The Association of Small Bombs(19)

Where’s Shockie bhai? he wondered again, as the bald, lipless judge, a man in his sixties, exchanged a few words with a lawyer. Arrested? On the run? Around the room no one looked familiar. But Malik would not have put it past his more impulsive friend to disguise himself and walk into an Indian courtroom and spray the crowd with bullets.

But what if Shockie was the informant? Shockie, in his whining, complaining, dissatisfied way, had talked a lot about defection, though this had been just that: talk, a way to fill the existential space between explosions.

A fat, bespectacled, avuncular, wheezing policeman in slippers (Why were all the policemen in slippers? As if they had just rolled out of bed?) clutched Malik’s wrist; he smelled of sweat and gutka.

The smell of sweat had become Malik’s relentless companion in the past month, in the heat of Delhi, in his small cell that he shared with ten others. This is the difference between being free and not. Freedom (at least temporarily) from the sweat of others.

Everyone in the courtroom fell silent. The hustle and bustle of the judge’s various assistants died down, and only the judge’s voice and the stenographer’s thwacks could be heard. The judge made a few remarks and read a list of charges against the men. Malik and the others stood in front of the judge, facing him, but all Malik could think about was his hunger. He had been fed his breakfast at six a.m. as usual, but had been given his “lunch” at seven thirty a.m. That was because you could not eat outside the jail. He was dying of thirst and hunger. “Barbarous actions . . . Civilization . . . The killing of innocents,” the judge said.

“Bread. Pizza. Chow mein,” Malik thought.





MR. AND MRS. KHURANA’S RESPONSE TO TERROR


   1996–1997





CHAPTER 6



Deepa and Vikas and Sharif and Afsheen were in the crowd.

When they had heard about the arrests, they’d been excited, passionately angry, each person exercising his or her fantasy of murder and revenge. Deepa imagined scalding the terrorists’ faces with cooking oil. Vikas smashed their heads with blunt metal rods. Afsheen thought, improbably, of delivering injections to their eyes. Sharif, who, in person, was the most bad-tempered of the lot, was the most subdued in his imagination. Slitting their necks quickly would do the trick, he thought.

But when the four victims, or kin of victims, sat in the court and saw the terrorists, observed the state of the room in which they were being processed—the cobwebs blousy in the corners, the guano dissolving the floor, the twitchy fan above barely containing the fire of the afternoon—they became dispirited.

Vikas put his arm around Deepa’s narrow frame and pressed her bones. She sat next to him on a plastic chair, tense and perched forward. She had been a good, diligent student and he half-expected her to bring out a notebook and sublimate her rage with flowering handwriting.

The men—bearded, gaunt, fair, dressed in sports windbreakers (as if they’d come from cricket practice)—looked middle-class, harmless. Unlike the criminals the Khuranas had seen in the court complex, they were not even handcuffed. Each man was held at the wrist by a paunchy policeman. One of the prisoners seemed to be on familiar terms with his escort and was laughing and showing his yellow teeth.

Were these the people who had killed her children? Deepa wondered. Their personalities did not add up to a bomb.

She became thoughtful and pensive, confused, shouted back to reality. She was aware, suddenly, that the death of her children was not a metaphysical event, but a crime. A firecracker set off by uncaring men in a market. She did not trust the government or the courts to do anything.

After the adjournment, the Khuranas and Ahmeds rose and went out into the heat. “If the next hearing is in September, how long does that mean the case will go on?” Deepa asked. The court complex pressed on them from all sides. In tiny huts sat lawyers amid alcoves of dusty tomes, cracking jokes. Tall British buildings hogged the sky. Men of various sizes and speeds threw their legs along the winding medieval streets, chatting, exchanging information.

Sharif, strolling plumply in slippers, said, “In the past these cases have gone on for five, ten years.”

“Because the blast was in Delhi, it’ll be faster,” Vikas said quickly.

“I’ve had a lot of experience with the justice system,” Sharif said. “It’s all about un-law and un-care.”

“The important thing is that they’ve been caught,” Afsheen said, her dark glasses lodged up on her head. “It’s terrible,” she said. “What these courts look like.”



In the car, after they had parted ways with the Ahmeds, Deepa said, “When the terrorists come to the court in September I want to be there to speak.”

“I’ll phone Jaidev and find out,” Vikas said obediently. He was marveling, through the windows of the car, at the orange midafternoon indifference of the city—the dropping trees, the flat blocks of government construction stranded in the haze in the distance, the canal by the side of the road with fresh black mud shoveled out on the sides. Everything felt closed after the hearing—all the sense of expectation and possibility was gone. “I wonder how Mansoor is,” he said.

“He’s alive,” Deepa said.



But, at home, when Vikas phoned Jaidev, a lawyer friend he knew from his evening walks, Jaidev told him what he had expected—there was little point in getting involved; the case would drag on; besides, they hadn’t been present. The best thing to do, Jaidev said, would be to focus on future events, on the effects of terrorism in society, in setting up a scholarship or a debating prize at the kids’ school. “There is nothing to be gained from being involved in the legal system, believe me,” Jaidev said, his voice dusky with gutka. “It’s barely worth it for us with the current taxation system.” Though Vikas knew he made crores.