The Association of Small Bombs(18)

He felt he had made such a good appeal that he was surprised by Malik’s reply. “Maybe you’re the coward.”

Shockie said nothing.

“Inflicting violence is cowardly. We’ve talked about that. If we were brave we’d walk into the street and be martyred.” He pointed to the Autobiography. “You know what Gandhi said Jews should do when faced with the Nazis? Commit mass suicide. Think about that.”

Shockie shook his head. “You’re cracked.”

“So what? What do you think these attacks are going to achieve? Today when you were complaining about the blast not being big enough, I was thinking: It doesn’t matter. It’s all wrong. Blasts are a way of hiding. If you want to be a hero you have to be a martyr.”

“Why don’t you propose this to Abdul?”

“Maybe I will.”



After Shockie went to sleep, Malik read by the milky tube light fixed over his bed. He read about Gandhi’s childhood, his suicide attempt with datura seeds, the shame he felt over the fact that he was having sex at the moment his father died, his weak vegetarian constitution, his struggles with pain and sexual urges—he read all this and thought, “But this is me.”

In the morning, when he woke up, Shockie was gone.



Shockie took a shared jeep taxi from Kathmandu to Bhairawa, on the border with India. At Bhairawa he boarded a bus to Gorakhpur, where he spent the night again in Das Palace.

Then, after days of traveling by train—this was his real profession, wasn’t it? Traveling?—he came to Hubli.

The Hubli Faction was a small group of Keralite Muslims who planned attacks from a safe house in a forest. They took him to a clearing and wanted to talk about Marxism, revolution, Naxalites, water politics—anything but the issue at hand, which was: arms. Finally they showed him a stash of the most derelict-looking AK-47s Shockie had ever seen and grenades covered in thick dust. Nothing. It was pointless. This was playacting. The country spread around them in the form of a thousand animal sounds: crickets, bats, birds. He thought about what it would mean to die, right now, here—who would remember him? His mother, maybe; possibly Malik—but anyone else? No.

He felt lightheaded in the clearing, in the dry dusk air of the forest, with birds leaping about in the space between trees. A wood fire was going and the members of the Hubli Faction, who got their cues from Rambo, were dressed in black and smoking around this fire.

The next day Shockie took a train back to the Indo-Nepal border. He was in a contrite mood. “I must apologize to Malik,” he thought. He never got the chance.



Instead, four days after Shockie left for Hubli, Malik was swept up from his lodgings and arrested.

Malik was brushing his teeth by the open tap when the police came. The four men handcuffed his thin wrists before he could put pants over his underwear.

“What have I done?” he asked.

The police would tell him nothing.

Still, once he was placed in the lockup, he began to relax.

Kashmiris were always being hassled in Nepal for bribes, one oppressed race expressing its particular brotherly cruelty toward another; and besides, the investigator who came to ask him about his recent whereabouts was amiable, distracted.

It was only when Malik caught sight of two bearded Sikh Indian policemen in the crowd of blue Nepali uniforms that he became worried.

The Sikhs were stout and talking fast and Malik put all his fingers in his mouth.

Then the station suddenly emptied and a Nepali policeman keyed open the lockup. “Am I free?” Malik asked.

“In a sense. Very much. Come with me.”

Instead, Malik was led to a windowless police van parked outside in the dirt and shoved into the back. He found himself in a metallic cavern, the outside world visible only through small stripes in the metal, the paint on the inside of the van scratched by desperate inmates.

When the Sikhs got into the front and started the ignition, Malik knew he was being taken to India as a suspect for the bombing.



Crouched uncomfortably on the floor of the van, handcuffed, his back against the metallic crown of a tire, Malik watched Nepal disappearing from view, photographing it mentally for what he expected would be years of imprisonment. He had read that the only way to endure solitary confinement—if that was your sentence—was to retreat into your own memories, to open and reread the books stocked in the library of your mind.

He began to cry.

Later, through the openings in the van, through the small grille, Malik saw a clear stream of water—a thread, really; a reel of light and fluid on the earth—and was reminded of his outing with Shockie to the pond two days before. It would be his happiest memory for many years.





CHAPTER 5



Malik was placed in police custody in Delhi on a Sunday. He was tortured for ten days straight.

A month later, he was produced in a Sessions Court in Delhi and united with a group of arrested Kashmiris he didn’t recognize. The men stood like scolded schoolboys before the judge, each with a personal police escort at his side. Malik had feared, after all the torture, that he might find himself facing another co-revolutionary who had broken down and come clean. But this wasn’t the case.

Gaunt, underslept, hungry, dressed in good clothes (for the sake of appearances), Malik peered out at unfriendly faces in the crowd.