The Association of Small Bombs(36)
His parents took him everywhere that summer—mosques, dargahs, the Bahá’i temple. Before, they had believed in nothing; now they believed in everything. He was happy to be escorted to these places in the air-conditioned Esteem, but when he found himself in a crowd his heart thundered, his palms sweated, and he looked around at the swirling faces of the devotees. “Mama, please let’s go home,” he begged.
“Of course, beta,” she said, shouting for the driver, who always appeared with a knowing smirk on his face, as if he did not respect his rich young master’s problems.
After that, the holy men trooped home: fakirs, maulvis, sufis, vaids, and the like. Mansoor, his thin legs tucked beneath his knees, said prayers with all of them, letting them press their old-man hands to his head for benediction and drinking whatever potions they offered.
He liked staying home, in the ground-floor flat in South Ex with its emporium-like drawing room crowded with exotic teak furniture from Burma and Indonesia (Afsheen’s father had been in the foreign service and she had grown up partly in Burma). He had no desire to venture out again into the misery of Delhi. When news of the blast welled in the papers, he avoided it, scrambling the pages in a nervous blur till he was at Garfield and Beetle Bailey.
Then, just like that, one day, school began. He was twelve and had places to be.
On the first day of school, he was driven from home in a car by the driver, his parents lapsed on either side of him, his father’s head tilted back and fingers on his lips as he looked out the burning window, a man fulfilling his duty with seriousness and without ceremony, his mother more involved, upright and relaxed and cooing, bringing her cold and fragrant Nivea hands to his forehead. Mansoor smirked proudly as the car gathered the familiar landmarks on the way to school: AIIMS, Bhikaji Cama Place, the sandstone nub of the Hyatt Hotel. He assumed this was special treatment, bound to be suspended in favor of the school bus the minute he was settled into his routine, but when he got ready the next morning, the driver was waiting for him again.
The bomb had killed his friends. But it had improved his life.
The children at Vasant Valley School had by now gone through several phases with regard to the bomb, not so different from society itself. Nor were they strangers to bombs, the idea of bombs. Every year some joker called the principal’s office, said a bomb was hidden in a classroom, and everyone poured into the field till the threat had been neutralized. It was always the most memorable day of the year.
So—the children, on summer holiday, had heard about Mansoor and been shocked, or rather tried to act as shocked as their shocked parents; had been bewildered or not based on their experiences with death; and then had forgotten. When they got to school, many were convinced that the deaths of the Khurana boys and Mansoor’s injury were just rumors, like those you sometimes heard about fast senior girls having sex with hoodlums who had finished school. These children were soon proven wrong, giving rise to another round of bewilderment: What could this small Muslim boy have to do with the exploding market? How could he have survived?
“Bhainchod, did you set it off?” one senior with a bobbing Adam’s apple asked.
Mansoor looked at him with confused, cautious eyes.
Mansoor’s panic attacks in public spaces did not go away—they got worse. It was absurd, he told his mother, that there was no security in school to protect against terrorists and miscreants, and he was constantly on the lookout for suspicious bulging backpacks; he started violently if a football smashed against the grilles on the churchy windows, grilles designed specially to repel such invasions. In the break period he showed the wound on his right arm to his friends—a long smear of fibrous reddish skin hanging over his veins with the glistening clarity of egg white. Classmates surrounded him at all hours in the brick buildings of the school. It didn’t bring popularity but rather a sort of bland notoriety. He felt like a freak. He was still the only Muslim in school and he wanted to hide.
He got the chance with physiotherapy. In a clinic in Safdarjung Enclave, he lay in a cube of curtains, tortured by tinny Hindustani classical music as a slight woman in a lab coat lathered his wrists with cold goo and ran the feeler of an ultrasonic machine over them. Adults with decomposing bodies moaned around him in adjacent cubes. In this house of pain, he too was a grown-up. His physiotherapist was a South Indian lady named Jaya—his first experience with South Indians apart from Deepa Khurana. “You’re Muslim?” she asked, clearly startled. “You don’t look Muslim.” But she relaxed when he mentioned the blast. “It’s very bad. These days one can’t live in this country.” She was one of those people who are lost within themselves. She told him the same story over and over about how her brother worked in information technology in Houston and how she had visited him there. “There is a very high standard of living there,” she said. She asked the same questions every time, as if discovering anew that there was a patient there. “You also want to study IT, no? There’s a big scope in it.” He lay impatiently in bed. Afterwards, he went with his mother for a walk through Deer Park, happy among the vaguely caged animals—deer, peacocks, rabbits, the moving rubbish of stray dogs and cats, the mynahs with their minimal beauty.
When the terrorists were arrested, Mansoor asked, “But Papa, what if they get out of jail?”
“There’s a strict sentence for terrorism,” Sharif reassured him. Though he himself was wondering whether the right men had been captured; there was already talk among the Muslim intellectuals he knew, professors at Jamia, that the police had rounded up innocents as “terrorists”; that they had planted a stepney, a spare tire, in the room of a couple of papier-maché artisans in Bhogal and arrested their fourteen-year-old cousin, who had come for his summer vacation to Delhi from Srinagar; that the other arrested men had been in custody even before the blast.