The Association of Small Bombs(17)

“Tomorrow,” Abdul said.

Shockie fell silent.

“What?” Abdul asked.

“Can Malik come with me?”

Abdul laughed. “You’re being serious?”

“Yes.”

Abdul laughed again and shook his head.



Malik had a reputation as something of a thinker in the group. This wasn’t a positive appellation: he was regularly derided by the others as being effeminate, confused, contradictory, ineffectual, and eccentric. He offered the most fantastic ideas at group meetings at the back of the carpet shop. “We should write letters to the victims and families of victims of attacks,” he’d said once. “After all, what these victims go through is similar to what we all have gone through as Kashmiris. Something bad happens to them, they expect the government to help them and instead the government ignores them. Yesterday I was reading in the Hindustan Times that most blast victims don’t get compensation for two or three years. I’m telling you, all these people—eventually they turn not against us but against the government. If you want a true Islamic revolution in this country—not just fighting selfishly for our small aims—then we need to win over these people, show our solidarity with them, tell them that our hands were tied, we were only trying to expose to them the callousness of the people they have chosen to elect.” There were tears in his eyes, as usual, from his own eloquence. “Only then can we depose the central government.”

“Anything else, Malik?”

“Yes,” he’d say, continuing, everyone watching with bemused expressions and grinning quite openly at each other.

Malik did not appear to notice. But Shockie always felt a little bad for his friend. “You aren’t appreciated here,” he often said. “You should have been a professor.”

“But I can contribute much more as a writer here.” Malik was the publisher and propagandist in the group and very proud of it.

Poor innocent Malik! Shockie thought. What could he contribute? He was only tolerated because Shockie was his protector and benefactor and Shockie was the top bomb maker in the group. And yet Shockie loved him. Being in the group meant eschewing relationships with women and this was the closest Shockie could come to re-creating the tenderness one felt toward a woman. They were roommates and Shockie often asked what Malik was reading. Gandhi, he might say. Or Tolstoy. Or Pushkin. What does he make of himself? Shockie wondered. Does he really have no idea how pathetic he is? But Malik appeared innocent about his own oddness. Perhaps the injury to his leg and penis had made him a little blind, had given him the aspect of a holy fool, as if that were the only way to deal with the horror that had been inflicted upon him—Shockie had seen this with other cripples, too: a strange light, maybe the light of death, bleeding around the edges of their dull corneas.



After his meeting with Abdul, Shockie went to his room. When he came in, Malik was praying on a mat laid out between the two charpais. He was a religious person—religion, Shockie thought, that crutch of the weak.

When he was done praying, Malik sat at the edge of the bed, and Shockie told him about the meeting with Abdul. Malik listened with his hands tight around a copy of Gandhi’s Autobiography, nodding at odd moments.

“You’re listening?” Shockie asked. Why were people never listening to him?

“Yes, yes.”

“Do you want to come?”

“What will I do, bhai? You know how these people treat me.”

“This is an opportunity to change that,” Shockie said. “You’ll get a little practice. Otherwise our missions are too dangerous for a first-timer. But you don’t have to. You can keep letting these people call you a coward.”

“It’s not that I’m afraid,” Malik said. “I think I can be more useful here.” He tipped his head toward a cyclostyle machine and some letter-block printing paraphernalia in the corner of the room. As the “publisher” and “propagandist” he churned out pamphlets, posters, manifestos, and warnings against civilians and army officers to be posted on the walls of village houses and GPOs and thanas, all of them written in an overblown apocalyptic style that Abdul said gave him a headache, and that Shockie, as Malik’s guardian, always edited.

“Suit yourself,” Shockie said.

But he was sad.

That night he stayed up thinking of his mother and imagining a series of girls he had been infatuated with in his village. Where were they now? Was that horrible ox of a weaver really f*cking Faiza? (This did not stop him from picturing the act; he liked imagining the private lives of others.) Was Sahar really a mother of two, putting oil on her round stomach? And what about Asma . . . ? In this way, he began to fall asleep. But right when sleep was coming, he got up and said, “You’re lazy.”

Malik, curled on his charpai, his back against the wall, reading, his toes visible and dirty, said, “What?”

“You should come with me. You have no idea how disrespected you are in the group. They mock you openly. When I told Abdul I wanted to bring you, he laughed and forbade me from doing it.”

Malik said nothing.

“When you were talking about Gandhi the other day, they were all laughing. I even tried to signal to you but you were so lost in your conversation. You need to do something. Your position in the group is insecure. If something happens to me, what will you do? That’s why I want you to come with me. That way we can be together if something happens.”