The Association of Small Bombs(39)
Then, one day, during his sophomore year, while programming Boggle for a Programming Methods class, his wrists started to ache.
His wrists had ached off and on ever since the Lajpat Nagar blast—Jaya, in her pedantic way, had warned him that such deep-seated pain, at the level of the tissues, where the cells and nerves themselves had been singed, did not go away easily, and he was supposed to keep up his wrist and arm exercises, lying on a yoga mat and lifting one-kilogram weights in contorted poses. Of course, he hadn’t. Exercise bored him—why run if you weren’t being chased?—and he’d been caught up in the ardor of college. Now the flaring pain sent vectors of electricity up and down his right arm. In the unintelligible void of his muscles danced a thousand pins and needles. “Don’t panic,” he told himself. But what scared him was that the left wrist, weak from all that typing, could barely continue on its journey along the valleys and plateaus of the keyboard. His neck ached.
After a few days of this (within three days, he was totally unable to type) he went to see the physiotherapist at the campus health center. Sitting among fragrant potted plants, amazed by how similar the place looked to the physiotherapy center in India, though the two countries were ten thousand kilometers and eons of income apart, he was careful to explain how it had happened, his history with the bomb—careful to separate himself from the other namby-pambies who came to see her. The physiotherapist, a bright and squat pregnant woman with blond hair and enormous overworked arms, put his arms one at a time in a hot bath of wax, so that a skin of hot wax hardened on them. It was like having another skin. “The heat will be good for you,” she said. After a while, she cut the wax away softly with a butter knife—it was a pleasing sensation—and she gave him printouts showing exercises and different relaxation techniques and told him he would be totally OK.
But Mansoor’s pain didn’t get better. It got worse. A few weeks after his visit to the physiotherapist, he woke up in the middle of the night with his arms radiant and loud with electricity. The massive hunk of Eddy from San Antonio snored in the upper bunk. When he got up to go to the bathroom, sparks shot up his sciatic nerve and numbed his leg, and he stumbled.
“You’ve got tons of microtears in your wrists from typing,” Laurie, the physiotherapist, concluded, when he went back to see her. “These things build up over years. You get injured, you develop a compensatory posture when you type, and bam!—years later you have herniated discs. When did you start using a computer?” she asked.
“Twelve,” he said. He had got a 486 right after the blast—he had got so much after the blast!
“There you go—all those years of sitting still, hunched over, not taking breaks.” She told him he had carpal tunnel, an incurable condition. “Though it can be controlled and improved,” she assured him.
He was essentially crippled. Walking around the bright campus in a daze, he felt his right leg and right arm and left wrist go numb.
Free from India and still plagued by pain! After all these years! He’d changed his mind about the bomb so many times. Of course it was a curse to have witnessed that explosion, to have suffered so vividly—to have so many things opened to him at once: death, a woman’s hanging breast, the cowardice of men and women who ran screaming from the market. At other times—the blast had improved his life, hadn’t it? He’d eked a spectacular college essay out of it—the dean himself had congratulated him on it when he’d arrived. Now he played the essay back in his mind: those homilies and banalities he’d penned about terror, the death of his friends, communal harmony—bah! Maybe that was why he was suffering now: he’d tried to take advantage of a tragedy. His mind darkened. When it comes to cause and effect, he thought, I really do believe God exists; I really do think God is watching, drawing his conclusions, doling out consequences. Sometimes I don’t even know I’ve committed a sin till a punishment comes along.
After all, he wouldn’t have been typing so much if he hadn’t been in the U.S., where everything ran on computers, where the Internet was available on tap and the electricity never went out. And he wouldn’t have been in the U.S. without the essay. You have to stop thinking like that, he told himself. You did almost die. He saw again the small child with flaring red-hot fragments around him, the screams, the stampede, the cowardice of a whole society stripped bare. Most of the people who had learned these lessons about their country and city died seconds later, as if the bomb existed to prove to them, in their final moments, that they had lived a useless life in a useless place.
But the pain did not go away; it got worse. In the middle of his third semester in college, unable to function, he returned to India to recuperate.
CHAPTER 12
“How can it still be there?” his mother asked the doctor at the clinic in Safdarjung, blinking furiously.
The doctor was a stately Sikh who dressed in white shirts with matching white turbans; he worked with a lot of embassies. The great endorsement of anyone in Delhi: he works with embassies.
“Sometimes it takes years to heal,” he said, clearly occupied by other problems: financial ones, maybe; he had an undoctor-like anxiety in his eyes.
“I don’t understand why it’s coming back now, at this moment. The last time we came, if you remember, the checkup said everything was OK.”
Mama, Mansoor wanted to say, it’s not his fault.