scooter accident. I was riding pillion and my friend’s scooter skidded—there was a motorcycle coming toward us in the wrong lane; it was Holi and the driver’s eyes were red and he had clearly drunk bhang, because he was smiling as he skidded—and we went sliding on the road, like this”—he made a gesture with his palms that you may make to mimic the flight of a jet—“and I rolled off and only narrowly avoided being run over by a Tempo. We were young, so we laughed it off, but then I started developing horrible back pains.” His eyes went dark as he remembered. “It was so bad, yaar. It used to keep me up at night. I couldn’t walk, talk, read—anything. And I tried everything: Reiki, yoga, yunani, ayurveda, homeopathy. You think of it and I tried it.” He paused. “It was only after some years when I realized that my pain was psychological and that I was holding on to it because I was addicted to it that it went away. It was only when I started praying and not thinking of myself that it went away. When I gave myself to Allah.” Ayub had rich, long lashes that throbbed oddly when he was excited. He was a bit like a bulb that hasn’t quite learned to hoard all its electricity into light and so emits it through twitches—in Ayub’s case, of the hands, eyes, feet; Ayub was always sitting on the floor of the NGO, on the white terrazzo broken into squares by black lines, rotating his feet like they were radars processing the conversation—only to suddenly burst into cogent argument.
Mansoor now considered Ayub, his advice, his well-meaning invitation to stroll in the market, his height, his stoop, his provincial sureness about whatever quackish solution he’d discovered, the power he must feel giving advice to people much richer than himself, the joy he must get out of pitying Mansoor, his expectant look, and said, “It could be true.” He blinked deeply himself.
Now Ayub became excited. “In fact, the way I solved it was by reading Dr. Mari’s book The Religion of Pain. He brings up the issue also and suggests you do visualization and don’t focus on your body. Between that and prayer, five times a day, I healed. You will too. I’ll bring you the book and we can go to the mosque together.”
“Thank you,” Mansoor said.
Instead, that day, enraged in a way he could not understand, he vowed not to return to the meetings at all.
CHAPTER 18
“Papa, I want to do the IT traineeship,” Mansoor said the next evening.
His father was sitting on the bed, his buttocks slumped forward under him and his stomach jutting up and out. A pack of cards with an elegant red paisley design on their backs—the same design Mansoor had noticed in the jaali work of the mosque near the university in Jamia—was spread next to him in an arrangement of solitaire. Sharif, his spectacles low on his nose, kept a couple of cards on his stomach for consideration. The floppy pipes of his white pajamas revealed thin white hairy ankles. “If you feel like it is the right thing, sure.”
“Yaah, I’m feeling a lot better and it’s good if I start and get work experience,” Mansoor started, but then stopped. His father, dipping a card into one of the simultaneous stubby rivers of the solitaire piles, wasn’t listening.
________
“The only issue is—are your wrists OK?” Afsheen said, carrying a bowl of fatty chicken bits swiftly back and forth in the kitchen. Her bun was done up perfectly and her forehead looked unlined and she was wearing one of her elegant purple-gray caftans. Tragedy had made her erect and confident.
“They’re fine, Mama,” Mansoor said, in the artificial unintelligible rush of the kitchen. “I don’t want to talk about them. And please don’t use them as an excuse for . . . our problems.”
“Yaar, Razia, I told you to put the onions here,” Afsheen said to the maid.
“Ji, madam,” Razia said.
“Where will you do it?” Afsheen asked Mansoor.
“Mahinder Uncle’s friend is an executive at Xansa,” Mansoor said, his back to a counter—the back suddenly aching, crossed by a vertical sting of pain and the horizontal hardness of the slab of counter.
“I see. You think you can sit in an office all day?”
“Yes, Mama,” Mansoor said. “As long as I take breaks.”
“We should get permission from the doctor first.”
________
So Mansoor went over with the driver to the clinic in Safdarjung.
He had been avoiding this the past few months. The nerve conduction test was the only objective measure of how you were doing and healing; by hooking you up to sensors and sending currents through your nerves, the doctors could determine how badly damaged they were. Mansoor had had such a test before in the U.S. He’d been frightened by the name, by its electric inelegance, but was relieved by how minor the shocks were, the way they felt like subcutaneous pinches.
The doctor wasn’t the stately sardar he usually dealt with but rather a lumpy Bengali man with gapped teeth and large moles under his eyes, wearing a lab coat, with a fixed smile.
“Hello, hello,” he said when Mansoor entered the small consultation chamber with its laminated surfaces and shelves piled with prizes from medical associations.
When Mansoor told him why he was there, he got up from his seat and removed a device from behind a glass case that looked like an old typewriter, complete with the gray fuzzy plastic shell.
Mansoor, sitting on a steel stool, tensed up. What if this Soviet-looking device was defective and hurt his nerves? What if the electricity went in the middle of the test?
“Put your wrists forward,” the doctor said and then tied the wires around his wrists like rakhis. Before Mansoor could speak, the current, warm and beery, started. He relaxed. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. His system wouldn’t be permanently rewired.
“What do you do?” the doctor asked after a while.
“I’m a student.” It was odd for Mansoor to be talking to this man without his mother’s mediation. “BTech,” he continued. “I’m studying computers.”
“Well, Mansoor-ji, you better find another profession.”
Mansoor looked at him with the calm that comes to people when they receive the news they have been dreading—the calm of disbelief; also perverse, awful relief.
“Your nerves are badly damaged,” the doctor continued. “You’ll never be able to type. You should find a profession that doesn’t require typing. Luckily, for your generation, there are many options. You could become a teacher or a professor.”
Somehow Mansoor endured this lecture. Do something else? But there was nothing else for people of his generation to do! They were hooked to machines. Everywhere one turned one encountered screens, keyboards, wires. And once again Mansoor experienced the bitterness he’d felt when the physiotherapist in the U.S. had told him he was suffering the consequences not just of the bomb but of years of mishandling his computer—why hadn’t anyone told him? Why was he allowed to throw his injured body at these boxes of signals? Even in the U.S., on his pristine Californian campus, there had been no instructions about how to protect his wrists from repetitive stress injuries—the keyboards in the computer cluster were far from ergonomic—and in any case most people had laptops and spent their days and nights hunched over them, writing papers, playing movies, sending e-mails, and downloading porn on the high-speed networks. And now, after I’ve destroyed everything, they tell me? That’s the meaning of having survived the bomb. I didn’t survive at all. I just spent longer dying, rendered crippled and obsolete like that old 486 on which I acquired my first repetitive injuries.
He walked out of the office with his hands in his pockets and the world wild and broken around him—dust in the air; haze against the eye; telephone and electric wires stretching arou
nd the colony like a noose; the rust visible on the chain-link fence of Deer Park, across the street; the rank odor of the gutter in his nose; the freshly tarred road like a living, breathing thing, a rising piece of bread, rolled flat by the cars’ tires.
When he told his mother the news, she grimaced at first in a show of strength, and then burst into tears. “Why is this happening to us?” she said. “Two thousand three. It’s a terrible year. We must get a second opinion.”
“No,” he said. He was done with doctors.
CHAPTER 19
At home, Mansoor found himself in the grip of a profound anger. He kept looking back at the day of the bombing and seeing Mr. and Mrs. Khurana skulking about and talking in their bright house, tall human adults in their forties, Mr. Khurana in a white shirt and khaki pants, Deepa Auntie in a red kameez dyed with purple mangoes running down the front in parallel rows (how vividly he remembered the details of that day, as if it had been stained by the wine of memory), full of domestic swagger and confidence, lost in their adult world, discussing bills and the latest gossip about a relative who had left her husband, the kids playing around and under them, kids they were eager to shoo out. Why had they been so irresponsible—with him in particular? But Indians were like that, happy to be puppets of fate. “Chalta hai.” “It’s in God’s hands.” “Everything goes.”
When Mansoor had told Vikas Uncle he’d call his mother so she could pick him up, Vikas Uncle had perversely cajoled him into going with Tushar and Nakul to the market. “Don’t worry, yaar,” he’d said, sitting back lazily in the sofa chair, his arms forming a relaxed hammock behind his head. Mansoor hated him.
The Khuranas had never apologized to him.
Mansoor’s thoughts flew in a circle of rage. His wrists hurt, his back throbbed, he sweated, his sciatica sparked. In his room, he turned the pages of ten odd books strewn on his bed—the Chomskys, Roys, Dalrymples. He wasn’t reading them, but testing his pain; even turning a page hurt. He was a highly defective machine, sensitive to everything.
When he sat on the sofa in the drawing room, the same old drawing room with its chests from Korea and Indonesia, its frantic unreconstructed Orientalism, the Orientalism only allowed to people in the Orient, a sickly current, like that of a tube light about to die, vomiting the last of its milky light, filled the columns of his arms.
Surrounded by unfeeling objects, his parents off to the lawyers to discuss the case and to figure out how to keep the business running (Sharif ran a plastics consulting and supply company), he began to whimper. Nothing had changed for him since the day after the bomb, when he had come back home to this very pain.
During a moment of insanity, he imagined doing something different—becoming a full-time activist and teacher with the group, traveling around the country and educating people about communal violence and . . . carpal tunnel. What if he became a doctor or physiotherapist like that South Indian bore Jaya? Well, that would be amusing!
Eventually, out of loneliness and rage, Mansoor returned to volunteering for Peace For All.
CHAPTER 20
The group meetings were the same—the discussions about the 1996 inmates had been put on hold to develop strategies to protest Modi when he arrived in Delhi a few weeks from now—but Mansoor, sitting on the floor, a mute spectator to the verbal drama, haggard and uneasy, avoiding Ayub, began to notice something strange: his pain had become much worse after the nerve conduction test. Whereas before he’d experienced a snipping tension and tiredness and a subcutaneous wetness, now an elastic, electric current spread through his limbs, dizzying him with its dull throb, making him feel like an overly tightened string instrument.
He began to wonder if there was something to Ayub’s notion that the pain was partly mental, seeing how it had jumped after the diagnosis from the doctor. At home, on his bed, enclosed by a life-size poster of Tendulkar on one side and of Michael Jackson on the other—old posters from the age of fourteen he had never taken down or replaced—he began to read the book Ayub had given him, The Religion of Pain.
The book said straightforward things. Pain was a response to injury. But when pain didn’t go away it was because a deep-seated psychological pattern had been established; besides, back pain hadn’t existed till fifty years before—before that, people got ulcers when they were depressed; where were ulcers now? Replaced by back pain. Mansoor skipped pages, his wrists singing with pain, his chin sunk into his neck, the back of his neck stiff. He was a mannequin of pain, controlled by it; he altered his posture every few seconds and kept the bloated tuber of the hot-water bottle pressed to his lumbar.
Then Mansoor got to the part where the author proposed a solution.
The solutions seemed laughably simple. One, the author wrote, exercise frequently but don’t focus unduly, in your exercises, on the troubled part of the body; and two, visualize at night the body part that suffers from pain and imagine it getting better.
In normal circumstances, Mansoor would have shrugged these off, but he was so down and out that he decided to give them a try.
________
Miraculously, as the weeks wore on, he began to get better. Establishing a routine of Iyengar yoga poses, swimming a few turgid laps in the covered Gymkhana pool, and skidding forward on the treadmill in the gym, he felt his pain beginning to dissipate, clear out, the way a clogged sinus might suddenly give up the ghost of its liquid. The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.
(Later, when it was all over, when his life was coming to an end, he would think that he had probably started to recover because months of therapy had paid off; that he had been misdiagnosed during the nerve test; and that his recovery had been an act of faith and belief, the sort that can only take hold of a person when he is at his lowest.
But then, in the middle of this storm of circumstances, with his father’s fortune disappearing and the family in decline and his future uncertain and curtailed and the bomb still sitting vastly on the horizon of his past, like a furious private sun, always pulling him toward it—in the middle of this, this experiment with visualization, with accepting there might be other reasons for pain beside injury, had seemed like a paradigm shift.)
“Mine, when I started it, was gone in three months,” Ayub said one day, in the room at the back of Holy Child Nursing Home. The two men had become friendly again when Mansoor had told him his advice had helped; they had arrived early, before the others, and were sitting on the floor and talking. Ayub was wearing a white kurta with Kolhapuri slippers. He clutched one foot with his hands. He had enormous toes with bright symmetrical toenails. “I too was skeptical when I was first told about this idea. We’re slaves of science. We can’t believe there can be an answer outside doctors. We believe whatever they tell us—you have microtears in your wrists, is it? Well, there might be an easier explanation for why you don’t see them! I don’t mean to be too philosophical here, but we’re brought up within that system and are incapable of seeing what may be wrong with it. You’ve read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings were doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don’t eliminate disease—they perpetuate the existence of doctors. This is all there, in Hind Swaraj. But our own problem is—and I’m talking about all of us—we swallow everything Western civilization gives us. We reject even the best parts of our own culture. All these things we now call faith healing—what were they? Just forms of this, visualization, holistic techniques. But modern men like you and me wouldn’t be caught doing this so-called jhaad-phoonk. That’s something our servants do. But our servants aren’t idiots. This is a country of servants. And these people are living, right? Healthier than you would expect given the water they drink, the food they eat, the air they breathe. How?”
It was a mistake to tell him, Mansoor thought. He’s getting all excited. �
�The tough thing for you,” Ayub said, “will be what to do when the pain starts moving around.”
“Yes, the book told me about that.”
“Your body’s not going to give up on pain so easily. It’s been living with it for six years. And it’s been validated by the doctor. The doctor who is like a priest marrying you to your pain. Anyway, what will be interesting is not even what you’ll do when the pain moves around—you’ll handle it if you can handle this—but what you’ll do when it finally disappears.”
________
Mansoor felt close to Ayub. His wisdom wasn’t just for show; he wasn’t a quack—in fact, he was the only person to have truly helped Mansoor since the blast. Mansoor despaired about the years he’d lost to pain, and wished he’d healed faster. “Don’t regret things. Look at the present, and pray,” Ayub said. “That’s why I started praying. If you look backwards or forward, you stumble. But prayer keeps you focused on the eternal present.”
They started going to the mosque together again, several days a week this time, Mansoor driving over in his car, no longer ashamed of his new religiosity. In the mosque he wore a skullcap and tried to be near the front and was fervent in his devotion.
He used his time praying to do what prayer must have been meant for in the first place, before it became ritual: visualization. Pressing his fingers behind his ears, he’d see himself playing cricket one winter day with Tushar and Nakul, smashing the ball. He could picture, in that hothouse of intoning bodies, the leaves on the trees, crisp and crumbling, above and beneath his feet, crunching; a discarded cricket glove, white and dirty and stiff around the thumbs, lying on the dusty earth; Nakul’s flexible, rubbery body curled over to bat, the bat kicking impatiently at the crease, looking sometimes like the leg of a tied horse and other times like the stuck tine of a clock—those were the happiest days of his life.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 16