As Ayub sat on the hotel bed, his hands became damp. He felt he was intimately connected, in that moment, to Atta—felt that he might even be him, the dead man’s spirit somehow invading his. And what is the difference between him and me? he thought. Atta too had a gaunt, Tauqeer-like, Skeletor look about him. A young student abroad, alienated from German society, he had strong convictions and beliefs about his home, Cairo, but no way to implement them. So, growing from within, leaping angrily across the Atlantic, he smashed the high locks on the gates of the West—but for what, exactly? Ayub had thought about this often since joining the group. Earlier he’d felt the attack was just revenge against American imperialism, but now he’d come to see that the reasons for such aggression would have to be idiosyncratic, personal. Did Atta wish to make a name for himself in history? Did he think this was the only way to enter al-Qaeda’s name into American consciousness? Or did he feel—as Tauqeer suggested about India—that America, in beginning two retaliatory wars, would end up ruining its economy and self-immolating? Was it really economic? As Ayub thought these things through in the hotel, with its softly thudding rats and the throttled, overused soap visible in the bathroom on its steel holder, he was convinced this could not be the case. There was too much blood involved—blood tossed against the mile-high windows of the WTC like a libation—for the reasons to not be emotional and hotheaded, even if it took the hijackers a year of training to accomplish their goals. Killing others and then yourself is the most visceral experience possible. Atta must have felt himself full of sexual hate for the people piled high in the towers, bodies in a vertical morgue. He saw the opening between the two towers as a vagina into which to shove the hard-nosed dick of the plane. Sitting at the controls, his curly hair tight on his skull, eyes rubbery, underslept, blackly circled, he must have seen someone appear at the window and look at him—a woman, maybe, a blond American woman. At that moment he got an erection. At that moment he slammed into her alarmed face.
________
On the day of the blast, Ayub went to the local mosque and prayed, worrying the entire time that he was being noticed. He wanted to phone his parents, but he’d been expressly forbidden from making contact. He was to play it safe, treat it like any other day, and for this reason, after he’d prayed and the sun was up and the day had begun in its thousand polluted particularities, he called Mansoor and told him that he had thought about it some more and he would like to talk to his father about the job after all.
“OK, boss,” Mansoor said, his heart leaping at how far his friend had sunk. If Ayub worked for his father, then he was truly not competition anymore; he had been removed from the nervy world of activism. “Just remember, he’s a little brusque sometimes. He shouts at people who work for him but he’s well meaning. And because of the court case, I’m not sure how much he’ll be able to pay you.” Actually the case was beginning to go well. After a year of threatening and frothing and refusing to show up for hearings, the Sahnis had phoned Sharif the other day and asked if he would consider settling out of court. At first, Sharif, injured and doubly cautious, refused to engage with them. “How do we know it’s not a trick?” he asked Afsheen. “Last time we trusted them you know what happened. And this must mean we’re winning—that they’re coming to us with their tails between their legs. No. I don’t want to talk to them. Let them spend their money on the case.”
“You’re spending your money too,” Afsheen said. “We should at least talk to them.”
“What, so you can accuse me of being pushy? I don’t want to. I want to follow the law of the land this time.”
But he was only being petulant, both Afsheen and Mansoor knew. He would come around eventually. He was famous for always saying no and then coming around. So the family was in a good mood when Ayub called.
“Tell him to come today itself,” Sharif said when Mansoor informed him about Ayub’s request. Even he, Sharif, could barely suppress his good mood.
How guilty he’d felt in the past few months! Guilty about having made such a big mistake with the family savings and guilty about not letting Mansoor return to the U.S. Actually, the reasons for making Mansoor stay were not only financial. Had they wished to continue his education abroad, they would have found a way—Sharif had enough goodwill with his fellow Muslim businessmen to take loans—no, he’d kept Mansoor back for the sake of his wife. Though she had always been eager for her son to study in the U.S., she’d become distraught after his departure, and this despairing state had been exacerbated by the news that Muslims were being targeted and mistreated in the U.S. “But he’s on the West Coast,” he said. “And on a campus what can happen?” To which his wife had responded by finding a clipping in a newspaper of a Muslim student beaten up in Berkeley. “It’s one incident,” he said, though he knew he was losing the debate.
Over time, though, he had begun to regret sending Mansoor to the U.S. He had one son. He’d almost died at the age of twelve—suffered a trauma few people experience in their lifetimes. Why set out to lose him again? So, when Mansoor came back quite suddenly one winter, he thought of ways to broach the subject with him, considered (to use the language of consulting) presenting him with a package of incentives to stay. The unfolding of the property drama was propitious in at least one way, then: he could act as if he were leaning on his son, as if he needed his help in this difficult emotional and financial time—oh, it was underhanded, opportunistic; he knew that nothing came of such behavior, but what could he do? He didn’t feel guilty except late at night when he feared he might be punished in some exceptional way for keeping his son home: Mansoor might die in a car crash, or some other tragedy more obviously native to India rather than the U.S. Twenty-five years of marriage and Afsheen and her hypochondria have rubbed off on me! And he banished the thought from his head and tried, in the way he knew best, to be close to his son, squeezing his shoulders, mussing his hair, hearing him talk. Unlike his wife, he had no desire to interfere in Mansoor’s development; he felt only that he should be present for the stages his son was passing through.
He considered Mansoor’s friendship with Ayub, a young intelligent boy from the provinces, another stage. “Send him over today itself,” he told his son. “I’m in the office all day. My meetings with the PearlPET people got canceled.”
________
When Ayub heard the news from Mansoor, he was overjoyed, and yawned with a weird, thrilling happiness. Which terrorist interviews for a job on the day he sets off a bomb? He left the hotel in a DTC bus, drowsing in the mottled sunlit look of the city. It was early afternoon and it appeared that afternoon might never end. Everyone dropped beneath trees or awnings, the bus was puffed full with people like a patila of rice, young men hung out of every opening, and God only knew how they were holding the hot metal—instinctively, Ayub remembered moments spent on swings as a child when he’d come to Delhi on visits to see relatives. These swings were among the most exotic things about Delhi—entire structures made for play! Nothing of the sort existed in Azamgarh, even in those days when the buildings outnumbered the mountains of trash and slush. And yet, when he remembered the swings and the playgrounds of Children’s Park, with their rectangular rusted ladderlike fixtures, what he recalled was the feeling of burning metal against his skin and a lacerating jolt of static that sent him leaping off the jungle gym. The bus lurched like a person weighed down with bags. The muscles of the people in the vehicle were aligned, rippling in unison.
What if a bomb goes off now? he wondered. And I am finished here itself, never to have a chance to follow through? When the bus dropped him off in a puddle outside the Surya Sofitel hotel he felt an acute sense of loss.
Zakir Nagar, Jamia, Sarai Jullena, New Friends Colony, Community Center—these were parts of South Delhi he knew well; most of the Muslims from his group lived in these areas and he himself had lived in Batla House when he’d moved to Delhi. Being back home, or in the vicinity of home, set his nerves tingling. He
was overwhelmed with sentiment for his youth here, the time he’d spent showing Tara around—Tara, who’d grown up in Delhi but admitted she knew nothing about Muslims; there had been no Muslims at the prestigious Delhi Public School where she’d studied—and he kept looking at the women in the fevered light of afternoon and thinking they were his former love. A city of a thousand Taras! That was Delhi. He passed through the door of a nondescript building and up some stairs artfully covered in paan spit and came to Sharif’s office.
“You’re early,” Sharif said, surprised; he had not been expecting him. “Come, come. God, it’s hot outside for October, no? Look at how you’re sweating. Will you have water? Mohsin, yaar, bring water for sahib.”
The office wasn’t much to look at—one of those seedy low-roofed places where every piece of furniture is covered in a layer of dirt or a plastic sheet and the computers and printers have long turned a milky brown or gray.
As Sharif spoke, Ayub smiled and held his chin in his hand and pretended hard to listen. Then, suddenly, Sharif was pointing at him. “You’re OK? Your eyes are very red. Do you have a fever? You look very tired—you have dark circles under your eyes.”
Not just that—Ayub was out of breath. “I’m OK, uncle—it’s very hot outside,” he managed.
“Where are you staying now?”
“With a relative,” he lied. “Nearby only, in Jamia. Batla House.”
“They’re giving you enough to eat, I hope.” He smiled, his large, hollow teeth visible through his graying beard.
“Yes, uncle,” he said, trying to smile, but failing to fall back into the natural stream of conversation.
“You brought your biodata?”
Ayub stiffened.
“It’s not that important,” Sharif said. “You’re the friend of my son and that’s the most important thing. There’s nothing in plastics that can’t be taught. You’re from Lucknow, right?”
They’d had this conversation many times at dinner and Ayub had long since learned that Sharif was not a good listener. “Actually, Azamgarh, uncle.”
Sharif nodded. “Yes, yes, Azamgarh. Named after Azmi—the father of your Shabana Azmi, no?”
This wasn’t quite right, but Ayub did not disagree. “Yes, uncle—actually we’re very distantly related to them. Even the train to Azamgarh was named after him. My great-grandfather was his cousin and a freedom fighter. He was quite a famous poet. But after him, the family went into decline. I have many cousins—the smart ones are in the Gulf, but most are uneducated. I don’t know how such a rapid decline happened in two generations. Now there’s just the name, nothing else. The whole town lives off the name.” Ayub was surprised at his own confession. The A/C made the place excessively cold. Maybe he did have a fever.
But Sharif was not thinking about Ayub or his family. He was thinking, rather—after a long time—of the Khuranas, of how similar Ayub’s story was to that of Vikas’s family, how so many great families had come crashing down after independence, as if the end of the revolution had robbed them of their raison d’être and they were condemned to forever looking back at towering figures from the previous era. Had these figures even been that great? Or was independence like any industry in India in which a bunch of mediocre entities with money cornered the market and congratulated themselves endlessly? Sometimes, in his darker moods, Sharif felt there had been no great figure in this country ever, that it had always just rolled along, a moody rock, a sticky mess of fictions and chaos and egos—like this fellow: Was his grandfather really great? Or had the mediocrity of the present made him think so?
“I see, I see,” Sharif said, smiling. Then he began to describe the job. Midway through, he stopped. “You should go home, beta. You seem very sick. This is a formality anyway. The job is yours if you want it.”
“Thank you, uncle.”
“Don’t thank. Any friend of my son is a friend of mine.” Then he said, “It’s up to you to raise your family name.” He said it cheerfully.
Ayub, his heart crinkling like a tissue, nodded desperately and went out.
________
His heart was thundering; it wouldn’t stop. Forget it, he told himself. There’s no way to fight it off. Accept this excess energy. He took a bus back to his room and spent the last scraps of the afternoon masturbating, crying, moaning, alternatively hot and cold, joyful and ready and alone and sick. Then it was time. He went to the designated shop in Paharganj, picked up the backpack with the bomb, and took an auto to Sarojini Nagar. The bomb was made of ammonium nitrate and charcoal tied with a thread—it was shaped like a coconut. A mobile phone was attached to a mass of materials and covered up with a gauzy cloth, so that if someone were to open his backpack, it would look like he was carrying a coconut for a ceremony.
An odd calm overcame him—the calm of living in cinematic time. He had spent the past few weeks using up his drama and tension—he saw the point of being sent early and remembered too what Rafiq had said about Shockie’s emotional behavior, how it drained him so he could focus coldly on action.
Sarojini Nagar is a horrible market in a nice part of South Delhi—an area characterized, in general, by wide roads, stately flyovers, government and private houses spaced decently apart, and well-demarcated lanes and street signs. He passed through the colonies the way a helpless person may topple down a waterfall, drawn along but also happy about every beautiful sight he encounters as he discovers he is not dying after all. With the evening had come an iota of relief and cool and he didn’t even mind the traffic or the slightly circuitous route the plump auto guy—wearing a thousand old rakhis on his wrist, rakhis like a fungus or infection—took to bump up his meter. It’s already happened, he told himself. It’s long over. When I get to the market, I’ll discover it’s on fire and it’ll be as if I wasn’t even present for what I did.
He had a sense, suddenly, of why Mansoor might have walked away from the blast without understanding or comprehending why. He hadn’t even set off his blast and time was compressing and skipping beats. He sucked on a Vicks; his throat flooded with cold.
When he paid the auto driver, he savored the texture of the notes, how difficult it was to uncurl them, how each one was crumpled in an individual way, how some had turned as soft as cloth from overuse. And that old-money smell—the smell of old keys.
The auto dropped him off at the mouth of the bazaar—near the square where the pukka market was based. He smelled ripe fruit. Elbowing rude unaware people, people passing quickly, people energized with purpose and conversation, pulling up their sleeves and smiling at the setting sun the way one may pose for a large camera, he went in deeper, into the warren, into this aquarium of fake brands. On either side, in a long row, shops churned with shoppers and shopkeepers, curling branches of incense, shiny baskets on sale for Diwali. A woman called her son close after he wandered off to a shop. A fat man stood talking loudly on his mobile, his hand pleasurably plucking the worry lines on his forehead and closing over his face like a crab, his eyes shut in happy concentration, his mouth open, his tongue moving about inside as mysterious roars came out. “Arre, bhai. No. No. No.” He kept shaking his head. It was the most joyful no Ayub had ever heard in his life. Another man sat on a bench, crouching over, washing his hands with water from a used plastic bottle, its brand sticker torn off, leaving behind a patchy residue, the ribs of the bottle pressed and distended. The man had alert eyebrows and curly hair with streaks of baldness—something was wrong with his hair; he was too young to be balding—and as Ayub looked at him, he looked back and a question passed between them and Ayub kept going, conscious of being watched. He could imagine the man’s head turning toward him, taking in his backpack. For that reason he went off for as long as he could. When he turned, the man was gone.
These looks were exchanged daily between men of a certain class. They said: I know you. I wonder how you made it.
There had been a moment—when he
had seen the woman and the child—that he’d lost focus, become a shopper himself, but now he was worked up to full alertness. Standing before a shop, he took the bag off his back and held it at his side as if freeing himself to gaze.
The people in the shop did not notice him. The bespectacled owner, sitting behind a desk, was shouting at one of his assistants. The assistant was jammed halfway up a wall of clothes, his feet bare and his hands plunged into the layers of plastic. Ayub put the bag down on the road, turned, and walked.
A few seconds later, the bomb opened with a seismic roar.
Hundreds of people lay on the ground. From the shop came only silence. Ayub—thrown to the ground, rolling, sliding—thought: Tara will hear me now.
THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS
OCTOBER 2003–
CHAPTER 29
When Vikas saw news of the bombing on TV, he called his wife to come over and watch. Deepa, who had been reading the paper in the drawing room, creased it into a tight square.
“How many dead?” she asked, peering into the cabin of the bedroom and then sitting on the edge of the bed and adjusting her spectacles.
The Khuranas, in the past few years, had started taking a morbid interest in blasts in all parts of the country, especially Delhi—they were excited by these bombings in a way that only victims of esoteric, infrequent tragedies are motivated by horrors. They knew instinctively what the victims and families would go through: how the government would promise help but the Municipal Corporation of Delhi would harass the shopkeepers, advising them to lower their estimated losses; how compensation would be announced in the papers, never to be paid out; and how the injured and dying would linger for hours in the market and the hospital before being treated.
The Association of Small Bombs Page 23
