Shockie and Meraj walked quickly to the Indian side, disappearing into a crowd of truck drivers. When they came across a small dhaba selling sandwiches wrapped in plastic, with a grassy patch in the back, they collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily. Meraj counted out money for ketchup sandwiches, but kept fumbling the notes.
Suddenly, Shockie burst out, “How much did they give you?”
“Two thousand,” Meraj said.
“Two thousand.” Shockie shook his head. “You think it’s enough?”
Meraj kept smiling—but it was a vacant, expectant smile. “It’s not bad.”
“Nonsense,” Shockie said. “Do you know how much Abdul makes at the shop alone?” Abdul was the leader of the group, a thirty-year-old who ran a carpet shop and also taught in the local school. “Fifty thousand,” Shockie said.
“Where, yaar?”
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And that’s on top of the dana we’re getting from Karachi.” Dana was counterfeit money. The Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force prided itself on being composed entirely of native Indian Kashmiris, but received funding from NGOs run by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency. “But why share it with us?” Shockie said. “We’re little people. We’re only making chocolate.” “Making chocolate,” the code for bomb making. “You know how in restaurants they have a mundu who helps the cook? That’s the amount of respect we get. We’re servants.” He snapped a Kit Kat they’d bought from the dhaba. “Listen to how it snaps. What a delicate sound. It sounds like money. They probably spent more for this one chocolate, in setting up the factory, than they give us for one chocolate.” He put a piece in his mouth.
Meraj watched.
Shockie said, “These small chocolates will achieve nothing.”
Meraj shook his head absently.
“You’re listening?” Shockie said. “Fuck it. It’s useless talking to you.”
This was not the best attitude to have, since they were soon on a five-hour bus to Gorakhpur, in India. A diesel-perfumed monster, its seats appeared ready to come loose from their moorings on the metal floor. Shockie looked out angrily at the landscape as Meraj drenched his shoulder with drool. How had this arid, dusty, ruthless part of the world become his life? Fighting for Kashmiri independence, he hadn’t seen Kashmir in two years; he was an exile, and in those two years, he feared (with the unreasonable worry of all exiles) that Kashmir would have changed. What if it had become like this after all the warfare? What if the green had been exhausted and the placid mirror of Dal Lake had been smashed, revealing layers of dead bodies and desert that lay on the lake bed?
When he’d been growing up in the late eighties and early nineties, he was convinced that the bottom of the lake was choked with bodies, that each taut stem of lotus or water hyacinth tugged at the neck of a drowned person like a noose. Sometimes his friends and he boarded a shikara and went trawling, running their hands through the water, jumping back if they touched something or if they saw a small drop of red floating by.
When Shockie looked out of the window again, it was evening. It occurred to him through his sleep that maybe even Uttar Pradesh had once been as pretty as Kashmir—only to be despoiled by wars and invasions.
________
Gorakhpur is one of the armpits of the universe. The best thing that can be said about it is that it is better than Azamgarh, which, along with Moradabad, competes in an imaginary inverse beauty pageant for the title of the world’s ugliest town.
Shockie and Meraj disembarked and checked in to their usual hotel—a half-finished concrete building that had once been a godown and was crowned with rooms in a gallery on the first floor and now called Das Palace. (Though they called it Udaas Palace—Sad Palace.)
The room was even more awful than the ones they were assigned in Kathmandu. Mosquitoes swarmed through the gaps in the doorframe—the door did not fit properly. Meraj, alert after his nap on the bus, smeared his body with Odomos. “There’s Japanese encephalitis here,” he said, offering the tube to Shockie and savoring the name of the disease: he had once been a compounder.
Shockie accepted moodily. Alexander the Great had died from a mosquito bite, from malaria, he knew.
In the morning, when they had drunk tea served by the hunchback, the only apparent employee of the hotel, they went to visit the Jain.
The Jain sat on a cushion in an impeccable house, impeccable only on the inside, of course: outside was a heap of roiling, shifting garbage, a heap that seemed a living thing with rats burrowing through it—swimming, really, floating in an unreal paradise of gnawables with pigs pushing aside layers of plastic and rotten trembling fruit with their snouts.
But the Jain’s house, built like a Gujarati kothi, was oblivious to all this. The Jain was a boulder of a man with smooth coal-colored skin and a bald head offset by two equal tufts of hair. His nose was a beautiful chorus of tiny pores. He had large dark hands, whitish on the inside. He sat on his knees on a cushion in a white kurta, the rock of his paunch balanced before him. “I had orchiopexy, you see—you know what that is?” he started. “When one of your testes doesn’t descend.” He must have been twenty-nine, thirty. No one in this world was very old. “For years I had lots of pain, and though I was strong, I couldn’t run without losing my breath and getting a sharp pain in my torso. I used to always wonder why.” The servant set down three earthen cups of tea; the Jain accepted his cup daintily in his large hands. “Now that I’ve had surgery I have all this energy. I can run five kilometers without stopping.”
Where does the poor fellow run in this dump? Shockie wondered. But ideas of health, Western ideas, were spreading everywhere. Shockie himself was obsessed with exercise, with hanging from a rod in his doorway.
“Anyway,” the Jain said, putting his large hands on his thighs, thighs the size of cricket bats, “I overdid it, so I have been advised to rest. Hence this cushion under me.”
A fan turned overhead, raising a delicious current from the layers of sleeping air. It was dark in the drawing room, a welcome respite from the May heat of Gorakhpur.
The servant brought a VIP suitcase with a numbered lock and the Jain twisted it open on his lap. “Count it,” he said.
Meraj and Shockie each took a bundle in their hands and petaled the notes. Shockie was sleepy and slightly delirious; the room had a fan but not much air, and the smell of fresh money made him high. He kept losing count only to realize he’d been thinking of nothing, or rather, thinking of himself thinking.
When they had finally accounted for all the money, they dumped it into their kit bag and went off.
“You see what I was saying?” Shockie said, as they waited on the railway platform for the train to Delhi. “What we get is just a tip.”
The money was not for them. It was to be dropped off with an agent in Delhi, part of a hawala money-laundering operation that sustained the group.
“But this is also for chocolate,” Meraj said, speaking with the dazed clarity that comes to people in extreme heat.
“Just like that, it’s for chocolate? If they have so many funds, why do you think they still bother to send us on such a long journey? Use your brain for once, Meru.”
________
The train from Gorakhpur to Delhi could take anywhere from fifteen to thirty hours, depending on the mood of the driver, the state of the tracks, accidents, and random occurrences. Meraj and Shockie settled into a third-class non-A/C sleeper compartment. Shockie was in a tired, despairing mood. He always got this way before action. It was like an advance mourning for his life. The vibrating bunks, stacked three to a wall; the mournful synthetic covers of the bunks, torn in places and looking smashed, with the webbed look of smashed things; the racing wheels underneath, like ladders of vertebrae being whipped; the sense of abject stinking wetness surrounding a train’s journey through the universe—all these things filled Shockie with futility. The bogey was a jail c
ell ferrying him to a destiny he did not desire, his jaw on edge like the stiff end of his mother’s iron.
Bougainvillea bloomed insanely here and there in the landscape.
Meraj kept waking up and falling asleep on the bunk across (they both had top bunks) and Shockie considered him with pity, surprise, even tenderness: people were closest to animals when they were sleeping and fighting for wakefulness. Or dying and fighting for life. What is Meraj dreaming about? he wondered. Probably the same thing as me—his own death—only through the obfuscating membrane of sleep. Meraj had been pulled out of a chemist’s and beaten and tortured by the Jammu and Kashmir Police a few years before.
At desolate stations in the depths of the subcontinent, Shockie got out and smoked, observing the blight of mildew on the walls, kicking away the twisted, disabled beggars who crowded around his feet cawing about their Hindu gods.
At the Old Delhi Railway Station, twenty hours after they had set out from Gorakhpur, an agent met them. The agent was a tall, hippy, pimply, nervous fellow in tight black new jeans. Shockie disliked him immediately. He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities. He lorded everything over them. He didn’t help them with their cricket kit bags. He asked them if they had ever been to Delhi before.
“Yes, hero,” Shockie said, setting his emotional lips in a smirk.
“Let’s go in different directions and meet at the car. It’s parked behind,” the agent, whose name was Taukir, said.
“Why do you want to do that?” Shockie said.
“You never know about the police these days.”
“No,” Shockie said. “What’s safer is that we go together.”
The key to not being caught, Shockie knew, was to behave confidently.
They walked through the annihilating crowds to the car. From the high steel roofs of the station, birds raced down, avoiding a jungle gym of rafters and rods. People pressed and pushed as the trains hurtled through their routes of shit and piss, plastic and rubber burning weirdly in the background, spicing the air. The station was so bloated with people that the loss of a few would hardly be tragic or even important.
When a Sikh auntie leading a coolie into a maroon train jostled Shockie, Shockie shouted, “Hey!”
“Move!” the woman shrieked at him.
“You move, you witch.”
And with that, she was gone, swallowed up by the dark maw of the train.
Invigorated, he lit a cigarette, broadening his shoulders as he brought the light to the Gold Flake hanging from his lips. He had always enjoyed the rudeness of Delhi.
A few minutes later, in Taukir’s Maruti 800, Shockie gripped the plastic handrest above the window and looked out. Delhi—baked in exquisite concrete shapes—rose, cracked, spread out. It made no sense—the endlessness, the expanse. In Kashmir, no matter how confusing a town was, you could always shrink it down to size by looking at it from a hill. Delhi—flat, burning, mixed-up, smashed together from pieces of tin and tarpaulin, spreading on the arid plains of the North—offered no respite from itself. Delhi never ended. The houses along the road were like that too: jammed together, the balconies cramped with cycles, boxes, brooms, pots, clotheslines, buckets, the city minutely re-creating itself down to the smallest cell. From one balcony a boy with a runny nose waved to another. A woman with big haunches sat astride a stool next to a parked scooter; she was peeling onions into a steel plate and laughing. Before municipal walls painted with pictures of weapon-toting gods—meant to keep men from urinating—men urinated. Delhi. Fuck. I love it too.
________
Taukir lived with two spinsterish sisters and a mother whose eyes were dreamy with cataracts. The ladies served a hot lunch of watery daal and tinda and ghia, but Shockie was so excited he could barely eat. “No, no, bas,” he said, whenever the younger of the sisters, not unattractive, gave him a phulka. The man and his house seemed very modern, with many cheap clocks adorning the walls; you had a sense that whatever money the family had earned had been spent on clothes. “When can we go to buy the materials for the chocolate?” Shockie asked Taukir.
Shockie wasn’t sure how much the sisters knew; he felt proud and confident nevertheless, puffed up like the phulka he set about tearing on his steel plate.
Taukir provided several ideas for where they could go.
“Chawri Bazaar is better than all those,” Shockie said.
After wiping his mouth with a towel, he signaled to Meraj and they went out to buy materials.
A car bomb is made by putting together a 9V battery, an LPG cylinder, a clock, a transformer, a mining detonator, and four meters of wire—red and yellow, to distinguish circuits. The cylinder is then put in the dicky while the wiring and the timer are packed in the bonnet.
The clock was easy to buy—they got it from a shop in Chandni Chowk, the Red Fort a merciless mirage in the distance. The 9V battery they acquired from an electrician’s shop in Jangpura, where an old Punjabi man sat among sooty tables taking paternal pride in every piece of equipment. Shockie understood the fellow. He himself took a certain sensual, even feminine, pleasure in shopping for materials for a bomb; he might have been a man out to buy wedding fixtures for his beloved sister. But he had to keep his instinct for haggling and jolliness to a minimum. You had to make as little an impression as possible, and it was crucial to get material of the highest possible quality for the lowest possible price. You did not want your bomb to go phut when the day came—something that happened all the time, even to the best bomb makers. It had certainly happened to Shockie. One of his bombs had fizzled and let out a small burp of fire. This was in a market in Jaipur. He ran away before being caught, but two of his fingers were burned and had to be chopped off at the ends. He lost some feeling in his hand too, but it was for the best. It marked him as serious. When bomb makers met each other, they inevitably looked at each other’s hands.
Taukir came along with them on these excursions, looking alternately keen-eyed and lanky and then despondent and distracted, one arm looped behind his back and clutching the other hand in that lackadaisical, half-stand-at-ease, half-chastised posture that is the hallmark of bored people at rest.
They shopped in a conspicuous group of three because the Indian police often prosecuted terrorists on circumstantial evidence, trying to damn them with statements like, “Why was he shopping alone with a shawl pulled over his face?” Thus, the revolutionaries reasoned, if you had three people carrying out a task meant for one, you defeated the police’s logic with your illogic.
After two days of shopping in different parts of Delhi and arranging the materials on the floor of a room in Taukir’s house—a room that obviously belonged to the sisters and mother, who had been sent away to the village the day after Shockie and Meraj arrived—Shockie said, “Now, let’s see the car. It’s still parked outside?”
Taukir let out a noncommittal sound.
“You’ve parked it somewhere else?” Shockie repeated, getting up from his chair and smoothing his curly hair, an unnatural motion for a man who liked the puffs and curls of his plumage.
“Ji, sir, that’s my car,” Taukir said, finding his voice.
“And where’s the car for us?” Shockie said.
“Well, we have to steal it.”
“I see,” Shockie said. “Let me go steal it now.”
Before Taukir could react, Shockie was up and heading outside the house. He came across Taukir’s 800, the one in which they’d been driven from the station. Like every other vehicle in Delhi, it was a dented and dirt-spattered specimen, ruined as an old tooth.
As if conducting an examination, Shockie put his fist through the front window. The window came away, the crystalline fracture smeared with blood from his hairy arm.
“No!” Taukir screamed, coming outside. “What are you doing, sir?”
But
Shockie said nothing, simply walking away, drops of blood falling on the earth.
________
The May heat was horrifying, violating the privacy of all things while also forcing you into yourself. Shockie closed his eyes against the ferocious prehistoric explosions of the sun. As he looked for a PCO from which to call headquarters and abort the mission—he had tied up his minor wound with a hankie—he cursed under his breath. They fucking want freedom but this fucking cheapness will never go away.
When Shockie had headed out for the mission from Kathmandu, he had been reassured that he would not need to steal a car—he had fumbled this crime before, and besides, he disliked all aspects of the job that made him feel like a common criminal.
Packets of gutka dangled in front of a shop like strings on a bride’s veil. Within the shop, the shopkeeper fished out items from the shelves with a pole. Shockie was about to ask the man if he knew where he could find a PCO when his eyes fell on another Maruti 800, parked on the side of the road—an ugly little blue thing with maroon fittings, tinted windows, and colorful plastic floral designs taped to the top of the windscreen.
The street was dense with scooters and bicyclists.
In a matter of seconds, Shockie bounded up to the car, hugged himself against the onslaught of vehicles and people, and then, in a swift motion that would have shocked anyone watching this avuncular fair fellow from a distance, put his hands on the petrol cap, stuck a blade under the metal, heaved with all his might, and ripped it off.
Every muscle in his left hand—his stronger hand, after that debacle in Jaipur—was afire. Carrying the petrol cap in his hand, making heavy strides in the traffic, he walked to Taukir’s house.
________
Back at the house, Meraj and Taukir were playing cards on a sofa in sulky silence, light filtering dustily through the old Punjabi-style grilles of the house. The sofa had been put together by joining two metal trunks and covering it with a dhurrie.
“While you were sitting, I’ve done the job,” Shockie said, coming in. He handed them the petrol cap.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 4
