The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  “Are they saying who did it?” Deepa asked.

  “No one’s taken credit for it. The news came in only ten minutes ago. It’s too bad. Sarojini Nagar is such a crowded market, especially at Diwali, and there aren’t any solid structures to absorb the blast.”

  “They know this risk exists,” Deepa said, scowling a little. “Why they don’t improve security, I don’t know.”

  “In this kind of market, how can you have security? I’m sure the shopkeepers would be against it.”

  Vikas, especially, had turned himself into a student of terror. He had come to see that people were blind to tragedy till they experienced it firsthand, and that they were willing to risk the unknown if it meant they could make money in the interim. This was the case not just with small Indian markets, with their reluctance to secure themselves, but with the U.S. as well: Airlines had known for years about the danger of hijackings, but had lobbied against security because it cost time and money to process passengers. Better to let a plane be occasionally hurled off track, the heads of the airlines reasoned, than to hemorrhage money in the terminals.

  It didn’t occur to them that a hijacker might wish to plough a plane back into the country, invest the blown and fluted metal into the mineral-rich earth.

  “When should we go meet them?” Deepa asked.

  “Tomorrow, maybe,” Vikas said, putting his hand in hers.

  ________

  In 2002, the Khuranas had founded the Association of Terror Victims. Over time, they’d come to realize that no one remembered the smaller blasts peppering the history of the country, blasts that vanished into a morgue of memories, overshadowed by bigger events. Therefore, the Khuranas reasoned, the thing to do was to corral the victims of these small blasts and create a group that could lobby for their rights and collectively remember the blasts in which they had lost their relatives or limbs. And why did the Khuranas want the blasts remembered?

  Vikas grappled with this privately—was it just a zidd, the demand of a hurt child? Or was there substance to it? He decided it was important to remember in order to keep the past from repeating itself; the country was moving so fast, hurtling so enthusiastically into the future, that people had little idea of how easily everything could be undone. More important, a blast was a political tragedy, an act of war, in which people perished not because of their own mistakes but because of the mistakes of the government. Therefore it held that blast victims should be remembered the way dead soldiers are—Vikas always thought of the names of Indian soldiers who had fought in World War I inscribed in the sandstone biceps of India Gate, a monument the boys had loved, and where he had often taken them for ice cream, the three of them standing on the reddish earth, the boys asking if it was true that the flame inside the gate had been burning for a hundred years and Vikas not knowing the answer—was it possible? Weren’t all sorts of crazy things possible? The boys. How would they have been now, all these years later? Were they still alive somewhere else, being shown around monuments by another set of parents? Had they grown up in this alternative universe where they wore white office shirts and black pants and got ready for work, their adult heads emerging from sweat-stained collars, the shoes on their feet gleaming blackly, Tushar an earnest trainee in some firm, Nakul batting his handsome eyes at some girl who sat at the other end of the office, hiding herself in a giggling group of friends? Sometimes if he closed his eyes he could imagine them as adults and the vision would be so exact, his heart would stop and he would think they were alive or that, by thinking itself, they could be brought back to life and then he would chastise himself for admitting defeat so easily in 1996, for accepting the official cant that the boys were dead instead of brazenly imagining the opposite.

  The bomb was so distant now that it did not quite seem real. When he went to Lajpat Nagar these days—and it was often—he tricked himself into believing nothing had happened, and in fact, it wasn’t hard to do: the market had covered over every sign of damage.

  Yes, it had never happened. He was forty-seven, successful, with a loving wife and two boys and a daughter. It was the thought of Anusha that jolted him to the present, pricked him with dread. She was the most solid recurring evidence that his life had changed. He hated his daughter. She was cute and round-eyed with flowing streamers of hair and an odd interest in learning how things were made—she was always hugging the walls, asking how they had been poured by workers—but he wondered if she were a little slow. He didn’t want to be near her. Better to stay cramped in the markets of Delhi, among the throbbing crowds, shoulder-to-shoulder with death, with the city, the city that crammed you back into yourself.

  Whereas his wife had grieved instantly, he only began to grieve after Anusha was born.

  He didn’t see it as grieving, of course. He thought he was taking an interest in the larger world, an interest brought on by the bomb; he thought he was gathering material for a documentary. He filmed it all, became known as the eccentric with the movie camera; people in the markets learned to ignore him after a while.

  He was making an encyclopedic film about Delhi, he told himself; capturing the fluctuations in the moods of places. But he was always a little vacant and bored when he carried out these explorations, just as he was vacant at home, draped in his Bhutanese gown.

  He was only happy when he was leaving his house, shedding the yoke of this new life that had been thrust upon him.

  ________

  His marriage fell apart. Deepa at first was patient, but then she became shrill in her disappointment. “Not again!” she shouted, confronting his cosmic sadness and anger.

  She’d wasted too many years putting up with his depressions: depression over art, his parents, his kids—now a depression over his daughter. As she shouted at him to wake up from his grief, she became nauseated and started burping and went to the sink and retched, but finally all that came were tears, tears ransacking the dignity from her eyes. “Shame on you,” she said, coming back to the drawing room, where Vikas had not moved from the cloth embrace of the broad sofa chair as he read the Hindustan Times, the alpine slopes of hair on his feet visible as they rested on the ground beside the leather slippers. “You’re not a real man.”

  Vikas appeared to listen earnestly, attentively, releasing one hand from the paper, which sagged into his lap, the free hand massaging his chin. Then he got up and walked out of the house.

  ________

  Deepa’s anger at her husband grew. She didn’t know what to do. That’s when she visited Mukesh again.

  Mukesh, sitting in his office, still dolefully managing construction sites for a living, had been waiting. From behind his glass doors, he had been following the distant eruptions in the Khuranas’ marriage, noting the frequency of Vikas’s exits, his chancy drumming gait as he fled the house, his late returns in the evenings. He knew the marriage was at its end. He was an invigilator of grief—a realist. He knew, unlike the rest of the people in the complex, who confused optimism with high-mindedness, that no matter what Vikas and Deepa did, their marriage could not recover. Nothing did from a bomb.

  He had seen the crater left by it when he had gone to the market soon after the blast. It had taken his breath away, given him vertigo, and his mind had circled the ditch with its lacing of trash blended in with the roots of a tree trying desperately to hold on to sinking soil.

  When Deepa came to his office one morning, looking frighteningly thin and worked up, he was sympathetic and placid again; he listened to her talk about the construction the neighbors were doing, which disturbed Anusha.

  It was in the anger that Mukesh saw the first shoots of life in Deepa.

  Then, one day, when Vikas was out, Mukesh went over to the entrance to the house and rang the bell. The dour Nepali servant answered and led him up the cracked stairs into the drawing room. Deepa sat tense in a plain white salwar, clutching her own wrists.

  She welcomed him in with a thi
n smile and offered him tea.

  Mukesh was in there for an hour making faces at Anusha, who had come into the room, excited to see her chachu, who gave her dates and candies whenever he saw her. “What a little princess,” he said to her in his disturbingly sexual manner.

  “Show uncle your Ajooba dance,” Deepa said.

  Anusha was oddly obsessed with this Bachchan movie from the 1990s, and Mukesh, sitting there in his white pants, clapped. There was something perverse about how joyful this child was, he thought. It would have been better if she were morose. Her joy only outlined the tragic background. It brought out the sickness in the yellow walls, the groans emitted by every off-center painting and troubled spot of seepage on the walls.

  Mukesh knew from Deepa’s face that he was being watched too, carefully.

  “How is the money situation?” he asked suddenly.

  “Good,” she said, but in a way that made it clear she had whispered a thousand bads before it.

  “So Vikas is finishing his film about markets?”

  Another pause. “Yes.”

  “Good.” Mukesh smiled, bending down from his chair to do a card trick for Anusha: he always carried a pack of cards with him, fanning them in concert with his lecherous grin.

  ________

  His visits became more frequent. He would come up in the middle of the day and play with Anusha; Deepa would watch him. Then, one morning, when Anusha was at her play school, Deepa led him into the bedroom and took off her clothes.

  Mukesh looked on from the door, hard, amused. Her nakedness made him aware of his own clothes: a checked half-sleeve shirt, loose gray pants, black Batas.

  She sat down on the bed, her buttocks on the sheet, and began to read a gray dusty book titled The Magic Mountain, which she lifted from the side table.

  Mukesh sat down on the sofa in the room, clutching and mopping his brow. Now that he had what he’d wanted—now that he was so close to it—he had a mind to turn back.

  After a while, he got up as if to leave, but then turned around and, still fully clothed—this is how he liked to do it—climbed onto the bed.

  ________

  It was not love—what happened. Though she had opened herself to him in that bed, on that morning, she was not aroused when he speedily covered her body with his.

  It was as if she would only let him have her by pretending to be dead.

  ________

  Their passion took on the flat quality of those mornings with their archipelagoes of white light thrown on the floor, the bones of the windows visible and gaunt, Mukesh coming over and rummaging around in her life, her bed—she never thought of it as sex, but as rummaging.

  She had long since evacuated the sphere of full feeling. In some ways Vikas had been right about her after she’d come back from visiting Malik—she was gone. What remained was a bright shadow, a disturbance of light intent on going on a little longer.

  ________

  The trouble started when she began to fall in love with Mukesh, as she looked forward to these illicit visits, imagining the imprint of his hands on the old wooden railing that ran alongside the staircase—the hands with their blisters from breaking and peeling branches with Swiss knives on trips to Dalhousie; hands that dragged the sliding door at the entrance to the drawing room so it hung, like a man taken by the throat, a few inches above its rail on the ground.

  That’s when she asked him for money.

  That had been the implicit agreement from the start—that he would give her money for Anusha; he had offered it after the first visit as he buttoned up his shirt and put on his brutal black shoes: the patriarch getting dressed before his family, entertaining petitions. And they never once talked about his wife and two grown-up daughters. “I should go pick up Anusha,” she had said after that first time, still half-smiling, half-radiant, abashed, touching her hair, confused, scared. She too knew she had crossed a threshold and, having done it, could not say why. It was not out of attraction—she had no physical feelings for Mukesh, disliked his breath, disliked even the tender, consoling way he had held her, as if putting her in a hypnotic lock before committing his act—no, she felt only a warping stasis, the desire to be rid of a station of life, no matter the method or means. And Mukesh, with his kara-cuffed arms, his triple-ringed fingers with their superstitious ruby insets, his almost synthetic mustache, his filigreed eyes, was such a means—had become complicit with her mission even before she’d set out on it. So she’d let him play his part.

  And putting on his clothes, offering to help with future school tuition, boasting about how the sale of the lands had swelled his bank account so much his kids couldn’t even squander it on TVs and cars, he was not so bad. She accepted.

  ________

  He kept giving her money, but it was to slap the relationship back into the realm of transaction that she began asking for it directly, her eyes hard. The more she liked him the more she hardened herself against him.

  They lived in a crowded complex—how long before everyone was talking about it? The servants, with their practiced clairvoyance, probably already knew.

  “This is the advantage of being a do-gooder type,” Mukesh said. “They think I’m interfering with everyone’s business and so won’t think it’s unusual I’m sometimes at your house.” It was a shocking touch of self-awareness and Deepa saw now how being generally shameless could permit and cloak even more dire shamelessness. “I’ve told them I’m bringing homeopathic medicines for Anusha,” he said. It was true: he did bring medicines, for Anusha’s persistent colds, but Deepa didn’t let him give her any. “I want Anusha to grow up free of all pollutants,” she said, thinking suddenly of Tushar’s pleading, brimming reactions to the tetanus injection brandished by the bespectacled lady pediatrician, or Nakul’s habit of squirreling away homeopathic pellets for all kinds of maladies in a single bottle, so he could nibble on them every night till they were inevitably found and confiscated.

  ________

  Vikas, cut off from family, knew nothing about this. He came home and saw his wife in the same pose with Anusha—scolding her for running around too much, for falling and injuring herself when she had been diagnosed with keloids.

  “Why not restart your baking business?” Vikas asked, waking from the dead dream of his endless documentary about terror.

  “I want to be there for her,” Deepa said, eyes pouring toward some faraway spot.

  Over the years Deepa had started to blame herself for the boys’ visit to the market. If she had been present, if she hadn’t been so dead set on making up the shortfall in the family income by furiously baking, if she had known to intervene when her husband, lazing around, doing nothing, had nevertheless sent them all away in an auto on an obvious suicide mission . . . if she had asserted herself. “What are you doing that’s so important that you can’t take them?” she imagined saying to Vikas. She often shouted it out loud as she walked about the house on her increasingly troubled knees, hobbling quickly.

  But it didn’t matter what she said to her husband, now or then. He continued to slip further and further into his dream of self-abnegation that predated even the boys’ deaths.

  ________

  For a man who had dedicated his life to seeing, he noticed very little. What he was really good at was getting people to talk, but that was within the square jail of his camera lens.

  ________

  She was alone with Anusha, always had been, so one day in 2002, when Vikas said they should invite Mansoor over for tea, that Mansoor had had a relapse of his bomb injury and was back in India, she said yes—what choice did she have?

  ________

  This was before the association, before the Sarojini Nagar blast. But seeing Mansoor in their drawing room—young, able-bodied, grown-up, handsome, thin, holding out his wrists, his stormy eyebrows like two thoughts disagreeing with each other—freed something in both of them. Afte
r years, they began to talk to each other again. They remembered stray things about the boys—the way Tushar, the morning of the blast, had come into the bedroom soon after Deepa and Vikas had made love, looking hurt and surprised, unsure what had happened, but putting his hands on his hips in a school-ma’amish manner, intuiting something.

  They remembered the high-pitched sound, like the Dopplering whistle of a train, that Nakul made during his imaginary cricket commentary as he ran back and forth in the bedroom, awaiting Mansoor’s visit—Mansoor’s visit, which the Khurana boys were always so excited about, as if having two of them wasn’t enough. But introducing a stranger always altered things, threw you into a new mood, forced you out of yourself, your small battles and jealousies; a new person signaled play. Tushar and Nakul were always their shiny boyish best around Mansoor. They had probably taken him to the market out of love and enthusiasm.

  For the first time, the Khuranas found themselves forgiving the boys themselves. They had not known till now that the boys had needed to be forgiven.

  But the boys had ruined their lives. The boys, not the bomb, had been their killers.

  A booming cord of light fell over their necks as they sat in the drawing room. They were together again. They hugged and held each other.

  ________

  The next day Deepa told Mukesh she wanted to end the affair. He looked at her sadly, his gray eyelids like two slow sloping slugs, mollusks with their own squirming life. Then he rolled the buttons through the buttonholes of his shirt and left.

  A day later, he was back.

  ________

  Deepa knew she must end it but was also addicted to it—to the numb pleasure, the dark routine, the certainty of his devotion; it had given her life, a feeling of independence from the domestic sphere. She had a secret. She stalked about the house powerfully now, not doting excessively on Anusha as she had before. She was a person again. Vikas was a befuddled aspect of her life, a sick branch that barely held on. They began to discuss ways they could memorialize the boys.