The Association of Small Bombs(11)
But the Jain’s house, built like a Gujarati kothi, was oblivious to all this. The Jain was a boulder of a man with smooth coal-colored skin and a bald head offset by two equal tufts of hair. His nose was a beautiful chorus of tiny pores. He had large dark hands, whitish on the inside. He sat on his knees on a cushion in a white kurta, the rock of his paunch balanced before him. “I had orchiopexy, you see—you know what that is?” he started. “When one of your testes doesn’t descend.” He must have been twenty-nine, thirty. No one in this world was very old. “For years I had lots of pain, and though I was strong, I couldn’t run without losing my breath and getting a sharp pain in my torso. I used to always wonder why.” The servant set down three earthen cups of tea; the Jain accepted his cup daintily in his large hands. “Now that I’ve had surgery I have all this energy. I can run five kilometers without stopping.”
Where does the poor fellow run in this dump? Shockie wondered. But ideas of health, Western ideas, were spreading everywhere. Shockie himself was obsessed with exercise, with hanging from a rod in his doorway.
“Anyway,” the Jain said, putting his large hands on his thighs, thighs the size of cricket bats, “I overdid it, so I have been advised to rest. Hence this cushion under me.”
A fan turned overhead, raising a delicious current from the layers of sleeping air. It was dark in the drawing room, a welcome respite from the May heat of Gorakhpur.
The servant brought a VIP suitcase with a numbered lock and the Jain twisted it open on his lap. “Count it,” he said.
Meraj and Shockie each took a bundle in their hands and petaled the notes. Shockie was sleepy and slightly delirious; the room had a fan but not much air, and the smell of fresh money made him high. He kept losing count only to realize he’d been thinking of nothing, or rather, thinking of himself thinking.
When they had finally accounted for all the money, they dumped it into their kit bag and went off.
“You see what I was saying?” Shockie said, as they waited on the railway platform for the train to Delhi. “What we get is just a tip.”
The money was not for them. It was to be dropped off with an agent in Delhi, part of a hawala money-laundering operation that sustained the group.
“But this is also for chocolate,” Meraj said, speaking with the dazed clarity that comes to people in extreme heat.
“Just like that, it’s for chocolate? If they have so many funds, why do you think they still bother to send us on such a long journey? Use your brain for once, Meru.”
The train from Gorakhpur to Delhi could take anywhere from fifteen to thirty hours, depending on the mood of the driver, the state of the tracks, accidents, and random occurrences. Meraj and Shockie settled into a third-class non-A/C sleeper compartment. Shockie was in a tired, despairing mood. He always got this way before action. It was like an advance mourning for his life. The vibrating bunks, stacked three to a wall; the mournful synthetic covers of the bunks, torn in places and looking smashed, with the webbed look of smashed things; the racing wheels underneath, like ladders of vertebrae being whipped; the sense of abject stinking wetness surrounding a train’s journey through the universe—all these things filled Shockie with futility. The bogey was a jail cell ferrying him to a destiny he did not desire, his jaw on edge like the stiff end of his mother’s iron.
Bougainvillea bloomed insanely here and there in the landscape.
Meraj kept waking up and falling asleep on the bunk across (they both had top bunks) and Shockie considered him with pity, surprise, even tenderness: people were closest to animals when they were sleeping and fighting for wakefulness. Or dying and fighting for life. What is Meraj dreaming about? he wondered. Probably the same thing as me—his own death—only through the obfuscating membrane of sleep. Meraj had been pulled out of a chemist’s and beaten and tortured by the Jammu and Kashmir Police a few years before.
At desolate stations in the depths of the subcontinent, Shockie got out and smoked, observing the blight of mildew on the walls, kicking away the twisted, disabled beggars who crowded around his feet cawing about their Hindu gods.
At the Old Delhi Railway Station, twenty hours after they had set out from Gorakhpur, an agent met them. The agent was a tall, hippy, pimply, nervous fellow in tight black new jeans. Shockie disliked him immediately. He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities. He lorded everything over them. He didn’t help them with their cricket kit bags. He asked them if they had ever been to Delhi before.
“Yes, hero,” Shockie said, setting his emotional lips in a smirk.
“Let’s go in different directions and meet at the car. It’s parked behind,” the agent, whose name was Taukir, said.
“Why do you want to do that?” Shockie said.
“You never know about the police these days.”
“No,” Shockie said. “What’s safer is that we go together.”
The key to not being caught, Shockie knew, was to behave confidently.
They walked through the annihilating crowds to the car. From the high steel roofs of the station, birds raced down, avoiding a jungle gym of rafters and rods. People pressed and pushed as the trains hurtled through their routes of shit and piss, plastic and rubber burning weirdly in the background, spicing the air. The station was so bloated with people that the loss of a few would hardly be tragic or even important.