The Association of Small Bombs(20)
“Don’t you think a mother’s testimony will be powerful?” Vikas asked. He felt alienated from himself as he posed this question.
“No, no. It won’t affect how quickly they prosecute,” Jaidev said. “That’s based simply on how much evidence they have. You know yourself, from having done your documentaries; here they arrest first and find evidence later. Now, that’s not to say that the people who they’ve captured aren’t guilty—these people are not any more competent than the police—but it depends on how they build the circumstantial case.”
Vikas was at a loss. He did not know how to proceed.
The next day Deepa and he visited the Lajpat Nagar police thana, a brutish bureaucratic place characterized by the powdery paint on the walls and heavy steel desks. Upon arriving, they were surrounded by several policemen who asked what they wanted, clearly sizing up their ability to proffer bribes. They were led into an inspector’s office, where, under the portrait of a dead policeman, they registered their statement.
“Anything else?” the inspector asked, squinting. He had a cold. One broken epaulet stood up on his shoulder like a praying mantis, or the wick of a candle.
“Will we get to speak in court?” Deepa asked.
“It depends on the lawyer, madam,” sniffled the policeman.
They returned now to the depths of their lives, awaiting the next hearing.
The days went by, soggy with anticipation, with the implication of important things happening elsewhere. Deepa baked cakes in the kitchen, punishing herself with heat. The kitchen was the largest, most luxurious part of the flat; a space that could have easily serviced three households, not just the tiny one attached to it—a leftover of the old joint way of life. Amazing, Vikas thought, watching her, that we’ve been in the same house for all these years. If I had money, we’d move.
But they were tied to the house. He’d inherited it from his father. He owned the flat jointly with his siblings, and it was difficult to imagine selling it: Who would want to live this deep in a complex full of Khuranas, even if the address were a posh one? Would his siblings allow it? (It occurred to him that, in the circumstances, yes, they would.) Mostly, it was difficult to fathom the complexity of selling, setting a price, transporting one’s stuff, homing in on a new place—tiring. When you came down to it, this flat was the only security they had, the only immutable thing, even if it were bloodied from the insides with memories of the boys, Tushar waddling about in his giraffe-patterned pajamas and ordering around the servant, Nakul lounging in his hep overlarge T-shirts, surprising Vikas with his catlike stare. It was because of the house that he’d stuck to Delhi and not moved to Bombay, where the film industry was concentrated. It was easier to make documentaries if you weren’t terribly strapped for cash and worrying about meeting the rent and if, by the luck of good inheritance, you had a decent address.
Foolish, he thought. I should have risked it and moved. Then this would have never happened and it would have been better for my career, which withered in Delhi, surrounded by family—people who judged my choices and my way of life without trying to understand.
Vikas had a fever. Since the day of the blasts, he’d been consumed by such what-ifs (the initial embargo on them, imposed for the sake of his wife, out of a temporary maturity that comes to a man when he feels he is in a historic phase of his life, having been lifted). Every way he turned, his past was detonated, revealing tunnels and alternative routes under the packed, settled earth of the present. For every decision there were a million others he could have made. For every India, a Pakistan of possibilities.
When things are good, you can see no other way of living; when things are in ruins, there appear a million solutions for how this fate could have been avoided. He blamed himself for all sorts of decisions: for turning down money (he’d been offered a commercial project on the strength of his documentaries but had rejected it on cranky artistic grounds), for not taking another job (his brother had offered him a position at his travel agency when he was particularly low, living off loans from the family), for cowardice (why had he been so afraid of trying his hand in Bombay, of fleeing his festering ancestral womb?). He blamed himself for selfishness (why had he persisted with this career that so clearly made his children ashamed? All the fathers of their friends were industrialists who took their kids on holidays to Jungfrau and bought them Parker pens for their schoolwork). But mostly, he felt trapped with his consequences in the flat, in this flat with its terrazzo floors and yellow post-partition walls and views across the street of the home of a technology czar, a sleek set of buildings muscled through with old, hard, thick Rajasthani-looking wood—a fashionable touch recommended by an architect, no doubt, the same one who had recommended that the pool be shielded from view of the prying neighbors. Are there any women in this house? Vikas wondered, coming to the window. He had vaguely known that the IT czar’s daughter was a classmate of Nakul’s, but he had never seen her or her mother—not even at the funeral rites for the boys, which the czar attended alone, looking freshly barbered and shaved in his white safari suit and designer slippers, slippers he carried in his hands out of fear of the shoe-keeper at the temple misplacing them.
They must drive up in their tinted Mercedes and be docked directly into the air lock of the portico of the Spanish-Rajasthani villa, Vikas thought.
What am I supposed to do? he wondered. How am I supposed to respond to this thing that has happened to me? A few weeks ago I was standing here, looking through this garbled, pearly whorled window for my kids on the street, seeing instead the servants skulking under the ashokas. Now they’re gone, forever, no matter how long I stay here like faithful Hachiko, from their English reader. And yet I have an urge to stay here forever. An urge to punish myself by looking, by scouring every inch of tarred road and glittering gutter and veined dust-sprinkled leaf, in every season, at all times, for my boys—to look till I go blind or mad, till my brain revolts, staging a headache in the space where I am trying to insert the entire city by looking.