The bodies had been taken away briefly the night before for a postmortem so the doctors could recover pieces of the bomb from Tushar’s and Nakul’s corpses. The leftover pieces—bright triangles of metal, serrated edges of bottle caps, nails—glittered in the pyre.
Deepa, weeping violently, her hair pouring everywhere, gray from smoke, screamed, “Take me away.” Vikas watched with his arms behind his back, like a military man at the funeral of his entire squadron.
The members of the Khurana clan did not see each other frequently, but they took the responsibilities of family life seriously, and after the cremation, they came from their flats and gathered around the couple in their house to console and comfort them. Rajat, Vikas’s youngest brother, a handsome fellow in his thirties with an unfashionable mustache and an air of self-important family-oriented efficiency, pulverized sleeping pills with a rolling pin and dissolved them in the couple’s tea; that they drank this hot cocktail without noticing was a sign, to him, of how far gone they were. Bunty Masi went through the kitchen drawers, collecting knives and dropping them into a jute bag she took home. The Khuranas’ close friends, writers and filmmakers and decent professional types, came together and sat in a grief-stricken huddle; the blow had been so big, it had the potential to damage an entire friend group.
Others crowded on the floor, offering homilies, stories, banalities. Everyone (save for two patriarchs) agreed it was impossible to imagine what the Khuranas were going through.
________
The bombing happened at six p.m. on a Tuesday. By nine p.m. a group calling itself the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force had called Zee TV and NDTV and claimed credit for the attack. The family members discussed the group and its intentions and fell back on their normal scorn for Muslims. “They can’t live in peace, these Muslims. Anywhere they show up, they’re at war,” one Masi said. “A violent religion of violent people. In the Quran, it’s written—no Muslim is supposed to rest till he’s drunk the blood of seventy-two unbelievers.”
“Kashmiris have always been filthy people. The whole winter passes and they don’t bathe. That’s why Srinagar stinks so much.”
“The problem is they believe they’ll receive seventy-two virgins in heaven.”
“You’re saying this, but I work with Muslims every day. All the craftsmen and weavers are Muslim. You go to their locality and each of them has twenty children.”
________
The Ahmeds too were adjusting to this new world—this world in which their son had nearly perished and in which his two close friends had died before his eyes.
The doctor who had seen Mansoor on the day of the blast said he was very lucky: some other object or person nearby must have absorbed the shockwave. It was the shockwave that killed most people. If you inhaled at the moment of the blast, which was the natural impulse, the compressing air got inside you and tore up your lungs and you died of “massive trauma.” “You, young chap,” the old doctor said, slapping Mansoor’s cheek in a friendly but unsettling manner, “you’ve only got a fracture and some stitches in your hand—things that all boys of your age get. Soldier’s wounds.” Then he slapped him again and prescribed a few months of physiotherapy. Mansoor was allowed to take home all the shrapnel that had been pulled out of his arm—twenty pellets—in a plastic bag.
“Should we take him to VIMHANS?” Afsheen asked afterwards, referring to the mental health institute on Ring Road.
“Tell me what happened, how it felt,” Sharif said to the boy.
“You can’t just ask like that!” Afsheen said. “There’s a proper process for these things.”
But the boy was happy as he was, at home. “Please, Mama, I don’t want to go anywhere,” he begged.
“See, Afsheen, what’s the rush?” Sharif said.
In any case, the Ahmeds found themselves very busy with the cremation and funeral rites of the Khurana boys. Blessed with good fortune, they experienced a strong obligation to be present for their unlucky friends and they went and sat in the Khuranas’ flat every day, ignoring the abuses hurled at Muslims by Vikas’s relatives—relatives who were either not aware they were Muslim, or wished to harangue them in a sidelong manner.
“Only another mother can understand what you’re going through,” Afsheen cried in Hindi, sitting on her knees by Deepa in the Khuranas’ drawing room. “Mansoor keeps saying his life should also be taken away if Tushar’s and Nakul’s were, and I have to tell him, No, beta, no, don’t have these thoughts.”
Deepa barely registered Afsheen’s presence. “They were such good friends, all of them. Best friends.” She sniffled again, covering her sharp nose with her bony hands, and then said, “I’m so sorry. I’m crying too much.”
“Cry. It’s OK to cry.”
Sharif spent time with an ashen, shocked-looking Vikas. “The terrorists were Kashmiri fellows,” he said, in the measured and serious way of someone unused to emotions, someone obviously puffed up by the opportunity to proffer advice. “It’ll be easy to find these people. They’re not professionals. The important thing is that you take care of Deepa. She needs you. I’ll ask Mansoor if he saw anything suspicious at the market.”
Mansoor was the one who provided the Khurana family with an eyewitness account of the boys’ deaths, putting an end to morbid speculation about their final moments. But he’d been unable to explain to his parents why he’d walked away. “Why didn’t you phone us, beta?” Afsheen said.
“I thought the lines would be cut,” he lied.
“But promise me, if there’s ever, ever such an emergency again, you will phone. Each market these days has hundreds of PCOs.”
But Mansoor—disoriented, overwhelmed Mansoor—wasn’t listening. He was thinking instead of the shattering, deafening moment the bomb exploded, the pain he’d felt in his extremities, the way Tushar and Nakul had snapped into sleep, going from on to off. What could he have done? Though he had no experience with mortality, though he had not gone over to their corpses to examine them, he had known they were dead, and had known there was nothing he could do. How to explain this? How to tell his parents the obvious thing—that walking had been his way of grieving, of indicting the entire city with his eyes?
His parents protected him from the Khuranas and the cremation and the chautha—he was a victim too, after all; his right wrist and arm, fractured, were in a cast—but one day, he was nevertheless taken to meet the Khuranas in their flat. Vikas, grief stricken but affectionate, hugged Mansoor with downcast eyes, smelling his hair deeply, wanting a full version of events. Deepa, dressed in an obscenely yellow kameez, sat on the sofa chair next to him, dazed, a hand on her head, the embodiment of a crushing headache. Afsheen kept throwing worried glances her way. “Deepa, will you have anything to drink?” she asked, even though this was Deepa’s house and the servant could be heard operating the mixie in the kitchen.
Mansoor told them about the auto ride, the walk in the market, the explosion. “But did they die instantly?” Vikas asked.
“They weren’t moving, uncle.”
“But you know for a hundred percent sure?” Vikas said, muddling his words. “We’re trying to make a case against the hospital and the police. When the bomb exploded, people phoned the fire department from the market, and they kept saying, we’re coming, we’re coming. But they didn’t come. They phoned AIIMS for an ambulance and they also didn’t come. They actually put people in the back of a police van and drove them to the hospital. They piled them on top of each other—”
“Answer uncle’s question, beta,” Afsheen encouraged him, realizing Vikas was getting lost in the horror of these imagined events.
“They were no more, uncle,” Mansoor said.
Vikas looked at Mansoor and in that glance it was clear to Mansoor that Vikas blamed him, that this question was not about the hospital or the fire department or the police but about why he had left them to die and walked away.
Why? He didn’t understand either. He saw the landscape, the dripping city with its thousands of watery, refracted lights; saw the dust on the yellow necks of the traffic lights; saw the torrid concrete undersides of the flyovers—saw it all and felt afraid, as if the city had recognized his guilt on the way home and would find a way to destroy him.
________
“Had they gone to pick up a watch or a TV?” Sharif asked Mansoor when they drove home in their Esteem.
“You don’t listen properly,” Afsheen scolded Sharif.
“TV, Papa,” said Mansoor.
“That’s what I thought. Because today I heard some relatives saying they had gone to pick up Vikas’s watch,” Sharif said. “That’s all. I was just checking.”
________
Having chased down the leads, having talked to the boy, having come to see there was no one else to blame, Vikas succumbed to shame. He felt his entire life had been a failure and that it was this failure, particularly the failure to make money, that had brought him to this point: if they’d had a driver, how could this have happened? He kept apologizing to his wife. “I told you I should have gone back to being a CA,” he said, referring to the career as a chartered accountant he had given up thirteen years before to make documentaries. “I’ll do anything for you.”
But Deepa wanted only one thing: revenge. Having passed rapidly through the stages of grief, she had emerged at a clearing of rage and felt the only reasonable thing was to watch the boys’ killers die a violent death. “Do you think they’ve actually arrested the right people?” she asked Vikas.
As usual, the police had made a few arrests right after the blast.
“God only knows, Deepa—I’m so sorry.”
When would this pain end? Vikas wondered. He’d experienced nothing like this—had never known a pain that could slip into every fold of the body—and he could only imagine what his delicate wife was going through. She was not a healthy person to begin with—her lung had collapsed some years before, and cancer ran amok in her family—and he worried that this uprightness, this forced bright rage, was a prelude to serious illness.
The family continued to surround them. But now the advice grew more specific. Bunty Masi suggested they see a guru she visited in GK. “Talk about a great spirit. He touches your hand once and half your problems disappear. Remember how bad Mansha’s leukoderma was? Absolutely gone.” Pratap Tau said grief made people holy and they should consider having another child during this period. “Adoption is also a possibility,” a do-gooder added (the house was full of do-gooders). Rajat offered to buy his brother and sister-in-law an all-expenses-paid tour to Switzerland. “May-June is the best time to go,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “There are very nice waterfalls.”
These people bewildered Vikas. But then again, they had never suffered such a loss, had never really known his kids. To them, every child born into the family was the same, a continuation of genetic material. He remembered why he had cut himself off from these people in the first place.
Deepa grew more and more adamant that they press the police to find the killers. Then, one day, to everyone’s surprise, it happened: the police said they had arrested the terrorists.
TERRORISTS
MAY 1996
CHAPTER 3
Soon after Shaukat “Shockie” Guru received the order to carry out the blast, he went to his alley and washed his face under the open tap outside the building. Then he entered his room and sat on the bed, brooding. The room was small, foggy with dust, ripe with the smell of chemical reagents (there had been construction recently in the alley), poorly painted. The sole decoration was a poster of a slick-bellied Urmila Matondkar from Rangeela. Two charpais lay separated by a moat of terrazzo. The mattress under him was thin. He felt the coir through the clotted cotton.
After a while, he went back into the alley, where afternoon was announcing itself in the form of clothes hung out to dry between buildings and the particular yawning honking that comes from cars when the sun is high overhead, dwarfing human activity, and he went to the PCO and called home. It was his ritual to call home before setting out on a mission. His mother thought he was a student in Kathmandu—at least she made him believe she thought that—and he wanted to give her an opportunity to save him. She is the only one who has the right to decide whether I live or die, he often thought when he smelled milk boiling in the shops—yes, that was the smell he associated with his mother and with Kathmandu. It gave Kathmandu a sweet, plasticky flavor. Of all natural substances, milk has the most artificial smell.
Shockie was the leading bomb maker of the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force, which operated out of exile in Nepal. An avuncular-looking man of twenty-six, he had catlike green eyes, wet lips, and curly hair already balding on the vast egg of his head. His arms were fat rods under his kurta. In the past four years he had killed dozens of Indians in revenge for the military oppression in Kashmir, expanding the JKIF’s “theater of violence,” as the newspapers called it.
Now he pushed the receiver close to his ear in the PCO booth. Deep in a crater of silence on the other side of the Himalayas, the phone rang. The phone was a drill seeking out life. “You’re sick,” he imagined saying to his mother. “Should I come?”
His mother had been a presswali her entire life, and had developed a tumor in her stomach after years of exposure to the hot coals in the heavy, radiant, red-jawed iron, an iron that was shaped like a medieval torture device, something you might want to trap a head in. No one had been able to cure her. And yet she always refused his offer. This time, the phone wasn’t even picked up (it wasn’t her phone—it belonged to Shockie’s cousin, Javed, who lived a few minutes from his mother in Anantnag, in Kashmir). Sweat distorted the air before Shockie’s eyes in the suffocating cabin of the PCO, with its thrum of phone voices. Back in his room, he asked his friend and roommate, Malik, “Should I not go?”
Malik—a slow, deliberate, hassled man at the best of times, the sort who seems to be exhaling deeply against the troubles of the world—said, “You’re making excuses.” He was sitting curled up on his charpai.
“I fear that she’s back to work again. My brother is ruthless and callous. He never did anything growing up and he’s used to being taken care of, and she likes taking care of people.” He spat. “Do you think this is a wise mission?”
“Not wiser or unwiser than anything else.”
“This is the first time Javed hasn’t picked up,” Shockie said, unzipping his fake Adidas cricket kit bag.
A journey to Delhi to plant a bomb did not require much, at least in the way of equipment. Most of the stuff you needed you bought there. That way no one could trace you to your source. You destroy a city with the material it conveniently provides. But every respectable revolutionary needs a few changes of clothes, and Shockie, on his knees in his shabby room, folded two shirts and a pair of black pants into the kit bag. On the journey, he knew, he would have to dress in pajamas and a kurta—brown rags. He was supposed to be a farmer attending an agro-conference near Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh.
These agro-conferences were among the most fascinating things about India. They happened several times a year, in far-flung parts of the country. Tinkerers and crackpots showed up, hawking inventions to solve irrigation problems and plowing “inefficiencies”; a good number claimed to have invented perpetual motion machines (Shockie remembered a machine shaped like a calf with a swinging leg). The farmers, dismissed by urban Indians as bumpkins, roamed in gangs, examining the machines, discussing the finer points with the inventors. They were the audience for these raucous fairs held under tents in eroded Indian fields. The farmers were uniformly suspicious. They were taken in by nothing. Shockie—who had attended a fair to buy pipes for a large new bomb the group was building, as well as to purchase gunny sacks of ammonium nitrate and other fertilizer—was impressed. When he heard another one was happening in UP, he decided
to disguise himself as a farmer in tribute. After stuffing a few old farmers’ newspapers in his kit bag, Shockie patted his hair into place, as if it needed to be coaxed into traveling with him.
The next day, with Meraj, another agent, he left by bus for the Indo-Nepal border at Sunauli.
________
Meraj and he were both in tattered kurtas. The bus, rattling over bad roads, usually took eight hours to Sunauli. Today it took almost ten. The landscape, a wild scrawl of reddish terraces and gushing private rivers, came right up to the bus, nearly shattering it. The dug-up road heralded the air with red dust. Plants with plastic bags over their heads crossed their leaves in surrender. A baby in the back screamed the entire way. Shockie and Meraj shifted on their shared seat, trying to apply enough pressure to keep Nepalis from sitting next to them.
When Meraj, an absent-looking fellow with a disarmingly stupid face you could consider capable of nothing dangerous, picked dandruff off his hair and sniffed his fingers, Shockie said, “Don’t do that.”
“OK,” he said, smiling nervously. But he had obviously not understood Shockie’s command and soon smelled his fingers again.
“That,” Shockie said.
At the border in Sunauli, a town reveling in its own filth, the policeman in the Indian immigration hut gazed at them for far too long. Shockie and Meraj remained impassive, but when they were halfway out, the policeman suddenly shouted after them. “You’re meat eaters?”
“We’re farmers. We told you,” Shockie said quietly.
“But you’re of the terrorist religion, no?” the policeman said. A dandy, his mustache was trimmed to the same depth as his eyebrows. “I’ve lived among you bastards and you’re all Pakistanis. Now go.”
The Association of Small Bombs Page 3
