The Association of Small Bombs(26)

A lot—too much—of family was present. Jagdish, who had organized the meeting, was in his small specs and crinkled face, looking short and wide in a safari suit as he walked with his hands behind his back. Mukesh: sticking out his chest, smoothing his mustache, constantly asking the police escort questions, as if to flatter him and overpower him at once. And Vikas, of course: slinking behind the two men and Deepa, acting even more distraught than he probably was, showing his displeasure about these men’s presence by not standing next to his wife. “Come in the front, yaar,” Mukesh said, grabbing him by the shoulder.

“No, no. I’ll keep watch of the back,” Vikas said, as if there was a chance they’d be attacked by escaping prisoners in these narrow Benares-back-lane-like channels.



“Why are they coming with us?” he had asked Deepa a few days before, when she told him that the meeting in the jail was confirmed.

“They organized it, yaa.” The South Indian yaa. These old tics were returning.

“They didn’t even know the boys. In all these years, tell me one time they took interest in them. All Jagdish would do is go up to them and make faces and say, ‘Who is Kumbhkaran and who is Duryodhan?’ And Mukesh—he’ll act like a chaudhary and take over the whole thing, as if his kids have died.” He flushed, as usual, at this phrase. He’d become a man whose kids had died. This was his chief distinction. It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer. I’ve been immune to all this, he thought.

His parents had not died early—nor had they died late. He was the third of four siblings; his parents were thirty-five and thirty-three when they’d had him. They’d both died in their early seventies. People lived for much longer now but he had not grieved too much for them—they’d led unhappy lives and they were especially unhappy in each other’s presence. Mama’s stroke of genius, he thought, was to die first. Her poor husband—angry, stingy, abusive, like all the men in this family—had been unmoored.

What a bitter man I am! he thought with some satisfaction. Can’t feel anything for my parents and soon I won’t feel anything for my dead children either. I care only about myself and there’s the rub—I’m not even worth caring about. Self-pity welled in his chest. It was a familiar, even comforting sickness, like the pleasure that a bulimic must feel when the food first starts rising in the elevator of her gullet. He thought again of his failures, thought of his wasted promise, thought of the way in which even God—yes, God!—had confirmed his suspicions about himself by murdering his children. I’m not fit to live! Everything I touch turns to shit! Now look at this poor woman—this lovely woman who’s thrown in her lot with mine (he looked at her as these thoughts swirled through his head, gathering together the threads of his life: only a second or two had passed in the drawing room, where they were having the conversation. She was icing a cake again, as on the day of the blast). What has she got? Nothing but years and years of heartbreak, of being pushed physically, I am sure, into the country of her mother’s cancer. When she married me, with my encouraging smile and my famous family, she probably thought she was gaining security—exactly the thing she craved after that tiny lifeboat of a family in Bangalore. Instead she got the opposite. Or not the opposite—just a continuation of her childhood. Secretly we are all looking for ways to continue our childhoods—the hurt, the pain, the love, the fear, the shame. So just as I recognized in her someone who would let me carry on with my bitterness, she must have recognized in me someone who would let her down repeatedly. Lead her straight into the waltzing, frizzing arms of cancer.

He put his arms around her in the drawing room. Her small, perishable bones—light like aluminum. “We should get you to rest. I don’t want you to fall sick,” he said. It was this fear of sickness—which ticked inside her like a genetic bomb—that kept him from pushing things to their extremes, kept him back from the edge of terrible behavior. There was only so much you could hurt this lovely woman before she imploded.



Back in the jail, a door opened and they were led into a clean bureaucratic office. They had passed through a number of doors already—gates, really—unlocked by the guards and then padlocked behind them before they could pass through the next set of gates. It dizzied the mind. He tried to form an image of the prison in his head, and could come up with only an indeterminate squiggle and a respect for centuries of panoptical construction.

A woman was seated behind the desk. Thin, with healthy oiled hair emerging in a braid, her shirt spruced with epaulets, she got up to greet Jagdish Chacha. The man hadn’t been a cabinet secretary for fifteen years now, but the trappings of power did not go away. While she spoke, he rocked back proudly on his heels and touched his spectacles to signal that he was listening.

Somehow Vikas and Deepa were holding hands again.

It was in this state—making physical contact—that they were best. He had never lost his fascination, never once in fifteen years (they had been married as long as his chacha had not been a cabinet secretary, he realized, with some satisfaction), for how light her bones were; his hands clawed through hers as if trying to break a spider’s web. She opened up her hand and then clung to his tightly. If I had known it would come to this, he thought, I would never have married her. I would have let her go the very first minute we became acquainted at Arthur Andersen; I would have dived behind a desk as she passed.