The Association of Small Bombs(28)

“Give him some time,” Vikas said. “We can also be quiet.”

“Don’t you people feel ashamed?” Mukesh said. “Oye, bhainchod.”

“Maybe you should go out,” Vikas said. He gestured at Deepa, who looked hurt and meditative. Mukesh went out.

Deepa too looked at the man. The gap between them was so small. Yet she didn’t know what she could say. Her head burst with the boys’ voices and gestures and shrill demands—somehow it was these demands and questions that stayed with her most. She saw the boys lying on their stomachs on the drawing room floor covering their school readers with plastic or brown paper. She saw them pausing in doorways, stretching. Smashing a sponge ball in their room with a tiny imitation cricket bat from a factory in Ludhiana. Making high-pitched sounds in imitation of their favorite cricket commentators. Nakul sitting on the sofa, with his brown thin arms, asking, “But what is a prostitute, Mama?” A teacher had called a girl with purple nail polish that. “And she called Madhur a gasbag!” he snorted, suddenly getting up at full tilt and going into his room, where, a few seconds later, you could hear a sponge ball tocked against the wall. Nakul’s Chinese-looking eyes. His darkness, his innocence, his Olympian cuddling, his monkeyish way of nearly hanging off the bed while he slept. Tushar’s perpetual mousy, frightened look. His habit of picking his nose, which irritated Vikas. “Where do you think he gets it from?” Deepa told him.

Together these voices created a viscid pressure in her brain. “Deepa? Do you want to ask him anything?” Vikas said.

She shook her head.

Vikas spoke now to Malik: “If you are guilty, if you’ve done this, remember there will be no peace for you or your families—not now or forever. You think you’re saving Kashmir, but you’re destroying it.” A bubble of spit formed on his lips and he considered spitting, but held himself back. He pulled out a photograph from his pocket. “Recognize them? My boys. They were blown up by you. What did they have to do with this?”

The man looked at the photos but said nothing.

Vikas turned to Jagdish, who repeated, “He won’t say anything.”



Malik was taken to a cell and stripped and beaten; they watched across the room as he howled. “He hasn’t said anything since we brought him in,” Mrs. Thapar explained.

Why did you bring him to us, then? Vikas wanted to ask.

“The toughest ones are the ones who don’t speak. Most just sign a confession and happily mention others; they say their own brothers have planted the bomb—they’re such cowards. Not this one. If he saw you, I thought he might talk. I’d told him journalists were coming to speak to him. I knew from the paper he reads who his favorite journalist is, and I’d told him that he was coming and he was excited.” She shook her head. “But nothing.”

Of course—nothing was free in this world, Vikas thought. They were being used too—as bait. “But the whole point was to talk to someone,” he said.

“I know, but there would have been no point talking to people who deny it.”

And it occurred to him now that the others who had been arrested were either broken or innocent, and this silent one was the closest they had come to finding a man who was guilty.





CHAPTER 7



Within days of visiting Malik, Deepa began to disintegrate. Vikas came in from an excursion in a market and found her walking about and muttering in the drawing room with cake mix on her hands. The windows of the flat were open and birds came in and out, commuting, as at a railway station. When he asked her what the matter was, she said, “I’m looking for Nakul’s crane.” In addition to playing guitar, Nakul had a passion for origami, making delicate folds on small pieces of paper, twisting and pressing the paper on the floor like a person performing a ritual to keep something under the earth from exploding.

Vikas told her the cranes were in a shoe box under the bed—didn’t she remember?

“Oh,” she said, bringing her hand to her mouth and leaving a smear of batter there.

It didn’t stop—the confusion, the disintegration. Deepa, characterized by her bright, chirpy alertness, was now inert. When they’d come back from meeting Malik Aziz, Vikas had feared she might kill herself, and for a few days he’d stayed home, keeping her under intense watch, with Rajat and his friends making repeated visits. But he saw now what had happened to her was far worse, the mind vacating itself before the body could even act.

They’d been sleeping on the floor next to the bed ever since the boys had died. This was because the boys, though they were eleven and thirteen, coming into their male sounds and snores, had shared the bed with them every night, the limbs of the four Khuranas tangled ferociously, like a sprig of roots, dreams and sleep patterns merging and helixing, so that on one particular night, when Nakul screamed in his sleep, so did the other three, and the family woke with a common hoarse throat, looking around for intruders and then laughing. “We’re like tightly packed molecules,” Tushar had said, invoking the words of his science teacher and squeezing his mother close. Here, the Khuranas, who were generally no-nonsense, were indulgent. They were physical people—Vikas vigorously petting one or the other boy, mussing his hair, pulling his cheeks; Deepa cuddling with them as she had liked to wrap herself up in Vikas when they were first married.