Then they put their heads down and prayed.
CHAPTER 27
Ayub had been trained in warfare; in shooting while lying on his stomach, while running, while out of breath, while the target moved; he had learned how to wire bombs, to carry fertilizer in a sack, to explain himself if he were caught (seven years later, the organization was using Shockie’s old technique of pretending its members were farmers, for the simple reason that most of the Indian bureaucracy is sentimental about farmers); but it had all happened fast and it was a jumble in his head. He did not feel that any of these things had entered into his muscle memory. Afraid to protest—he knew he was still on trial—he called up Mansoor from a freshly purchased mobile when he got back to Azamgarh.
“Who is this?” Mansoor said, his thick, croaky voice coming on.
When Ayub revealed himself, he said, “Ayub bhai! Where have you vanished?” The strange thing about Mansoor was that, though he often looked moody and stormy—possibly on account of his flaming eyebrows—when you got to know him, he could be quite goofy and funny.
Ayub told him he was coming to Delhi—could he stay with him?
Mansoor was a little stunned by the request—didn’t Ayub have other friends? Besides, in the past few months, things had changed for him at home. His relationship with his parents had turned toxic. As he’d grown angrier with himself about sex, he’d also become more self-righteous, judging his parents for their greed, telling them they should abandon the case with the Sahnis. “We’re religious in action,” his father had said.
“That’s nothing without actually taking time out for God,” Mansoor rebuked him.
Mansoor himself prayed five times a day, sometimes adding on the optional prayer, and increasing the rakat in each prayer.
If he prayed just enough, he thought, he could blot himself out.
“Why not do programming instead of praying so much?” his father asked. “Prayer is for old fogies like me. Young chaps like you should be out and about, working hard.”
“We shouldn’t be so ashamed to be Muslims,” Mansoor replied.
“Arre, where’s the question of shame? We have our last name. We are Muslims. If we were ashamed wouldn’t we have long ago left India? I’m only saying—do you need to pray five times a day to be a Muslim?”
“When Mohammed flew to Jerusalem on the Night Journey, God initially prescribed fifty prayers a day for all Muslims. It was Moses who told him to bargain it down to five. So five isn’t that much. So it’s a bargain, which you would appreciate as a businessman.”
“But do you need to wear the gol topi?” his mother asked, pointing to his skullcap. “You’ll get unwanted attention. Nowhere does it say you have to wear one.” Mansoor had overheard his parents talking about how it was a trend that had started only in the past ten years, as the mosques were flooded with Gulf money. They also talked about how people now said “Allah Hafiz” instead of “Khuda Hafiz” and how the money exchangers all carried signage in Arabic.
“Actually I should have a beard too—I’m only wearing the gol topi because I don’t want to grow a beard.” (He was afraid he couldn’t.)
“These days to call attention to yourself for being a Muslim—” his mother began.
“But it’s exactly because of this kind of shame that I’m wearing it! We have to get over all this shame and fear!”
________
So—to introduce his most strident Muslim activist friend to the mix would only increase the turbulence. Besides, what would Ayub make of his house, how rich he was? It’s good, thought Mansoor. I’ll tell him about our property loss now. He’ll like hearing about it. “Definitely come,” he told Ayub. “Stay as long as you want.”
________
When Mansoor told his parents that a friend would be staying, they did not react either way. “Of course,” his mother said, sadly, coldly.
________
Ayub had by now learned about his mission: he was to go to Delhi, stay with Mansoor, check e-mail regularly, and await orders. “It will be a blast!” Tauqeer said in English, joking.
“Is there a chance this will get my friend into trouble?” Ayub wanted to ask, but he was fearful and resisted. His palms turned on like taps. Sweat ran down his forehead. He developed an itch on his scalp under his soft, sandy hair. He blinked hard, often, girlishly. His breath hung in an awful cloud in front of him.
Delhi was sedate at this time, mid-October. There had been a fire in a hospital and a train collision, but nothing major—the kind of clear news weather you needed for a blast.
“I don’t want to kill innocents,” Ayub said. “I’m happy to kill people in the BJP, RSS, even the police.”
“We talked about this,” Tauqeer said. “Casualties can’t be avoided. If anything, it’s preferable. If you are worried about innocents, think about it this way—the fewer that die, the lonelier the victims are. It’s better for the event to be big, to affect many. People say 9/11 was the worst terror attack of all time—was it? I think the small bombs that we hear about all the time, that go off in unknown markets, killing five or six, are worse. They concentrate the pain on the lives of a few. Better to kill generously rather than stingily.”
The way he said it, without irony, was frightening. But there was also something idealistic about his flat exhortation—puffing his inhaler, he presented the image of a man who had thought things through and resigned himself to all of them. He had the unaffected, unshowy confidence of a young man who has dedicated himself to a difficult way of life. As a master terrorist, he no longer saw the strangeness of what he did or how he talked about killing.
Ayub became despairing. After spending a few days in Azamgarh, pretending to normalcy, visiting his parents for the last time after all, he headed to Delhi—the second time in six months he was making a journey to kill. He passed the tired stations with their tired paint and oozing pumps and acres of newsprint sold in stands, passed the charging boards, where men of all sizes and shapes plugged in their mobiles and sank onto their haunches, passed it all and felt: It’s up to God now. If God chooses to be absent from this hellish place, I understand. That’s the tragedy of Tauqeer, Rafiq, even me—we’re all fighting for a place long vacated by God, fighting to save hell.
What if I’ve died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you’re locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it? He touched the dirty windows of the train compartment, pawing the yellow, urine-colored tinting to see if this was real. Yes, all tangible.
And what did that mean? Inside him, in a broth of blood and water, organs bumped softly, organically into one another, like fish in an aquarium. The train swayed. Who was to say there was anything more to you than this? A computer, a system of organs bumping blindly within a sloshing pool, the attached head only doing the slavish bidding of the body, like a periscope emerging from the depths and mistaking itself for a living thing. Ayub closed his eyes and tried to hear his own heartbeat. But it was lost too deep in there and the train mercilessly drowned whatever was left.
Refusing Mansoor’s offer to pick him up from Old Delhi Railway Station, he took an auto to South Ex. In the past he’d taken buses, but he had decided to treat himself. Dozing between the open sides of the auto, he took in the industrial drama of the city. Factories, gathered and arranged into smokestacks, sent frantic plumes into the air. The power plants by the dried riverbeds were frightening to think about—the monsoon water tugging at the roots of the wires. Ayub remembered how, in Azamgarh, his friends put the two ends of a broken transmission line into a pond to shock the fish to the surface. The slick, oily shaking creatures that emerged were like the long, cut-off, vanished fingers of people. . . . Back in Delhi, trains charged by in their armor of municipal soot, bestowing their warmth and whistles on the city. A shuttered flour mill made of dull unaging brick, gorgeously stenciled in some ancient serif,
went by, curved and flattened by the arc of a flyover.
Azamgarh had had a flour mill once, the main source of employment, but it had closed down the year Ayub was born.
A guard at the gate of the fancy house in South Ex let him in. The house wasn’t big; it was palatial. He didn’t feel so bad anymore, putting these people through trouble.
________
After Ayub had formally met Mr. and Mrs. Ahmed, crossing his arms and bowing to them in a manner that made Mansoor embarrassed, the two friends ate lunch.
Ayub, trying his best to act normal, asked through the steaming dishes, the heat rising up and sitting in a haze over the table, his eyes watering from the spices, about Peace For All: How was it doing?
“Fine,” Mansoor said, chewing down the rajma. “There was more focus and zest when you and Tara were running it.” Actually, ever since Tara and Ayub had left, the group had devolved into the languorous gossip session it had always been destined to be, with toothy, smiling members with adolescent mustaches from Jamia and JNU meeting in Baristas and Café Coffee Days scattered all over the city, backslapping and regaling one another with stories and theories about the “real India.” But anyway, Mansoor had other things on his mind. Since Ayub had vanished Mansoor had been in touch with Tara over e-mail under the guise of asking for advice about programs in the U.S. “If my visa comes through, that is,” he’d written. “One of my friends who gained admission to Wharton was denied a visa because his birthday is the same as a terrorist’s. And he’s a Hindu!” She had responded to this as he’d hoped: bitterly, in lowercase. He was quite in love with her.
Mansoor asked Ayub if he had heard from Tara, holding his breath.
“No. But what happened between us was amicable. Did I tell you I’m engaged?”
“Wow, yaar,” Mansoor said. “And who’s the girl? Who knew you were such a chhupa rustam?” He was somewhat disoriented at these rapid changes in his friend’s life.
“Her name is Zahara,” Ayub said. “She’s from my native place. Her parents know my parents. They’re also syeds.” He took a heaping of rice from the casserole. “I used to be opposed to such matches, but when the background is the same that makes all the difference.”
“Where did she do her studies?” Mansoor asked, bringing his palms together in a nervous crisscross of fingers on the table.
“She has an MA in social service from BHU,” Ayub said, taking quick bites between words. “And she did a BSc in biology through correspondence. But the parents are very liberal people. I like them.”
“Hmm. Sounds like moving back was quite good for you, then,” Mansoor said, his heart freeing up: he could contact Tara without shame now! But he also felt bad for his friend. “One day I’d like to visit—I’ve hardly seen the rest of India. Maybe for your wedding.”
“Of course,” Ayub smiled tiredly, which Mansoor interpreted as a sign.
“I’ll show you the den where you’ll be sleeping.” Mansoor said.
________
The “den,” air-conditioning, marble floors, servants—these were all pleasures Ayub had forgotten after those months of hardship in the hot infertile fields of Azamgarh and the forests of Hubli. He marveled at the room as he set down his bags and Mansoor switched on the light and fan and left him to unpack. So this might be the last room I sleep in, that I’ll see, he thought. What a pity. What a pity to have to do the heavy work of revolution while such rooms exist—to be out changing the country while people luxuriate, unaware, in these marble oases. He had a weird sensation that he was in a tomb.
He had told Mansoor that he’d come—astonishingly—to shop for the wedding and to find a job, and he began to go out during the day for “interviews” and “discussions.” He had not been happy working for Eveready, he told Mansoor; he felt the job of area salesman was beneath him—what he wanted was a job that made money and also did good for the world.
“I understand,” Mansoor said. “That’s hard to find.”
They were sitting on the hot veranda of the house.
“You know my friends who run the Islamic VC fund?” Ayub said. “I may talk to them.”
“You have experience in that area?” Mansoor asked.
“Don’t mind my saying this—but that’s the problem. People value experience over brains and ideas.”
“I didn’t mean it that way,” Mansoor said.
“I know you didn’t,” Ayub said. “I’m just revealing an attitude. How about you? When are you returning to college?”
“Actually, I wanted to tell you,” Mansoor said, and he finally admitted the whole saga with the family’s property deal, the tricks played by the other side in court, how they were using psychological warfare to weaken his parents. But then he stopped. “The point is that it has increased my parents’ stress a lot. Maybe they were glad for this reason that you, a guest, were coming: we can at least feel and behave a little normal. So,” he said, in conclusion. “As you can see, this is a bad time for the family—therefore it isn’t right for me to go to the U.S.” This long story! And still he hadn’t been able to admit that the financial stress was the reason he couldn’t go. The roots of shame run deep.
Ayub considered Mansoor and his story with a distracted air. Basic interactions had become hard for him. Language, that fundamental unit of life, which had once escaped his mouth like helpless bubbles from creatures of the sea, which had filled his mouth when he couldn’t afford food, which had always seemed as natural to him as another limb, like the instinctive act of putting one foot in front of the other—language had deserted him. All his fluency was gone. And without this fluency to oil his interactions with people, everyone seemed distant, alien, blocky, impossibly trapped in the amber of their own emotions. Finally, he said, with a hard blink and a gulp, “That’s very tough, boss.”
“Yaah,” Mansoor said. “But God will show a way out.” Suddenly embarrassed, he asked, “How was returning home for you in other respects?”
Ayub was disarmed by the question. “It was good. My father is trying to sell organic vegetables. He’s ahead of his time, but it was good to spend time with him. It humbles you, to be with your parents, to realize you’re not as original as you think. I had always thought I was being a big renegade by being an activist, but it’s probably a bigger rebellion to sell organic goods in Azamgarh. Now he wants to provide updates to farmers through his mobile.” He smiled. “The only problem is that both him and my mother are becoming blind. They both had diabetes but they got into this naturopathy business and didn’t do any of the things the doctors told them. As I say this I realize their attitude isn’t so different from mine. I too probably would have done something like that, with my suspicion of science. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m my parents’ child.”
“What about your brothers?” Mansoor asked.
“They’re both in Dubai. They send money to my parents but they hardly come. I don’t blame them. When you grow up in Azamgarh, all you want to do is escape it. People are confused why I came back.”
Why did you? Mansoor wanted to ask, but said nothing.
Ayub put a hand on his forehead. “I feel feverish.” But what he meant to say was, How did it happen? How did my gift for speech suddenly return?
________
Mansoor tried to bring Ayub along to the Peace For All meetings, but Ayub refused. Mansoor thought, “He’ll come around; it’s God’s will.” In the meantime, the two men prayed together, with Mansoor happily leading the way.
________
It was turning out to be a hideous October, an October of dengue and death, and the waiting grew longer and Ayub’s days as a guest stretched on. He was only allowed to contact Tauqeer through a cybercafe using a new Hotmail account every time, but he was given no answer beyond: wait.
“How long is your friend staying?” Sharif asked Mansoor one day.
Mansoor snapped, “How doe
s it matter?”
________
Ayub visited many parts of Delhi, did all the sightseeing he’d never bothered with before, and wondered if this waiting too was a kind of test—to see if he would give up and go to the police. Certainly he’d had a lot of time to consider what he was doing—and he’d come to the very reasonable conclusion it was indefensible, and that Delhi would respond to a bomb the way it responded to everything: with indifference. He saw the point now of a large attack like 9/11. It guaranteed you were taken seriously. It made sure death wasn’t wasted, as Tauqeer had implied. But what would a big attack, a 9/11, look like in this city? As he contemplated these ideas in Mansoor’s house in South Ex, he felt he was losing his mind, splitting in two, the difference between his polite exterior self and the violence inside growing too great. He felt an actual line passing through the center of his face, splitting it into left and right.
“My job search has still not yielded anything,” he said for the millionth time after coming home from a day of sightseeing.
“Maybe I can help you,” Sharif said one day over dinner, in a rare moment of relaxation. He had just put his fingers in his mouth to cleanse them of the last bits of food and was leaning back heavily in his chair. “What kind of job would you like?”
As Ayub answered, Sharif said, “Arre, Mansoor should have told me earlier—you should work for me.” Sharif ran a consulting business out of an office in Zakir Nagar; he was a plastics engineer and helped companies set up manufacturing and packaging plants in the country.
Ayub had wondered, more than once, why he’d been embedded so conspicuously in an alien family, where his inertia and lack of direction would be instantly noticed, where he was, in a sense, already under trial, being studied by Mansoor’s parents, not just as an individual but as a specimen of their son’s interests—it is through the osmotic medium of their children’s friends, after all, that parents accidentally learn the most about their own children. And now he’d been noticed to the point of awkwardness. Being offered a job was a kind of ultimatum. “No, no, uncle—you should get someone more qualified,” he sputtered.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 21
