The Association of Small Bombs(25)

He did. With the whisk tight in his hand, he churned the butter and the sugar. He was not as effeminate as his father made him out to be. It was a matter of context. In the context of the kitchen he was an expert. As he mixed the frosting, Deepa hugged his small frame from behind.

Later that evening Nakul played “Edelweiss” for her on the small guitar they had bought him. “Edel Vyes, Edel Vais, every morning you greet me,” he sang.

Now, back home from visiting Mukesh, Deepa reflected on the tragic oddness of her own life, how she’d grown up in a tiny family in Bangalore, the only daughter of a reclusive man who ran a famous bookstore and could talk about nothing but sixties rock ’n’ roll (he had not been a recluse before his wife died, though she could barely remember that); how she’d been a shy and frightened but persevering creature, doing well in school and ending up in Delhi and working for Arthur Andersen, the CA firm, thanks to a family connection—Delhi, that odd world, so much more spacious and rude than Bangalore; Delhi, a place where no one was firmly rooted and there was a sense that if a better city presented itself just fifty kilometers away, the opportunistic inhabitants would immediately quit the city, caring not a jot for the earth that had nurtured them. And, of course, out of all these Delhiites, these savage North Indians, she’d picked Vikas. Or Vikas had picked her. She’d liked him because, in the middle of the rude crush, he had the disarming gentleness of a South Indian—he was a Punjabi but he could have been sprung from St. Joseph’s. Calm, sympathetic, patient, he was a good listener, marked with none of the prejudices she imagined North Indians carried toward South Indian Christians (and she wasn’t wrong about these prejudices: years later, when she became a de facto Punjabi as well, she learned that most North Indians thought all Christian women were maids); and their courtship had an easy, light quality; they’d melted like two shy creatures into one another.

Tears came to her eyes remembering those early days—days of infatuation. After that everything had gone to ruin. Vikas slipped into a depression about his career as a documentary filmmaker from which he never recovered—angry first at his family for not understanding why he wished to be an artist rather than a CA (“There’s only one artist in the whole bloody family and they can’t even handle that!”) and then at himself for having chosen such a nugatory, ascetic path at a time when India was booming with money and rupees fell from the trees like soft petals, enriching even the fools of his family, whose property values shot up. How many times had she told him to quit? To go back to being a CA? To do something else? To sell his inherited lands in Patiala? But he refused. Descending into bitterness, surrounded by the braying, pointing, mocking audience of his family, he had become attached to his own pain. He did not want to make changes because that would mean losing his precious exchequer of bitterness.

And then there were the kids. He had, in his bitter, depressive way, been opposed to having any, but she had pushed him and pressured him, sending subtle messages through family members, thinking that children would rouse him from his emotional torpor, give him a reason to act. And, in fact, there was a change in him after Tushar was born. Vikas loved the boy in the obsessive, cuddly way he loved animals—constantly nuzzling against him, singing wicked, demented songs; he was energized (as many artists are) by his own creation.

But soon he lost interest in Tushar and Nakul and returned to his depressive state—in fact, he blamed the boys for exacerbating his depression. “We should never have brought them up here, with the influence of this family. They’ve also turned out to be Punjabi brutes with no understanding of art.”

“I’ve told you many times we could move to Bangalore or Bombay,” she said. “And the boys are much more like you than anyone else.”

“And who’s going to pay the rent, my dear? The fees for their school? This property is my curse. I’m stuck here. The property is probably my subject, though I’m not sure how to make a documentary about all these oafs.”

Such self-pity! She wouldn’t stand for it. “You have more than enough money locked up in lands. Why don’t you sell it?”

But Vikas was incorrigible. “Do you realize how complex it is? I’ll have to deal with Mukesh, Jagdish, Rajat, Bhim. It’s not worth it. Better to let a few of them die off,” he said viciously.

How had he become like this? Where had her husband—the sweet man she’d known the first few years—gone? She began despairing that this was his true self, that she’d been fooled those first few years. Such bitterness could not be minted overnight; it had to be implanted at a young age. Maybe he wasn’t so different from the bad-tempered, cynical people in the complex that he despised—but whereas those people pinned their cynicism on the decline of the family’s reputation, he pinned it on the decline of his career. It was all the same, in the end; it produced the same results. It occurred to her that she could have been married to any one of the shrieking, sniggering fools on the family campus. That she was like Draupadi, wedded to the family, not to a person. “You used to be different,” she had said at the end of that conversation about selling the lands, trying to keep herself from cracking.

“No,” he’d said. “I was just on a break from being myself.”



Then, one day, in October, five months after the boys’ deaths, they went to Tihar Jail to meet a man named Malik Aziz. Malik, it was said, was the ideologue of the JKIF, the man behind its violent philosophy. A bookish student of chemistry at the University of Kashmir, he had turned out to be a dangerous, charismatic figure in the student protest movements, egging his fellow students on from stone throwing to kidnapping a vice chancellor of the university to assassinations and finally terrorism. “According to RAW, he’s one of the most dangerous terrorists in the country,” the police escort whispered as he walked beside Deepa through the winding inner roads of Tihar, small paths canyoned on either side with high dirty yellow plaster walls, the walls overlaid with snaps of shattered glass and barbed wire.