The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  “You were injured in the blast?” Naushad said, pointing a finger down at the ground in surprise.

  Mansoor nodded. “I was small. But I got shrapnel in my arm.”

  At that moment, Mansoor felt he had pulled out a trump card; that he had absolved himself of suspicion in the eyes of the dhaba-wallah, who had been listening to the exchange in an absent way; sopping up the conversation the way his samosas were sopping up oil.

  “Don’t take this the wrong way,” Naushad said, clearly excited. “But you can really help us.” He launched into an explanation. “We’ve been working for two or three years for people to give attention to the locked-up men. Everyone knows—even the judges—that the wrong men have been arrested. You can read it in the documents: there was no independent witness present when they were arrested. That’s why they keep adjourning. But the issue is that after 9/11 and the Parliament attack, no one wants to help these people. ‘They’re bloody terrorists; let them rot,’ they say. But, bhai, they haven’t even been proven to be terrorists! One is a papier-mâché artisan. Another was a student in class eight when he came to Delhi to stay with his brothers. And the last one, he used to work with his family in a carpet shop in Kathmandu. These people’s lives have been ruined, and now six years have passed without a trial. So we’re making an effort to bring out the story in the press. And look, if someone like you, an educated person, a victim—if you say something, imagine how much more of a difference it’ll make. Let me write my name and e-mail and phone on a chit”—he had already taken out a tattered lined paper and was pressing a pen into it against a timber column in the tea shop—“and if you want to help please phone us or e-mail us. Here you go.” He handed Mansoor the chit. “As salaam aleikum,” he said.

  “Wa aliekum as salaam,” Mansoor said.

  ________

  Mansoor liked that the man did not press him, but it was also one of many encounters during a sullen winter and he did not make much of it. Instead, at home, Mansoor focused on coaxing his injured limbs to life, dipping his arms in alternating casseroles of hot and cold water and pulling up his sweater sleeves, his feet feeling cuffed to the marble floor. When he doused his arms in the water, his back ached; his body parts jostled and screamed for attention. When one part improved, the other took on the mantle of pain. Jaya explained that the computer, because of the intensity of attention it demanded, turned the muscles into hard microchips.

  He was in the middle of this ritual when he got a call from his friend Darius.

  Darius had been a schoolmate of Mansoor’s, but not someone he’d been particularly close with—whom had he been close with?—and so when Darius came on the phone, Mansoor was oddly excited.

  “How are you, Mansoor?”

  “Fit, yaar,” he said, turning back into the anxious-to-please second-tier-popular student he’d been in school.

  They talked for a while about an elderly art teacher who had recently died of a stroke—she was a chain-smoking radical leftist who had made them paint antinuclear signs (INDIA: NO CLEAR POLICY) for half a year after the Pokhran tests—and then Darius said, “So I’m calling because you met my friend Naushad.”

  It turned out that after a year at St. Stephen’s studying history, Darius had become an activist. “Anyway,” Darius went on, “he told me about his idea of getting you involved and I think it would be excellent. In fact I had told him about you at one point but I didn’t know you had come back to Delhi.”

  Mansoor felt a dip in his mood. “Yaah, it’s a health issue.”

  “Anyway,” Darius said in his unhearing way, “it’s a great group of people, very smart, and you’ll like Tara, who runs it. A Dipsite but she’s very eloquent. Anyway, I think these people are making quite a bit of difference. Wouldn’t hurt to come for at least one meeting.”

  ________

  Mansoor didn’t want to go, but he had never really learned to say no, even after what had happened in the market with the Khurana boys, and so, on a rainy afternoon, he went over to the nursing home in Defence Colony where the group met—Tara’s mother, a doctor, ran the hospital.

  The nursing home was a wide dish of a building smarting of disinfectant; the smell seemed to have struck dead the stunted palms in the front. Shivering, Mansoor climbed the stairs past the rooms with their sounds of conspiring patients and came to a bare room full of men and women sitting cross-legged in a circle. “You can sit down anywhere,” a woman said, her sharp canines visible. She was attractive, in a fair vampirish way, and must have been Tara.

  Darius and Naushad got up and introduced Mansoor, who put his palms together, like a politician.

  There were twenty people in all, most of them his age, some wearing checked shirts and pants, the women in modest salwar kameezes, a few heads dotted with skullcaps, gol topis, the Muslim women identifiable by their coquettish pink head scarfs.

  Tara, after a brief explanation of what the group did—she said it had first formed in response to the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat earlier that year—asked Mansoor to speak. He suddenly became confused about why he was there. “I actually don’t know that much about the blast. I was quite small when it happened.”

  “But you were hurt, right?”

  “I was injured. And that’s why I’ve come back, for treatment. The bigger issue was that my two friends died.” The room hushed; Mansoor hadn’t mentioned this to Naushad—nor, apparently, had Darius, who, like many people Mansoor knew, had forgotten the aching detail of the two dead boys. The bomb survived through the living, not the dead. “Tushar and Nakul Khurana,” Mansoor said, savoring the Hindu names in this secular atmosphere. “I’d gone with them, and when the blast happened, near the framing shop, they died instantly. I had to run back all the way to my house in South Ex.” Sensing that people were impressed, he went on. “I was in a lot of pain—even my fillings in my teeth had fallen out—and I also felt a lot of guilt, even though I think they died instantly. I was twelve. I’m not sure what I could have done.”

  “Poor boys,” one woman said, shaking her head.

  “Yaah, but what’s more horrible is that other innocents are suffering,” Mansoor said, suddenly finding the thread. “That’s why I came.”

  The group filled him in on what, exactly, they’d achieved with regard to the 1996 blast. Through filing petitions and engaging public litigation lawyers, they’d managed to bring the case before a board that dealt with TADA and POTA cases. They were also selectively targeting corrupt policemen who arrested former informers and innocent Kashmiris whenever there was a terrorist event. “The police aren’t happy about that, and they’re going to come after us,” a man named Ayub said, clearly looking forward to this drama. He seemed like one of the leaders of the group—a tall man with impervious dark skin, sandy hair, and an unplaceable class background, though Mansoor assumed he was lower class. “But the thing you can do for us,” Ayub went on, “is write petitions and editorials. You know, the hardest thing in this media environment is getting a word in the papers or the press. But someone like you, eloquent, studying abroad, a nonthreatening Muslim—people will be interested to hear what you say.”

  Mansoor wasn’t sure if he should be flattered by the word nonthreatening, but he straightened his posture and looked at Tara, who was picking at her bare feet, the heart-shaped frond of hair on the top of her head visible, crisscrossed by several partings.

  Everyone but Mansoor was barefoot in the cold room, with its single bed pressed against the wall, suggesting it had once been a guest room. The shelves were empty except for weirdly out-of-place religious tomes in Sanskrit, bound in red. “I can consider that,” Mansoor said, though he instantly tensed up, thinking of what the Khuranas and his parents would say.

  ________

  At the end of the meeting, Tara and Ayub came up to him.

  “So you’re based in the U.S.?” Tara asked. Ayub stood a little behind her, smiling.

/>   “Yeah.”

  Tara said she had studied abroad too, at Carnegie Mellon, where she’d majored in psychology. “What I loved about the U.S. was how open it was to the humanities. I would not have developed any consciousness had I not gone there.”

  He liked how unpretentious she was. “Me as well.”

  Ayub now stepped forward. “How long are you in Delhi?” he asked.

  “A few months,” Mansoor said, standing up on his toes; Ayub was taller than him.

  “Then you should come with me tomorrow,” Ayub said.

  ________

  The wives and mothers of the accused had long since moved to Delhi from Kashmir to lobby for their husbands’ or sons’ release, and so the next day, setting off with his driver, Mohammed, Mansoor picked up Ayub from outside Tikona Park and they drove together to a small alley in Batla House overflowing with mud and gravel smeared on the ground from abandoned construction. At the far end of the alley, schoolboys, twelve- and thirteen-year-olds, poured out of an unfinished concrete building in their tired school uniforms, their socks drooping, their bags like the surreal burdens of soldiers. Their presence in the alley created an alertness, an impression of a herd of blind, ambling animals, of uncontrolled life, and for a second Mansoor was nostalgic for his school days. But looking at the boys again, their smallness, their jutting confidence, their scramble of limbs—restless, pumping, pointing, shooting everywhere, gesticulating for no reason, grabbing cones of chana from each other—their tense flowing energy, the symphony of gestures, all this filled him with fear and sadness: how ill equipped one was to deal with pain at that age! The ghosts of Tushar and Nakul flashed through the crowd: fat and thin, retiring, sharp. All crowds of a certain age contained them. Mansoor found himself praying for these poor Jamia schoolboys.

  After leading him to another alley, Ayub ushered Mansoor into a small room that looked like the waiting area of a homeopath. When they’d been driving over, Ayub had told him he was taking him to the office of a friend’s Islamic venture capitalist fund, which the friend allowed Ayub to use on weekends. “What does Islamic VC mean, exactly?” Mansoor had asked.

  “It’s a normal venture fund,” Ayub said, “but you only invest in Sharia-approved companies. So, for example, if a company is involved in processing pork, you won’t invest in it.”

  “What about a company that generates interest?”

  “That too. You can only invest in Islamic banks.”

  “It’s the way activists want the endowments of universities to be purified,” Mansoor said, vaguely remembering a discussion he’d had with his friend Alex.

  The women were sitting on a Rexine bench in the decrepit VC office, pressed together. One was young and pretty and wore all black and kept her head covered; another had a nose ring, with little fountains of hair visible under her dupatta; the third was toothless, gross featured, henna haired. But Mansoor could not see them, not really. As they spoke, holding their own wrists, as if permanently taking their pulses, they were swallowed up by their stories. One woman told Mansoor how her husband had been pumped with petrol in the anus. Another said her son had been hung from the ceiling of a police station till he lost all feeling in his hands. “He can’t write anymore,” she sniffled. The last one narrated an even bleaker story. Her son, Malik, a student from Kathmandu, where he had also worked in his uncle’s carpet shop, had been shocked in the genitals and had had some of his tongue scraped off with a blunt knife. “They do it in such a way that you can still talk, but you sound like a stutterer,” she said, displacing the cruelty she’d experienced onto the imaginary stutterer, whom she mentioned with contempt.

  The cascade of horrors, the way they were narrated, with fiery intention but also deadness in the eyes, the eyes having turned into shields that guarded the inside rather than bringing light from the outside, reminded Mansoor of how he himself talked about the blast. After a certain point the violence in your life acquires unreality through repetition. What could he really recall of the day of the bombing? The heat, flying swords of metal, pools of blood, deafness, a watery distance from everything. But really what he recalled was getting up and running way, the walk home.

  At the end of each story, Mansoor nodded his head—that’s all.

  After the meeting, Ayub asked, “What do you think?”

  They were again in the alley, which was quiet now, evacuated of the schoolkids, broken only by the hiss of the illegal wires hanging overhead.

  “It’s terrible,” Mansoor said.

  CHAPTER 14

  Mansoor became active in the group, going over to the room in Defence Colony two or three times a week for meetings, telling his parents that the NGO worked for “communal harmony.”

  His mother was happy that her son had found a source of distraction while he healed. His father, meanwhile, energized by Mansoor’s presence, took him around to look at houses. “It’s time to buy a new flat,” he told Mansoor. “We need a bigger place and anyway South Ex is so noisy and polluted now.” He had become fixated on this project, even though most of the flats they saw were out of their price range or in colonies like Neeti Bagh where the sellers would never deal with Muslims.

  Mansoor was in pain still but felt oddly content. He was healing and would return to the U.S. for his spring semester, which began in January. It was November now.

  Peace For All had serious intentions but was also a friendly group. The twenty-odd members knew each other well and were jokey and friendly and relaxed before and after meetings. There was Shahid, a tall man with enormous hands, plastered balding hair, and a goofy grin with gapped teeth, a second-year mass com student from Jamia. Jacob, the only Christian in the group, thin and nervous and colored with pimples, studied chemistry at St. Stephen’s. Zeenat was working toward a diploma in computers from NIIT. Tariq had graduated from a forest management institute in Maharashtra but obviously hated forests—you could see it in the way he cursed whenever a mosquito buzzed near him. They were seekers. They had witnessed what Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, had done in his state in March, how he and his administration had stood by, in localities like Naroda Patiya, Meghaninagar, and Bapunagar, as violent Hindu mobs, armed with swords, petrol bombs, tridents, and water pistols to spray fuel, had set upon Muslims, burning them alive, tearing infants from mothers and fetuses from wombs, raping women, killing a thousand. And they had realized that the Indian government wouldn’t protect them, that in fact it had an incentive to demonize and exterminate them. The members of Peace For All were not radicals. They were eminently reasonable people, students engrossed in careers, people who wanted to be Indians but had discovered themselves instead to be Muslims and had started to embrace their identities. In their alienation, their desire to be included in the mainstream, Mansoor recognized himself.

  “Do you think they’ll let Muslims get away with that?” Zeenat might say, for example, when someone suggested a nonviolent protest.

  “The police are the most corrupt. Just yesterday they stopped me and wanted to know where I was driving to at night.”

  “Your idea of doing communal harmony workshops is very idealistic, but we need something more extreme to awaken people.”

  Everyone had a story of being personally pegged for a Muslim too.

  “Why do they always tell us to go back to Pakistan? You’re a Hindu—go to Nepal! And why shouldn’t I go to Malaysia?”

  “The worst is when they say ‘Oh, you don’t look Muslim!’”

  “I was once at my friend Akhil’s house and I made the mistake of touching his father’s Ramayan. That man, a baldie, started shouting, ‘You’ve soiled it! Dharmbhrasht kar diya!’ He made poor Akhil pour Ganga water on it from a Bisleri to purify it.”

  Mansoor sat cross-legged, bringing his bare feet together anxiously with his hands, pressing his soles together.

  The voice of reason, of knowledge, during these raucous meetin
gs was Ayub. Ayub was twenty-seven and from Azamgarh, but seemed older; it was as if he had digested recent history and sociology and philosophy, and could draw links between subjects without being the least bit pedantic. With his quick-fire noun-laden sentences, he made knowledge attractive. “The Brotherhood in Egypt is primarily a social organization. It only became politicized when they were persecuted, when their leaders were locked up in jail. I don’t think Qutb was a great thinker as others do, but why martyr him?” People nodded their heads dreamily, not knowing much about Egypt or Qutb. But Ayub’s style was inclusive, and Mansoor felt he could understand the problems of Muslims elsewhere too.

  Then one Friday morning, after a meeting, as they all got up to leave, Ayub asked Mansoor, “Are you coming to the mosque with us?”

  “I don’t have my car here,” Mansoor said.

  “No problem, yaar, I can take you.”

  Mansoor had been hesitant to get involved with the religious aspects of the group; it wasn’t that he disliked religion but that he felt it was outside his purview. When he heard the members talk about the rulings of the ulema, or what al-Tabari had written about the fitnah, or the corruption of the Uthman, he instinctively zoned out, the way he did when his mother was overcome with piety two or three times a year, increasing the rakat in her prayers and promising a sadqa for the poor to express thanks to God for Mansoor’s continued health.

  Now, caught, unable to come up with an excuse, Mansoor walked with Ayub down the stairs and into the service lane before the main road, where leaves were coming unclipped from the dead trees and rattling down on the street, like the tail of a distant dragon. The roads were brightly bisected by newly painted white lines that stood out against the pervasive dustiness of winter. Mansoor inhaled the stink of racing petrol deeply. Growing up in Delhi, one gets addicted to pollution.