The Association of Small Bombs(35)

She looked up from her desk. “Isn’t it? I love that scene in the billiards place.”

“Yeah, yeah, what amazing camerawork,” he said, fumbling—he hadn’t seen it. “Only thing was—I had a bad print. I saw it on my cousin’s VCR and there was that normal PAL/NTSC problem.” He continued, “Someone should bring new wave to India also.”

“Indian men aren’t handsome enough to pull off new wave stuff,” she laughed.

“Insult, yaar. Insult.”

“I’m joking, yaar,” she said. She picked up a piece of paper and began signing it. “One minute,” she said, and signed something else.

Vikas waited with his hands on his hips, wondering if the crowd of CAs was surveying him. To distract himself, he dished out more of his hair from his scalp and looked up at the ceiling. It occurred to him that there was something brilliant about Prabhat’s gestures: he’d taken a host of normal nervous tics and transformed them into something sexy and unpredictable and moody.

“You love touching your hair,” Deepa said, interrupting.

“No, no,” Vikas said. “It just distracts me.”

“What happened to your thumbs?” she said.

“Oh this?” he said, feeling suddenly embarrassed. There were two gashes, like mini eyes, on the sides of both his thumbs. “I scratch my thumbs when I’m bored and sometimes they peel off.” He had been doing it a lot recently, thinking of Deepa.

“It’s quite deep,” she said, taking his hands in hers and turning them over, like he was a child being examined for dirt by his mother.

Vikas felt a wild electric charge shoot through him. I wonder what the other CAs are thinking, he thought. But he let her look at the thumbs. These Christian girls, he thought. So fast. No wonder Mahinder the sardar was always going on about them.

She let his hands go and seemed to nod in a deep, knowing way. “I have many nervous tics also,” she said. “I bite my nails. I also pick at my face.” She grinned crookedly. For the first time Vikas noticed how properly filed her nails were, though they were bloodless and devoid of nail polish. The fingers were fragile-looking and wiry and veined with bluish-green vessels, and when Vikas looked at her face again he could suddenly see the vessels crisscrossing her large forehead, throbbing things like the pressings of stems in a scrapbook, the skin of the forehead already crinkled. She was just a mesh of blood, he thought, with pity. A fragile biological creature.

Vikas said, “Have you seen any films by Bergman, by the way?”

“Bergman? Let’s see. Scenes from a Marriage. Persona. Virgin Spring. Through a Glass Darkly. So yes. Four.”

Vikas was truly amazed. “That’s more than I’ve seen, man! I’ve just seen Scenes from a Marriage and Persona.” He said, “He’s a total genius, no?”

“I agree.”

He went on, “Sorry—I don’t know why I brought him up. I just thought, given that you liked Scorsese, you might like Bergman.” This was nonsense and he knew it. He had brought up Bergman because Fanny and Alexander was playing at a festival at Kamani, and he wanted to see if she was going, but he had lost his courage. “Anyway, I’m glad you like Bergman; it makes me happy someone else watches him also.”

“I think he’s quite famous, no?”

“Not here,” he said, indicating the CAs.

She smiled at him with her eyes and nodded back. It took Vikas a second to realize that she was gesturing about her approaching boss. “Chalo,” he said. “We’ll talk later.” But then he didn’t move. He was past embarrassment. The boss came and went. Six months later, they were married.





MANSOOR AHMED’S RESPONSE TO TERROR


   MAY 1996–MARCH 2003





CHAPTER 10



The bomb became the most significant thing that had happened to Mansoor, cleaving his life into before and after. His hearing got worse for a while, cleaned out by the violent finger of the bomb. He wore a cast on his right arm for two months.

Mansoor’s pain came in enormous fuzzy waves in his arm, doubling him over in his bed. At other times it was a claw of lightning, rapacious and singular, turning his limbs wet from the inside as he walked about the house in his pajamas. When he lingered with his parents at the dining table, a constant drizzle of electricity shocked his arm, and in the mornings his muscles turned sluggish with cement, and wet sand filled the gap between tendons.

When he recalled the day of the bomb, his eyes filled with tears. He hadn’t known till then how selfish he was, and when he felt bad for the boys, it was undercut by a feeling that he was performing for God. And because he felt God could see him he was doubly guilty.

It was lucky, his parents said, that the blast happened in the middle of the summer holidays, giving him time to heal. But maybe, Mansoor would think later, when he was older, his life in ruins, maybe it wasn’t. Had he been forced back to school, forced to confront the mundane dribble of homework and unit tests and weekly exams, he might have recovered faster. Instead he stayed home that summer—disturbed, upset, coddled, winched by nightmares, remembering the bomb, the boys as they lay next to the twisted car door, dropped and broken, and of course their faces before, the moments before, when they’d all been trudging through the market like heroes, talking about the prices of trump cards and bats, and he’d felt irritated at Nakul for acting so certain and authoritative. I know you’re not rich, he’d wanted to say. Why do you act it? But he’d said nothing. His mind whipped back to the bomb, the meaninglessness of it.