Thinking of Shockie, he got inexplicably angry for a second and clutched the rusted nail.
Then he turned over on the bed. He knew that the people around him were here because of his efforts, that their wounds and tears were his doing—he’d heard the fat man who’d been talking on the mobile in the market moaning—but for that reason, it was satisfying that he too was hurt. He hadn’t exempted himself from the suffering he’d caused others.
The doctor had told him he would make it out with a slight limp if he did the right exercises. Ayub had smiled through his comments, aware of having hardened. So this is how it feels to be bad. Cold and sober.
Riding the flare of this feeling now, he got out of bed and started walking away. “Where are you going?” a nurse asked, calming another patient, but when he put up his pinky in the universal salute of wishing to pee, she looked away and he kept trudging. He came to a door that led out of the ward, amazed at the blindness of the doctors and the patients—a blindness like that of the shoppers he’d killed. He slipped out of the main entrance into the shameless afternoon light.
Buses, angry and green and gray, with oleaginous windows and robotic grimacing grilles, were blowing lightly down the road.
Originally, he was supposed to meet Shockie at the park after the bombing; he wondered how Shockie had responded when he, Ayub, hadn’t shown up. Did they think I was a double agent, that I went to the police? But, then, the bomb did go off—surely they heard about that. Would a double agent really set off a bomb?
The bomb had only killed fifteen and injured thirty. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it, except to say to himself, “It’s Indian propaganda. It was much bigger.”
Ayub passed a phalanx of dozing ambulances. But when he got to the lip of the hospital complex and hailed a rickshaw, he realized, with the despair of a man who has almost escaped, that he had no money. Someone had taken it from his pocket when he was lying in the mud, bleeding.
________
Mansoor came again in a few hours with his father, who fussed over Ayub and had him moved to a private room (Ayub had come back to the ward). “They’ve started making arrests already,” Sharif told Ayub. “The Indian Mujahideen has taken credit.” It pained Sharif to have to talk about yet another group of Muslims responsible for terror. He really did feel, as they moved Ayub to his room, that the world was closing in on him and his family, that it was bad luck to be back here again.
Ayub was frightened to hear about the arrests. “Did they say who did it?”
“You think there’s a reason?” Sharif said, mishearing. “They hate everyone, especially themselves.”
“You’ll appreciate this, uncle,” Ayub said, settling into his new bed, now echoing Mansoor’s statement to his mother. “I fought for the rights of people arrested for terror but I’ve never been on this side.” Suddenly, seeing his body, the whole injured extent of it, he was comforted. “One understands how the victims must feel about terrorists. They’re looking for revenge. They don’t want to listen to reason. What happened is so irrational that it makes people irrational.”
“Which is exactly what the terrorists want,” Sharif said. “How’s your eye?”
“It’s OK, uncle. One eye is nothing.”
“Better than the brain, I suppose.” He smiled weakly, saying the wrong thing as usual. “I should have had you start work that day itself—then you wouldn’t have had time to do shopping.” Sharif smiled again.
“I only went because I had to buy gifts for my family. They all like brands. Maybe this is a lesson for me not to buy brands,” he said, smiling.
“My missus called your parents,” Sharif said, remembering what he’d been told to say. “They said they’re coming. I made a booking for them through my travel agent.” He didn’t mention how surprised Mr. and Mrs. Azmi had been to hear their son was in Delhi, how they hadn’t heard from him in weeks.
“They’re both becoming blind,” Ayub said sadly, his eyes curdling with tears. “They won’t be able to come.”
“They didn’t tell me that.”
“They’re very polite.”
Seeing them now in his mind’s eye—seeing the disappointment they would feel if they ever discovered he was a terrorist, his heart crumpled. I hope the train crashes and they die happily, he thought.
________
When Sharif went out to make a call—he was always making calls on his mobile—Ayub said to Mansoor, “I have to tell you something. Close the door for a minute.”
Mansoor lowered his big head and shut the door.
Ayub said, “I’m going to be arrested.”
“What?”
Ayub craned his head toward the door. “I don’t want your father to know.” Now he told him a story he’d thought up earlier. For all his pain, Ayub’s ability to fabricate hadn’t gone away; it had got better with desperation. He said he had enraged so many policemen over the years with his activism that they had vowed to take revenge on him; one had come by and threatened him with arrest.
“Which one?” Mansoor asked.
“I wish I knew his name. He was a sub-inspector with the Delhi cadre. But he said they can take me away under POTA anytime.”
“But I have a connection,” Mansoor said, thinking of Vikas Uncle.
“The connection won’t help. It’s a deep issue. I’ve revealed too much corruption in the police.”
“We can go to the press,” Mansoor said.
“Mansoor bhai, you have to trust me. This is the one time none of this will help. You saw how the press reacted to our rally—why will they come help us? And a Muslim injured in the blast? They can easily pin it on me. Religious, young—they don’t need evidence.”
“I was also injured in a blast.”
“That’s different. You were little.”
Mansoor paused. He was wondering at this story.
________
Soon after, Sharif came in and asked Mansoor to accompany him to the photocopier in the hospital complex to make a copy of Ayub’s prescription. Mansoor, nodding to Ayub, went out with him. He had assured Ayub he wouldn’t tell the secret, yet he wasn’t sure why he should keep it from his father. Still, as he walked with his father, he became aware of how burdened Sharif had become, a neckless man sunk in the worry suit of his body. Mansoor decided to help his friend.
________
Going back to Ayub’s room—his father was now on the phone talking to a business contact in the lobby of the hospital—Mansoor said, “What do you need?”
“Honestly? Thousand rupees.”
“That’s easy. Here’s six hundred.” Mansoor’s pulse raced. Would he be arrested too?
“You don’t need to worry,” Ayub said. “They won’t do anything to you. Their issue with me is personal.”
“It still sounds dangerous. We should tell my family friend.”
“If you tell them, it’ll only cause more drama. Believe me, the best situation is for me to go.” At that moment, stuffing the money into pajama pockets, Ayub smiled. In that smile Mansoor suddenly knew that Ayub had done it, that he’d planted the bomb.
Mansoor was thrown out of himself. His emotions and facial gestures got scrambled. He smiled and blinked and frowned and twitched; he didn’t seem to have control over his hands, which felt around his face as if for the first time, as if touching the face of a lover in the dark and discovering it is your enemy, or worse: a cold corpse, the corpse of a loved one. His stomach muscles cramped. The food he’d eaten earlier that day troubled the top of his throat.
Ayub stood up jauntily and put a friendly hand on Mansoor’s shoulder. “You’ll be OK.”
“Yes.” Mansoor smiled.
“Good. You go from the stairs,” Ayub said. “I’ll take the lift.” They walked out into the corridor in opposite directions.
But going down the stairwell, that pouring cuboid o
f negative space, the undersides of the zags of staircase above furiously black with beards of dust, Mansoor became worried. Everything swirled in the stairwell; a bat flew up, circling, wafting through the unmarked stories. Mansoor sweated, his heart beating weirdly.
When he came to the lobby he half-expected to see his father and Ayub chatting. But neither was there. His father, it turned out, was already in the car, getting lathered with the aftershave of air-conditioning; he had left Mansoor missed calls to join him in the car.
So Mansoor walked across the lot to the pale blue Honda City and got in.
His father was sitting in the back, scratching his stubble like a happy animal, playing “Yeh Shaam Mastani” on the stereo—his favorite song, partly because it was the only one he knew how to play on guitar; late in life, Sharif had developed a fixation that he ought to learn one musical instrument.
As the car started, Sharif unconsciously put his thick hand on his son’s—the hands were plastic and large, puffy, covered in ridges, fair. His fingers were so much fatter than Mansoor’s. He seems to be made of a different material from me, Mansoor thought.
But they did not talk the whole way home.
________
At home Mansoor was disoriented, unable to speak at dinner, which was illuminated by the faint light of the generator—the electricity had gone. “Poor boy, you’re tired,” his mother said. Mansoor, smiling sweetly and dumbly, neither agreed nor disagreed.
It was only in his room that night, in that palace of air-conditioning, that he began to shiver. The shivers were uncontrollable. His ribs hurt. His teeth clattered and sang and slid against each other, testy with enamel. His body was out of control. He got up and sat on the desk but his palm vibrated on the table like a mobile. “No,” he said out loud.
He thought of Ayub and wondered where he was now. But it was no concern of his. He was just Ayub’s friend. He had only come to see Ayub in the hospital. It was Ayub’s free choice to go wherever he wanted. This relaxed Mansoor. Then the shivering began again.
________
“Are we going to go today to see him?” his mother asked in the morning.
She was clearly enjoying this routine of spending time with her son.
“Let me call his room in the hospital and find out if he’s awake.”
“He’ll of course be awake. They wake you at six in the hospitals and they keep you up the whole day with checkups and plates of food. That’s what we’re being charged four thousand per day for.” Her generosity did not preclude harping.
Clutching his Nokia, Mansoor called the hospital. After an interminable wait, the receptionist came back to him and said, “He’s not there.”
“Oh?”
“He’s gone. There’s no one in that room. Has he checked out? We have a queue of patients.” He was surprised by her lack of concern.
“He’s left the hospital,” Mansoor told his mother.
She crinkled her expressive moon-shaped forehead in surprise. “Very strange.”
“He’s like that. I knew he would behave this way if you got him a room. He’s too self-respecting. It’s how he left after we offered him a job.”
“I only hope he gets better,” his mother said. “And his poor parents are coming also.”
________
Mansoor prayed that nothing had happened, that Ayub had not been caught, that all of this fell behind them.
Then, the unraveling began—but in the strangest way.
CHAPTER 32
For years, the Delhi police, as well as Khurana and Gill—first individually, then collaboratively—had been tracking Shockie. Three years after the 1996 blast, Malik had actually broken down and fingered Shockie, though he had returned quickly to a contrite silence.
Ever since then there had been a bounty on Shockie’s head and a great deal of intelligence expended in failing to capture him. So it was a surprise when, a few days after the Sarojini Nagar blast, he was arrested.
It was a triumphant moment for everyone. A flighty, bald, wet-eyed man was produced in the lockup. He looked like an electrician—like someone you might hire for handiwork at Lajpat Nagar. There was nothing terroristic about him. Gill and the Khuranas watched with delight from behind a glass window as he was interrogated and beaten.
After three days of torture, he angrily confessed. “The real mastermind is Ayub Azmi. He’s done the last ten blasts. I’ve been his servant.”
“Who’s that?”
“A young man,” Shockie said. “An activist from Azamgarh. That’s why he was never detected. He was injured in the Sarojini Nagar blast.” Shockie secretly blamed Ayub for his arrest. Actually, he had become quite attached to Ayub, the way he had been attached to Malik, and had stayed on in Delhi hoping Ayub would reappear at the park. But it was Shockie’s constant presence in the park that had attracted the attention of a paranoid man who lived on the periphery. Soon after this man had contacted the police and a policeman had matched Shockie to his photo.
________
After escaping from Delhi, Ayub went to the base near Hubli. But when he got there, exhausted—his exhaustion only fully expressing itself now, as it does at the tail end of journeys that have been soaked and powered by adrenaline—Tauqeer, looking gaunt and ill only wanted to know where Shockie was.
“I thought he had come back.”
“Obviously he didn’t.”
“I assumed he had.” Ayub unconsciously covered his gashed left eye; it was lacking a patch now. No one in the group appeared to notice or care.
Soon after, the group learned Shockie had been arrested, and in a panic—but a smooth one; the group was made for panicky situations, even looked forward to them—split up into cells and went in different directions. Shafi and Rafiq went north, to Kathmandu. Waris and Karim headed to Gujarat. Ayub and Tauqeer hurtled overland, in the back of a truck, to a secluded beach in Kerala. Once there, Tauqeer and he settled into a hut on the beach.
The first two days were almost pleasant. Ayub liked Tauqeer now and they talked about Palestine and Carlos the Jackal. Then one evening, after going out for a walk, Tauqeer vanished.
The problem with this was that Tauqeer locked the door whenever he left; Ayub couldn’t get out of the hut. For a few hours he sat cross-legged in the sand.
He could hear the ocean susurrating beyond and after a while, he pounded the door and threw his bulk against it but the force was useless; the door was metal, clasped with a chitkani outside.
He sat back down in the sand and told himself not to worry. Tauqeer would come back for him.
Night came—no Tauqeer. He drowsed and drooled, hungry. He hadn’t eaten in a day. He was thirsty too; to get to the water under the sand, he began to dig.
He passed out. When he woke the next day, he was in another hut, on an operating table of some sort. “I’m glad you found me,” he said with a smile, still surprisingly weak. “Is there a drip here? Some glucose?”
He had a vague memory of waking and trying to open the door of the hut and then passing out again.
The doctor, who was wearing a face mask, said to another man in the dark corner, “Our friend is awake.” He had kind eyes that closed into slits.
“Tauqeer bhai?” Ayub asked. “Are you there? Was the key to the hut lost or what?”
The man in the shadows did not answer.
Ayub became aware that he was undressed to his waist. More to the point: there was a strange square scar on his chest, where a scalpel had been recently applied. The skin was reddish, welted, peeling.
“Did I need to have surgery? Was I very sick?”
“You are the bomb,” the doctor said.
Ayub moaned and tried to turn over.
The doctor tapped his chest with a blunt cold metal instrument. “We’ve put a bomb in you. It’s a new kind of bomb, since you’re curious. It isn’t timed. It goes off w
hen you move your body in a particular way.”
Ayub’s broad shoulders shook and compressed. His leg muscles tensed. “What did I do?”
“We know who you’re working for,” the man in the corner said. It was Tauqeer after all.
The doctor helped Ayub off the table. “It’s OK,” he said. “You can walk. Here,” he said. “Put this shirt on.” Ayub complied, hunching himself to accept the shirt. He was very weak.
He must have been walked some distance in this drowsy state, because when he came to, he was on a deserted beach.
Tauqeer and the doctor were gone. The hut was gone. The birds struggled in the wind like flies in honey. The sounds were enormous, the ocean regally hushing the beach. It was beautiful. He tried not to move—to avoid the secret configuration that might set off the bomb. With one hand he picked at the sand, kneaded it. What a waste of a life, of talent. Did he believe he would explode? Of course. Stranger things have happened. He had never experienced such a fear of the body before, not even with his back pain, or the bomb he’d planted in Delhi. The body itself was abhorrent. It could be made subservient to anything. It could work for despots, tyrants, fascists, terrorists—it could work for machines. He realized the pointlessness, at a time like this, of having a mind. He kept imagining the form the explosion would take, how it might gush out of him like a white star, pelting the ocean with soft embers and pieces of his skin. What was a bomb, really? A means of separation, of opening. A factory of undoing. It took the violent forces of civilization and applied them to the very opposite aims with a childlike glee. A bomb was a child. A tantrum directed at all things. A wail of a being that hadn’t got its own way. The choice of suicide over defeat. Ayub, in his reading of Marxist history and leftist theory, had always been interested in the role of bombs; now he too was a weapon, part of a long evolution of revolution. In that instant, he was connected to the bomb throwers of the past and the bomb men of the future. Entire cities of exploding people might exist someday. He saw a hut in the distance. Casting aside fear for an instant, he got up and ran.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 26