“We could write a book or start a site,” Mansoor said.
“The book’s been written—it’s called the Quran.”
________
There is an unnatural concentration that comes with being freed of pain after years, and Mansoor felt the world was finally clear to him. The NGO wanted the country to own up to what Modi had done in Gujarat: massacre scores of Muslims in public view, with the police standing by and watching, even helping, the rioters. But Indians couldn’t see anything. They were in the grip of materialism and individualism (he remembered what his father had told him about the Khuranas, the way they had lied about the reason Tushar and Nakul and he had gone to the market; how, even at this purest moment of grief, they could not shed their materialism). What was needed, he felt, was a revolution of values in the country, a retreat from Western materialism. People needed to be shown what religion could do for them in a practical way—how it could save them from depression, pain, meaninglessness, how it could connect them to a family beyond their small selfish nuclear units.
“That’s the type of site we need to start,” Mansoor told Ayub. “Something that connects old values with new problems.” He knew he sounded idealistic, but he suppressed his self-consciousness. “I know someone who can help with videos for the site,” he told Ayub, thinking, in that circular way of his, of Vikas Uncle.
CHAPTER 21
Ayub felt close to Mansoor too. When Mansoor had opened up to him about sex, he had been surprised and touched. After that he had started considering him a close friend.
They began to go for walks together in the parks of Delhi—Lodhi Garden, the Mehrauli complex; they even drove out one day to Coronation Park. Then one evening, in the park of Khan-I-Khana, with its powerful pocked tomb and its aura of a thousand bats, Ayub told Mansoor. “Tara and I. We have something special between us.” He felt shy and fumbled with a leaf in his hand. “We’ve been together for two years, before Peace For All.”
“I knew about it,” Mansoor said, smiling broadly.
“Oh, we were trying to hide it,” Ayub said.
Mansoor had noticed the tension between Ayub and Tara. They assiduously avoided each other during meetings and looked away when the other spoke. Mansoor felt happy for Ayub. Tara was a tall, sensible, brilliant woman with a comical face like a touched-up, feminized version of the principal in Archie comics. But this made her beauty accessible. Her smile gave her away as a sincere person—not one driven to the icy, egotistical, inhumane extremes of activism. Mansoor often stared at her during meetings—she was the only Hindu girl there, and the most cheerful and confident. “You would be good together,” he said.
For a while it seemed that Mansoor, with the newfound glow of religion, could be happy for anyone. Then negativity once again took his world hostage.
CHAPTER 22
Mansoor was sitting with Tara and Ayub at a dhaba in JNU, drinking cutting tea, when it started.
After Ayub had told him about Tara, the three of them had started going out together, eating pizza and burgers and lime ice at Nirula’s, savoring tea from Tara’s and Ayub’s favorite dhabas, and discussing their dreams.
Tara wanted to start a communal harmony institute, one in which common values would be shared and discussed. “There’s a big scope for that,” she said. “You can see people have a hunger to discuss these issues when you go to schools. But there isn’t any outlet for them.”
Ayub wanted to get into politics. “People like me need to take some initiative,” he said. “That’s why I left engineering. My whole family was in shock. Every day they send me messages through relatives trying to see that I’m not on drugs. They can’t fathom why someone like me would do something of this sort.” He grinned and pressed his hand for a second onto Tara’s palm, which was open limply on the table, as if this were an old joke between them. Tara, who was slumped forward on the table—she slumped when she was happy and at ease with people—smiled at him, a tiny candle of a smile, one that created intimacy in the crowded dhaba with its students debating Marxism and whatnot.
“So what do you want to do, Mansoor? Be an engineer?” Tara asked, looking across at him after that private moment.
“Me? Be an activist, I suppose,” he said. But he was gulping now, for reasons he couldn’t understand.
He noticed that Tara was pressing her other hand against Ayub’s under the dhaba table.
That’s when it started. It was as instantaneous as pain. It was jealousy.
He didn’t know why or how it took hold—but there it was, lurking powerfully. This relationship, Mansoor thought, it’s just Ayub’s way out of poverty, out of being lower-class. That’s why he’s in this NGO—to attach himself to this rich, idealistic girl.
As for Tara, she likes having power over these desperate Muslim men.
But Mansoor was thinking of himself. As the three of them had ventured out together, he had become more and more attracted to Tara. His blood jumped in her presence. Her perfume, her mysterious unfashionable waft of coconut, even her sweat—all this turned him on. All the old sexual obsessions returned. But he had no way to exorcize these thoughts now—wasn’t allowed to masturbate. At home, in his room, not masturbating took up all his time; it was almost as all-consuming as watching porn and masturbating.
He wanted to talk to Ayub about this struggle against sexual impulses but felt guilty that he was struggling over his girlfriend.
As the weeks went on, Mansoor’s struggle became solitary. Thoughts and images about sex, about undressed women, shot like arrows of flesh through his brain. Stop, he shouted, at home, down on the marble floor, praying. When he visualized the happy round of cricket with Tushar and Nakul in the park, a naked Elizabeth Hurley stalked onto the pitch, interrupting the game.
Please, God, Mansoor prayed. Are you testing me?
Then one day he lost control and masturbated and was filled with disgust and cursed himself: May your wrists go black!
But in this way, slowly, he fell into a trap of masturbation and self-hate.
So when he met Ayub and Tara a few days after the encounter at JNU—they were at Flavors now—and they told him excitedly that they were organizing one of the largest mass protests in Delhi’s history to interrupt Narendra Modi’s visit to the city, that they had corralled activists from all over the city, Mansoor could only nod grimly. He was a miserable, poisonous person, he felt, unworthy of God.
“We want to bring the city to a standstill,” Tara was saying. “If necessary, we want people to court arrest. You know what Gandhi said the Jews of Europe should do when faced with Hitler?”
“No,” Mansoor said, though he’d heard her say this a million times.
“Commit mass suicide,” Tara said, savoring the words with the intensity of someone who has obviously not considered it seriously. “Throw themselves from cliffs. Think of it. If the Jews were able to muster that kind of courage, the Holocaust would have never happened. We want to get to that level of nonviolence.”
“But doesn’t suicide count as violence?” Ayub asked rhetorically.
“You’re right. It does. But you’re allowed that kind of contradiction when you’re up against a completely unrepentant force.”
“I see,” Mansoor said, interrupting this public lovemaking of activists. “And what about the 1996 blast accused?” There had been a lull on that front. Mansoor and Ayub and Tara had written editorials together about the accused and mailed them to the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, and the Pioneer but had not heard back; the editors at these papers, it seemed, were not interested in the unique slant of a victim asking for a terrorist’s release.
“We’ll work on that after the rally,” Tara said in her direct, no-nonsense way.
________
“Everything OK with you, boss?” Ayub asked him when Tara had gone to the toilet.
“Of course,” he said, though he mean
t the opposite.
________
When Mansoor looked at himself in the mirror at home, he saw a dark, small, pathetic person, an ugly person, a person who shouldn’t have lived. He saw that these feelings had nothing to do with the bomb. This was who he was.
AYUB AZMI’S RESPONSE TO TERROR
MARCH 2003–OCTOBER 2003
CHAPTER 23
Ayub and Tara had been planning the rally for months, even before Mansoor had joined the NGO. To see it on the horizon excited them. Then, in March, it happened.
Ayub and Tara came to the roads near the India International Centre worked up and expectant—having not slept the previous night, having stayed up reading selections from Gandhi’s Autobiography, Ambedkar’s essays, the speeches of MLK and Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. “It’s so touching, the sense of empowerment Islam gave to all these colonial people, to slaves. America’s attempt to crush Islam is an attempt to destroy the self-esteem of the rising, conquered people,” Ayub had said. Tara had nodded her head in agreement.
Then, in the late morning, right before the rally began, Ayub faxed the police about the protest from the market near the site of the event; this was a loophole activists exploited. You were supposed to inform the police about any rally you held, but there was no statute on exactly when you told them, as long as it was before and in writing.
Doing it in person was too dangerous since the police would ask you to lead them to the rally.
Yet, when Ayub joined the crowd on the road—hundreds of men and women chanting and holding up signs—he found the police already there, battalions pouring forth from Gypsies and coming up to the protesters, asking them questions and gently herding them onto the sidewalk. “You can’t do that,” Ayub said. “It’s a nonviolent protest.”
“You shut up, you terrorist,” a policeman—younger than Ayub, livid with youth—said.
Ayub was wearing his skullcap.
Ayub made to attack him but a couple of older policemen, blasé in their interaction with the disaffected, pushed him aside.
“Arrest me,” Ayub said, holding out his wrists.
“You’re not worth an arrest,” a policeman with gray hair said, stepping out to shout at a pimply activist who started running at the bark from the policeman.
Then something terrible happened on that spring day. The crowd dispersed.
________
The next day when Tara and Ayub opened the paper, there wasn’t even a mention of the protest.
________
Tara and Ayub debated what had happened with the members of the NGO—all of them, including Mansoor, had attended the disappointing protest—and fell privately into despair. Ayub began to believe that nonviolence didn’t work. He’d had this feeling for a long time but had said nothing to Tara about it. In the NGO room, where they often met to kiss before meetings—they had still never made love—he scolded her. “I knew it wouldn’t work.”
“I didn’t personally tell people not to come,” she said bitterly.
“But we should have known.”
“You prepared for it too!”
Ayub went on ranting for a while—frothing, gesticulating, blaming Tara for her naïveté, for her earnestness—till he finally stopped. “I’m sorry.” He lived like this—in these explosions of passion. He was a passionate person.
Nevertheless, his loss of faith in nonviolence cut deep. He believed nonviolence suffered the fundamental problem of having no traffic with the media. The media reveled in sex and violence—how could nonviolence, with its graying temples and wise posture, match up?
Ayub tried to come up with alternatives—nonviolent spectacles, theater, protests—but all these needed participants and an audience.
He was not prepared when, a week later, Tara broke things off with him.
CHAPTER 24
Tara had become tired of Ayub, of his brilliance, his neediness, his delusions of grandeur; she felt she deserved more. In December of the previous year, in anticipation of an eventual breakup, she had secretly applied to Brandeis for a master’s in social work. When she was admitted soon after the failure of the rally, she confronted Ayub and told him she wanted to break up.
Ayub, when he heard what she had to say, stood up from the bed in the NGO room, his eyes livid. “How dare you, you bitch!” he frothed, full of his normal uncontrolled anger.
“It’s my life!” Tara said.
“How dare you!” He thought she was doing this because the rally had failed.
They calmed down after a while and made up, sitting on the bed together, cajoling each other, feverishly discussing whether Ayub could find a way to go to the U.S. too.
But then, suddenly, Tara said, “I don’t like your smell.”
Ayub looked on in cool shock. Tara’s fairness, then, on the bed, was frightening to Ayub—like porcelain, speaking of centuries of superb breeding, of Aryan excitement.
“Brandeis, applying, going abroad—these are all excuses to get away from you,” Tara said. “I like you, admire you, but—something isn’t right. I don’t like the smell of your breath,” she repeated, as if shocked with the truth of this, formulating it for herself.
Ayub looked out of the window. From the room he could see an alley, and beyond, a backyard festooned with clotheslines. In the alley, a car had broken down between two flowing gutters. Beneath it, a runway of needles, discarded by the hospital, glistened in the sunshine, the garbage ponderously overflowing, everything protected by the rusty, aggressive fragrance of the air conditioner, in whose lungs the krill of pollution stuck.
Ayub’s heart got mixed up with the freezing waves of the air conditioner. A few days later, he left Delhi and returned to his hometown, Azamgarh.
________
When Mansoor heard of Ayub’s departure, he was shocked. “Where did you go?” he SMSed Ayub.
“Decided to start a job as an area salesman for Eveready,” Ayub SMSed back. “KEEP THE FIGHT ALIVE.”
Area salesman? For a battery company? What about Tara?
Tara was not helpful either. “Oh, that’s what he said? I think he’s gone to visit his father, who’s ill.” She threw her hair back and laughed her rich, upper-class tinkling laugh. “He’s so eccentric.”
CHAPTER 25
Ayub started working in his father’s “organick” nursery in Azamgarh, digging up turnips and potatoes under the hot UP sun.
He’d come very far, in a sense. Starting from a lower-middle-class Muslim family in UP he’d made his way to Delhi and established himself with his wit and charm and intelligence. Like Mansoor, he’d dealt with pain—the pain of separation, of being out of one’s depth, fearing one’s mortality—but had cured himself. (Unlike Mansoor, he hadn’t had the luxury of physiotherapy.) But he saw now that freedom from pain was a kind of sentence too—your mind, free to cast about in any direction, latched on to every outcome, every path, every regret. Whereas pain was focusing and drew you into yourself. It cut off options.
Sometimes, working on his father’s farm, Ayub tightened his neck, wishing the pain would return. It didn’t. He’d made himself too sturdy through religion and exercise. But his mind began to flower outward, became crowded with mirages. Tara stood knee-deep in a field of wheat, a few meters beyond him, hunched over and ready and sly, her eyes blinking and the soft, sensual braid tossed over her shoulder. A rumble in the distance made him glance up and he thought he saw an airplane flaming overhead, but it was just a trigger of sunlight. At night, in bed, he dreamed of school bullies and friends who had let him down out of jealousy when he’d had a little success in college as a festival organizer. A mild person, he’d always gone out of his way to put others at ease, to not threaten them with his intelligence. Now he regretted it.
He kept endlessly revising the day of the rally, his conversation with Tara, the swiftness with which everything had fallen apart.
Why
hadn’t he said more when she’d broken up with him? But there was a part of him that was addicted to defeat. Even as he’d received the stabbing message from Tara, that part of him had swelled with brilliance and promise and negative fulfillment.
Ayub dug holes and toiled under the sun.
“We can show you a girl,” his mother said.
His mind was coming unmoored. The field, with its hideous infinity of dirt packed into a few acres, didn’t help.
He could have boarded a train and gone back, but he had no money and no real way of making any; his work with the Muslim community had taught him how difficult it was for educated Muslims to get jobs or even housing and this paranoia infected every future he could imagine for himself in Delhi. And the more he thought about money, the more he regretted how things had turned out with Tara—not only had they got along, but she had paid him a salary. “To hear you talk,” she’d once laughed. He was irritated by this comment, but once he began to speak, his self-consciousness fell away and he looked at her with unembarrassed frankness. “So what if I love to talk! I’m good at it.”
But there was also anger in him about how well she knew him, and he would be turned on and would wish to make love to her.
Of course, this never happened. Tara always stopped him—for religious reasons—and he couldn’t refuse. Nevertheless, it frustrated him. He had a tremendous sexual drive and he sometimes thought he should have been allowed, by God, to break the rules—for the sake of revolution, for India. Instead he proposed marriage.
“You know I’m engaged, right?” she told him.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 18
