The Association of Small Bombs

by Karan Mahajan

  “Why do you want to do this?” he asked him directly.

  “To take revenge,” Ayub said.

  “On who?” asked Shockie.

  “On Modi,” said Ayub.

  “For who?” said Shockie.

  “For Muslims.”

  “Why do you hate him so much?” Shockie asked. “He’s just a man.”

  “He’s not a man; he’s a symbol.”

  “There’s something else,” Shockie said. “A man like you doesn’t turn to revolution just like that. What do you want? Are you angry? You want to show the world you’re a hero?”

  Ayub considered this. The reasons were murky in his head, all the more so because he had lived them out with such intensity. Death. I want to die. Some weeks ago, he had taken a drug in the field. The drug was mixed with milk and peddled by the local witch doctor. What had followed was a series of terrifying hallucinations. First the fields, bulging under the sodium lamp of the sun, had changed colors, parted, leapt about, danced with flames of murmuring wheat. He could touch and see everything for kilometers around. Then, as he’d walked, he’d had a strong sense that all the people around him—the men in their small square stalls, selling bidis and phone chargers; the auto drivers; the farmers whipping their skeletal bulls; the man selling pomegranates by the circuit house; the boy riding his bicycle to and from the shabby hotel; the frightened women in burqas clustered outside their homes, awaiting their husbands from the Gulf—were monkeys. Yes, monkeys, animals. That’s what people were when you took away the basic veneer of civilization. And he’d had a vision then of Tara, a vision of love. What was Tara but a lost monkey from a powerful family of monkeys, who’d fallen down from her tree and randomly played with a poor monkey far from its own family? No, there was nothing to do but feel sad about Tara—what fault was it of hers? She had been pulled back into the thicket of her family and that was how it should be. As for him, he was a small, wounded, seeking animal, one who had strayed from the path a long time ago; he saw now that his time in Delhi, with Tara, had been a conference of the weak. They thought they were changing the world, but everyone except for him could see they were weak, damaged animals, clasping each other.

  Why am I so wounded? he thought. But that is the fate of certain people. They lose themselves and never find themselves again.

  He saw too, in this vision on drugs, that the world was dictated by power (he did not think, as he would later, that the reason he’d had such nihilistic visions was that he was depressed). What was Modi but a violent, screaming animal demanding the death and destruction of other clans? There were two ways to handle such a fat chest-beating monkey: to hide away forever in the forest or to attack him and his clan. In an instant, hallucinating, the field leaping about, he grasped the swift logic of violence. The world existed in a state of battle between clans and races. Each clan rose at the expense of the other. Whenever one came up, it was important to cut it down to size with violence. . . . He thought of 9/11, a crime that had, for all its religious implications, always seemed opaque to him, and it was clear that, in world historical terms, if you thought of the world as a jungle, what had happened was simple, obvious: sensing the rising power of one group, Atta and company had attacked the temple of that group.

  As for death? It did not matter. We are only animals, and if we give a complex name to our grief, it is because we like to pretend otherwise.

  A clan is more important than the animal. In fact, it is in grief that we become most like animals, hiding, curling up, refusing to accept the truth of someone’s goneness, acting as if the person gone is a part of ourselves.

  It was during this hallucination that Ayub decided to give himself to revolution and violence. “I tried nonviolence,” he told Shockie now. “I was a big believer in Gandhi. You could say I was a self-hating Muslim. I wanted equality between Hindus and Muslims, brotherhood. I thought the majority could be persuaded with such action. At one point, when the farmer suicides were happening in Andhra and Maharashtra, I even staged a protest where Muslims threatened to take the poison and kill themselves. It was nonviolence taken to its full extreme. But the press gave it no attention. Now I see it’s a world where everything operates by force. If you sit and let people go on, then they will. I had always thought you had to educate others about your pain, show them how to solve it. Now I realize you have to make them feel it.”

  “That’s a very good speech,” Shockie said. “You should be a politician.”

  Ayub grew exasperated. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea after all. The door he’d been about to walk through closed a little. He had an inkling of how life would look if he retreated—how he could rebuild it. The sounds of hammers and construction were at his back. All of India was under renovation. Why was he so eager to destroy it? “It looks like you won’t be convinced,” Ayub said, curling his lips. “So forget it.”

  “You see my problem,” Shockie said. “It’s a problem of trust. But there is a way. If you can get me to meet Malik Aziz, who is a friend of mine, I’ll be convinced.”

  “You know Malik?” Ayub said. “It’s not that easy.”

  “I just want to see him,” Shockie said.

  “For that you can go to the trial,” Ayub said. “If you’re confident and well dressed you can enter anywhere.”

  “How is he?” Shockie asked.

  Confused by the direction of the conversation, Ayub said, “You know he hasn’t spoken in six years, right? Some of the ideas of nonviolence I got from him. He’s one of the major exemplars of such protest in the country. Even the foreign media has covered him.”

  Poor Malik! Shockie thought. Who loved to talk! “I know,” Shockie lied.

  But now an intimacy developed between them. Shockie suddenly decided to trust Ayub.

  At a certain point all such work is risk. The question is when you are willing to take it. In any case, the danger existed regardless of where you hunted for it; often it came from the most unexpected source.

  ________

  The group operated out of a series of safe houses in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh. For Ayub, everything connected to the group was new. His fellow revolutionaries, shady figures he might or might not have heard about in the news, were serene individuals. Wrapped in woodsmoke, they conversed quietly, surrounded by sacks of cement or grain inside small huts. Several of the men in the group were educated, young professional types who’d given up their careers in big towns. Tauqeer was a former software engineer; Rafiq had an MA in psychology and had worked for Coca-Cola in marketing; Mohammed was a renowned hacker. These men greeted Ayub with interest, suspicion, condescension. He’d forgotten what it meant to be the junior member of a group after having a free run with Peace For All.

  Ayub had always railed against Muslims who turned to violence (though he had been sure, after working with inmates for years, that many of the bombs were planted by Hindus to frame Muslims), but now he found himself on the cutting edge of news events, on the verge of becoming a news maker. He marveled at how this group of men, gathered in a warm, dark room, could alter the political future of a country. “If we disrupt the economy,” one was saying as he chewed a bit of bread, his legs dangling from a ledge in the hut, “then Modi automatically goes.” Ayub had been introduced as a new member with no criminal record, who could infiltrate Modi’s inner circle—he had boasted of his connection with Tara, whose parents were rich, well-connected BJP supporters.

  The men, because they were educated, talked in economic terms. Plant enough bombs, Tauqeer said (he had a memorable face with gaunt cheekbones, a prayer callus on his forehead, and black whorls where the cheekbones jutted out of his face), and you create uncertainty in the economy and investment dries up. “This so-called economic boom is fragile,” he said. “It’s caused simply by a cost advantage on the Indian side. The investors are like hawks. They’ll move to another country or state the minute they feel it’s dan
gerous. And Modi too will be voted out of power.” He was arguing, in effect, that there was no need to kill Modi directly. Just taking aim at the economy of Gujarat, the apple on Modi’s head (or was it vice versa?), was enough.

  “And think about what happens if he’s killed,” Rafiq said.

  Ayub had an image of riots, bloodshed, babies speared from the stomachs of pregnant mothers—real images; he’d seen them a thousand times when he’d screened the documentary about the Gujarat riots for schools.

  “We shouldn’t be afraid of such consequences,” Tauqeer, obviously the leader, burst in. “We should welcome them. Unlike our friend Rafiq here,” he said, turning to Ayub, “I don’t share such a rosy view of our fellow Muslims. They’re corrupt, cowardly, hypocritical, and busy fighting among themselves. There’s no difference between them and Hindus, if you ask me. The Muslims in this country are Indians first and Muslims second.” (It occurred to Ayub that just months earlier, he would have considered this a good thing.) “Having a few more riots will awaken them to the reality in this country.” Ayub saw now that he was being addressed directly—that he was considered one of those Muslims who had woken up after the riots. But was he the only one? All these people are young. I suspect they too only took this extreme step after the riots, he thought.

  How much blood will we have to shed to create a million versions of me?

  Tauqeer produced an inhaler and sucked on it. So that wasn’t just a rumor, that he was asthmatic. Taking a puff, he said, “You want?”

  The five men in the room laughed.

  “In the old days they had hookahs,” Tauqeer said, laughing.

  ________

  The men traveled to a forest outside the city of Hubli, in Karnataka—a dry, arid region famous for its sweets and reddish rotis. At this time Shockie’s position in the group became clearer to Ayub. He was a handler, an uncle who watched his reckless wards with his hands behind his back and eyes slightly absent till danger presented itself. Always dressed in a sleeveless sweater, whatever the weather, he wore dusty black pants with astonishingly sharp pleats. Later, Ayub would learn that Shockie, the son of a presswali, took a dandy’s pride, despite his thinning curly hair, in wearing ironed clothes. Shockie kept a distance as they practiced and conducted training drills in the forest. The practice, Ayub had imagined, would be easy, a way of killing time before the actual killing. But it was exhausting. He was made to run through the bramble and brush till he collapsed. He lay in a puddle of his own vomit. Screaming, he hung for an hour from a branch on a tree, a branch that refused to spare him by breaking off, despite his prayers. He was left in a forest with a compass and no Odomos or light and made to find his way back to the camp in the forest. How could such training be possibly useful in the jungles of urban India?

  Later, when they were exhausted out of their skulls, sitting dead-eyed around a fire at night, the fire like a performer throwing its hands this way and that, someone would pass a packet of biscuits and the others would accept and a warm, happy communal feeling would engulf them. Shockie remained standing off to the side.

  “What is his position?” Ayub asked one particular night after he’d proved himself during training, shooting straight while running. All that practice with his country pistol had paid off.

  “That’s Shaukat Guru. You’ve heard of him,” Rafiq said.

  Ayub was blank.

  “Yaar, he’s one of the most dangerous men in India. He’s set off bombs in every Indian city.”

  “And now he is—?” asked Ayub.

  “He’s like a coach.”

  Yes—that’s exactly what he looked like—a sports coach. He even had that bulky avuncular look under the sweater.

  “He’s stopped doing it himself?” said Ayub.

  “He’s sick,” Rafiq said. “Has a bad heart. Afraid of going phut with the bombs. Said he didn’t take care of himself when he was younger and that’s why he’s turned out this way. You know, back in the day, even for militants, they didn’t believe in training physically. You were given your guns, your equipment, and you had to figure it out yourself. Given all that, he did very well. One of his bombs in Delhi killed hundreds, they say. Do you know Lajpat Nagar market?”

  Ayub froze. He nodded without betraying anything.

  Shockie stood in the distance, swaddled and sentry-like in the fulminating firelight. Was it possible that Malik Aziz, Shockie’s friend in prison, was guilty? Ayub wondered. He had thought a lot about the silent inmate over the years and had come to the conclusion that, despite his brave silence, he must be suffering from a mental illness, that he had been arrested precisely because he was somewhat retarded. Talking to his relatives in Anantnag had confirmed this—though, being village people they were eager to agree with whatever Ayub said, and anyway they changed their minds on any subject a million times. Village people had no central conception of truth or time or even of other people’s memories; they always just played dumb when he told them they’d changed their stories. What if Malik was a terrorist after all? Ayub was seized by rage. If he were a terrorist it would have been helpful if the behnchod had admitted it and let other innocents go. Ayub had even tried to reason with him on trips to the prison. “Just say something. If you have done it, you can save the lives of others.” But nothing. Ayub really did think prison was the worst way to spend one’s life. This made the sacrifice he was making all the more grand, of course. If he were arrested, he would be able to help people inside, apply his leadership skills. Unless he were kept in isolation.

  Despite the fact that he had almost given himself up for arrest at the rally, he had a total fear of solitary confinement, believed it would absolutely break him. He was a person who thrived on company, who desired camaraderie, even in its lowest, most base form; he felt that just seeing other people, no matter the circumstances, even if the people were enemies, filled you with health, gave you a reason to live (we are monkeys). Without other faces it would be over; he’d be thrown down the well of madness.

  In the forest now, he prayed. They were all delivering their evening prayers—Tauqeer carried a stopwatch so they could pray at the exact time every day for the exact duration. Please, God, spare me if I end up there, Ayub muttered, pressing his forehead against the root of a tree. Give me an infection. Gangrene. Put ice and bacteria in my chest. Let me go off, like a switch. I know what I am doing is wrong, but know that this mistake was made in the spirit of goodness, sacrificing short-term happiness for long-term change, out of a desire to establish your empire on earth. (He had never stated it like this before; it sounded too grandiose, but not when said directly to God.) Most men think in years and days. Allow a few of us to think in eons. Spare us.

  ________

  Soon after, Ayub’s talent for speaking was discovered. He lectured the other revolutionaries on world history, American politics, Marxism, concurrent events in Bosnia and Chechnya. But he could never grip them in quite the way he had gripped the members of Peace For All. These were men of action, impressed by action.

  ________

  “What was Malik like before the blast?” Ayub asked Shockie one day, during a break in the afternoon in the forest. “You know, he never spoke once he went in. He was the only prisoner I dealt with who refused to speak. A man even made a documentary about him. When this filmmaker threatened to kill him, he shouted no. So it wasn’t that he couldn’t speak or hear.”

  “Don’t tell me this,” Shockie said.

  Ayub saw there were tears streaming down his face even as he kept his hands behind his back.

  Was Malik his brother? An innocent sacrificed at the altar of terror?

  Then Shockie told him the story. How they’d been best friends. How he’d been tortured at a young age by Indian soldiers. How Malik was part of the group but had renounced violence just before he was taken in. “That’s the sad part,” he said. “He had given up that way of life when he was arrested.�
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  “Why didn’t he speak?”

  “I don’t know. He must have been trying to protect us. He used to love to talk.”

  Watching Shockie cry, Ayub thought, Something is not right about this man. You can’t be a terrorist and be so emotional and unguarded.

  “It’s normal,” Rafiq told him later. “He’s always been an emotional person. Used to cry freely about his mother, his brother, Kashmir—he lost everything, you know. But don’t underestimate how dangerous he is. When he’s making bombs he’s another person. He’s possessed. His personality when he’s making bombs has nothing to do with how he is normally. His speed changes too. He moves fast. It’s almost as if by crying and being slow, he’s saving up all his energies for the bomb.”

  “I thought maybe he had recently lost someone.”

  “Unlikely,” Rafiq said. “He has no one.”

  ________

  “Who do you know in Delhi?” Tauqeer asked Ayub one night.

  Tauqeer was sitting on his knees with the stopwatch open on his palm, watching the seconds go by till it was time to pray.

  Ayub, on his knees next to him, gave him an informal list of people. “And there’s Mansoor Ahmed,” he said finally. “He was injured in the 1996 blast—the one that Shockie bhai carried out.” Then quickly, “I know him because of that, actually. He’s from a rich, well-known family; he came back from abroad and became very idealistic and wanted to help release the accused in that case. He’s a good friend. I didn’t want to tell Shockie bhai because I didn’t know how he would feel.” Now he realized there was something suspicious about protesting. “Generally, I never get to meet victims, especially Muslim ones.”

  Tauqeer didn’t appear to notice the shifting registers of Ayub’s tone. “Can he be trusted?” he asked, the digital numbers on the stopwatch dissolving.

  “Hundred percent.”

  “Good. Might be good to stay with a victim.” Tauqeer looked at Ayub with the full skeletal form of his gaunt face, all the straight lines and dark indentations revealing themselves the way the sides of an octagonal satellite might shimmer melancholically in moonlight. “Because you’ll be going in five days.” There was something about the way he said it, with his whole testing gaze fixed on Ayub’s face, that made Ayub feel Tauqeer had reached the decision right then, that it was revenge for the crime of being handsome and eloquent.