The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  Soon after 9/11 and the Parliament attack, the Khuranas had been visited by a journalist eager for their opinion about America’s response to 9/11 and how they felt about the 1996 trial, which was still lapsing through the courts. Deepa and Vikas had tried to be objective but ended up frothing. “They should kill everyone in the Taliban,” Deepa had said, sitting under two garlanded portraits of Tushar and Nakul. “Every single one.” Vikas had added, “When we see what is happening in the West, we are glad. We are glad George Bush is going after terrorists. It should be a lesson to our country. We’ve been passive people too long. But this passivity and ignorance doesn’t work before terrorism.”

  Afterwards, they were shocked at themselves. They were no longer liberals.

  Soon after Mansoor’s visit, they approached K. R. Gill.

  Gill, a sardar in his forties, was a former Youth Congress leader who had survived three separate car bombings by Khalistan separatists in the 1990s and now headed an association of terror victims. This group, which supposedly had fifty members, lobbied for terrorists to be hanged. Gill, who had a personal investment in the cause, was a towering, swaying figure full of undistinguished rage. He tilted about on artificial legs—both legs had been blown off in separate bombs—which he dismantled and brandished at the slightest provocation from a journalist or judge. He gave medals to victims and shamed politicians. He was theatrical, morbid, explosive, full of hot tears. He threatened suicide in court. The Khuranas had come across him when he made a vehement appeal before a Sessions judge for Malik to be hanged.

  They had been frightened by him then, but now they reached out with an idea.

  Gill, who had been looking to energize the drooping association, was happy to induct such well-spoken victims into his group. Vikas and Deepa began working with the victims of small bombings. “The deadliness of an attack should not be measured by its size,” Vikas told a news channel who interviewed him about the association. “In my estimation the small attacks are more deadly, because a few have to carry the burden of the majority. Then, as these victims’ grievances get forgotten, as the blasts themselves are forgotten, the victims of these small bombs turn against the government instead of the terrorists. Is that a situation we want? No. That’s why, along with Mr. Gill, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands.”

  The Khuranas now went to hospitals right after attacks. Vikas talked to victims and their families in the hospital, listening sympathetically, nodding on cue, his long neck bent down in respect and his large hands tenderly mashing the dense, comforting, youthful patches in his hair. Deepa, more unsentimental and direct, was better at knowing how to boss the nurses around, at noticing what exactly the doctors were overlooking as the patients lay bloodied and bandaged and dazed in the hospital. “Please bring him water,” she might shout at a nurse, taking the bridge of her nose between her fingers and stroking off the dust and sweat. Or, “For how many days has this sheet not been changed?”

  Together, aged, having experienced so much, they cut warm, comforting, watchful figures in the hospitals. Often, they were observing not the victims but each other. How had they come from marriage to the death of their boys—to this? And yet, it gave them enormous solace to know that their suffering had not been for naught, that they had been able to eke a larger meaning out of it; they felt the closeness couples sometimes experience when they become rich after years of poverty, a mutual appreciation and gratefulness and wonder and an awareness of the depths of the other person—an awareness that is stronger than any affection or love.

  These kinds of couples are at their best when they are silent together, letting the world do the talking; when the world ignores them, taking them wonderfully for granted, so that they are no longer an anomaly. This kind of love is shot through with the fire of long-vanquished sadness. Deepa and Vikas did not hold hands as they stood by the beds of victims, listening to the complaints of mothers, the women distraught beneath the head cover of their dupattas. But they may as well have been.

  “Let me know if you need help with the association,” Mukesh said one day when he was sitting with Deepa, having tea. Many of their trysts amounted to nothing more than this; the illicitness of the meetings themselves was thrilling, with Deepa finding an excuse to send the servant on an errand to a distant market. “I’m sure I could get Naidu-ji to come.”

  “No need,” she said.

  It was the last time she saw him.

  But not everything returned to normal. Anusha became neglected. Whereas she’d once been a bright, soliloquizing, self-contained child, hopping and leaping about the place in her looped black shoes, shaking her hips to Bollywood tunes that were frozen from the 1990s, when the boys were growing up (Deepa had kept all their tapes—Hum Aapke Hain Koun, DDLJ, etc.), she now found she had no audience. A knowledge of loss entered her face as her parents came and went, busy with work and the association. She began to grow up.

  Later, when she was older, she would tell her friends that she understood how such people, outwardly sensitive, could neglect their children to the point that they would go to a market and blow themselves up.

  CHAPTER 30

  “The association of small bombs,” as the Khuranas called it privately, was a support group and forum for the grievances of victims. It was also an alternative family for Deepa and Vikas, a group of individuals with whom they could converse freely, of which they were the matriarch and the patriarch. Not only were they the oldest members, but—besides one family in which three of five people had died (a mother had taken her two children out shopping to buy birthday gifts for the other sibling; all three were killed)—they had suffered the greatest loss. Sitting up together in drawing rooms, they dispensed advice on compensation and injuries and medical bills. Gill, meanwhile, dealt with the issue of the terrorists themselves, lobbying for the terrorists to be stripped of all rights. This put him in direct opposition to Tara and Ayub’s NGO. “You people support terrorism,” he’d shouted at Ayub some years before. “All the evidence is there—we need the trial to happen faster.”

  The way the association was structured—dependent, in a way, on the inflow of victims—also made the Khuranas perversely eager for new bombings. Soon after they heard about the blast in Sarojini Nagar on TV, they headed to the hospital.

  ________

  It was in the hospital, amid the chaos and stinking blistered bodies and nurses pushing trolleys full of IVs and bottles and news crews thuggishly infiltrating the wards, that Deepa and Vikas met Ayub, though they had no idea who he was. He lay in a bed with a patch over his left eye and legs tightened in bandages. The blast had caused lots of lower-extremity injuries, the doctor said, talking to the Khuranas, but this particular man had been spared the worst. Instead a piece of shrapnel had bounced up and penetrated his left eye; the bomb had been packed with industrial nails and ball bearings. “Many of these people,” he said, gesturing around the room, “have wounds that look like bullet holes.”

  “Better to have lower- than upper-extremity injuries,” Vikas said.

  The doctor looked at Vikas as if to say, “You know a lot,” but then, pointing to Ayub, went on, “He’ll be fine. If he had been closer he would have died instantly of an internal hemorrhage, so you’re lucky.” The Khuranas had pretended they were relatives of this boy on the bed. This was their usual ploy to get access to hospitals right after a blast.

  What was it about such a morbid war zone that energized Vikas? Once, on a trip to France to screen a documentary at the Aix-en-Provence film festival, Vikas had peeled off and visited a chateau in the Loire Valley. Stony and hard skinned, the chateau consisted of two towers connected by a covered bridge that ran over a river. During the Great War, his guide had told him, the battling armies shared the bridge as a common hospital. Vikas had been stunned by the idea of wounded soldiers—who may have wounded each other—lying bed-to-bed in the same ward. What horrified him was the fact that injury, its
violent horizontal stasis, revealed the complete artificiality of war.

  He remembered seeing Tushar and Nakul in the morgue and thinking: They belong to a different class now. The class of the dead.

  He had never lost his urge for classification—this tyrant’s urge for unity and separation. He knew everyone was different, yet he wanted them to be the same. Hence his obsession with death.

  Vikas had always been obsessed with death. In his youth, it had taken the form of constant anxiety and brooding, and he had always been fascinated by Deepa’s star-crossed past, the way so many of her relatives had died young. And maybe he had taken satisfaction in the ruin of his own life, the way in which death had washed over him in an equalizing wave. Maybe if he had not thought so much, worried so much about death, it would not have come for him.

  And yet, death could not get him now. Everything had been taken away from him. Even his wife, to a degree, was gone; he knew (vaguely) that he didn’t have her completely. He had made himself immune to the only disease without a cure.

  CHAPTER 31

  Mansoor heard about the blast the day it happened, but he didn’t learn that Ayub was among the injured till he saw his face a day later on TV—Ayub, swaddled in blankets, on a rusted bed, croaking a few words into the microphone, the groove above his nose deepening; then Vikas Uncle (of all people!) taking over the proceedings with his trademark fluency and rapid-fire way of speaking. “The government has promised compensation,” he said. “But so far no one has even visited these people in the hospital. Nor has the emergency protocol changed and improved—it took two hours for an ambulance to come to Sarojini Nagar and then too it was not equipped with the right emergency machines.”

  “Mama,” Mansoor said, muting the TV.

  “Yes, beta,” she said from the other room.

  “Something very bad just happened.”

  ________

  When his mother saw Ayub on TV minutes later, the news segment recycling itself, she shook her head sadly, but also, Mansoor felt, not urgently or empathetically enough.

  “I’ve had a feeling that something bad was about to happen,” Afsheen said. “I’ve been having headaches.” Tears sprang to her eyes. “Do his mother and father know?”

  “I don’t know if anyone knows,” Mansoor said. “If he knows. I should go right away to the hospital. But it’s good that Vikas Uncle and Deepa Auntie are there. Poor fellow—he’s about to get married, and Papa said he came only two days ago to the office and was wondering why he hadn’t phoned.” He could understand now, in a way he couldn’t before, the point of Vikas Uncle and Deepa Auntie’s association. He hadn’t known they got involved this early in a bomb’s unraveling.

  His mother insisted on coming along with him to the hospital and he didn’t refuse.

  In the car, Mansoor, resting against the door, marveled at the oddness of the situation—the way in which life had come full circle, so that he was the well one now, with strong arms, a skullcap on his head, a prayer on his lips, visiting someone else who’d been injured in a blast. He must have met thousands of people over the course of his life and none, save for Tushar and Nakul, had been injured or killed in a blast. Ayub, as the poorest of his friends, was the most likely to end up in a public space overrun with flames.

  Of course, by the time Mansoor got to the hospital, propelled forward in his car by the driver, the city comforting him with its exciting colors and music—the soundtrack to Godzilla on the stereo casting its own spell—he’d forgotten all about this circularity and was taken up with parking, finding the reception desk, moving to the right ward, behaving like an adult to the correct degree. His mother was beside him, covering her mouth, put off by the hospital.

  “I was also in a hospital like this and I was OK,” Mansoor said, referring to his first visit to the hospital after the blast to get the shrapnel out of his arm.

  “But you didn’t stay in the hospital, beta. We took you home. These days a lot of antibiotics are being dumped in our rivers—I’ve read drinking river water is like drinking Crocin. All the bacteria are resistant to medicine. You should cover your nose. Most people die in these hospitals from staph infections and pneumonia.”

  You should have been a bloody doctor, he thought, but kept his mouth shut. He noticed people staring at him because of the skullcap and broadened his chest in defiance.

  Passing through the ICU, they found Ayub lying on his own bed (most of the other victims were doubled or tripled, head to foot, on beds). “Ayub bhai,” Mansoor said.

  Ayub smiled weakly from his metal bed and held out a bandaged hand. He did not actually feel so weak anymore but knew it was crucial to act the part. After the explosion, the pain, the loss of his left eye, which had sliced the world in half, tunneled it, he’d woken up in the hospital surprised and frightened—though he’d been told, during training, that such an outcome was far from extraordinary. Terrorists were always being blown up by their own bombs; if he were injured, he’d been told, he was to play a confused victim and supply a Hindu name.

  Now he waited, in panic, for communication from Shockie or Tauqeer.

  “Do you know they’re calling you Mr. Galgotia?” Mansoor asked. (Ayub had named himself after his favorite bookstore, Galgotia & Sons.)

  “They’re confused about everything.” Ayub waved it away. “Hello, auntie.”

  “Hello, beta,” she said. After ascertaining he hadn’t talked to his parents, she said, “Do you have your mummy and papa’s phone number? We should call them. Otherwise your pain’s under control? We can make arrangements to transfer you to a private room.”

  “That’s a good idea,” Mansoor said. “The state you’re in, it might take you ten more days, and you’ll feel better if you have a room of your own.” He felt self-conscious offering this privilege to his Gandhian friend. He sighed. “I couldn’t believe you were in a blast, yaar. I thought I was imagining it. But your eloquence was undiminished.”

  “It’s like what you had said. One remembers nothing.”

  “Something about the intensity of the sound and the speed with which things get rearranged,” Mansoor said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “It’s like being sucked into a tornado. The mind doesn’t know how to process it. But you should have phoned us, yaar. That couple who came, the ones who run the association, they’re family friends.”

  Ayub’s neck twitched. He had recognized the couple—but they had not recognized him—and he’d been very uneasy the whole time he’d been speaking to them and into the camera. Yet he’d gone ahead with the interview in hopes that his comrades would see that he was injured and that he’d given away nothing. At the same time he worried about his parents watching him on TV. “I would have called but I couldn’t remember the number and my mobile—I don’t know where it is.”

  “The hospital has a directory,” Mansoor said. “But believe me, I understand. I couldn’t remember my own home number when the blast happened,” he said, looking triumphantly at his mother. All these years and they had never believed his story!

  “Your mummy and papa’s number?” Afsheen repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking around the shabby ward. The place was heady with the stink of sweat.

  “Even that I can’t remember,” Ayub said, smiling.

  “We’ll talk to the doctor and get you moved,” Afsheen said. “If you give me their name—”

  This was the thing about his mother, Mansoor thought. Financial troubles or not, she was extremely generous.

  “Mr. and Mrs. Azmi,” Ayub said, unable to lie anymore. “Of Azamgarh. And no need for the room, auntie.” But he did not push hard. Better to be put out of public view.

  ________

  “What was he doing in the market?” his mother asked as they left the hospital in the car.

  Mansoor knew there was a kernel of suspicion buried in her generous soul. He coughed. She’d never really cared f
or his friend, had been suspicious of his antecedents, his needlessly long stay. “He’s not from a rich background,” Mansoor said. “That’s why he was shopping in Sarojini Nagar. I told you—he’s a very impressive guy. He did his engineering and then he came to Delhi and decided to do social work. Can you imagine someone from our background doing that?”

  She smiled and shook her head absently. Noticing her nervous tremor, he was angry, sad, afraid. Life was an endless parade of tragedies: solve one thing and another rushes to take its place. He was consumed by the idea that his mother, this noble creature with her dark thick skin and mauve lips and particular motherly creases, was going to die. He put his hand over hers. “But it’s bad luck for him,” Mansoor continued. “He doesn’t have much of an income and I think he’s the only son in India, so it’ll be tough for his parents.”

  “We’ll take care of him,” his mother said, smiling.

  “It’s so ironic,” he said to her. “He was the one in my NGO who was the most staunch believer in nonviolence. He’s the last person it should have happened to.”

  ________

  Ayub, left alone in the ward, began to palpitate and lose his nerve. He’d always had a weakness for mothers, feared their telepathic abilities and felt that no matter what he said, Mrs. Ahmed would see through it. “She knows,” he thought. “That’s why she wasn’t smiling, and that’s why she came—out of curiosity.”

  Before, for all his planning, he was an innocent, pure potentiality. Now, he was a murderer and a terrorist—worst of all, he was injured and in pain, which prevented him from thinking clearly about what he’d done. Why had the bomb gone off so quickly? He’d been told Shockie was the greatest bomb maker of his time.