The Association of Small Bombs(41)

Pulling back her graying hair, she brought out a photo album with a dizzying fluorescent green and maroon cover. “Here are pictures of you and the boys at the Sports Day in Maharani Bagh,” she said, opening to a plastic page with two photos jammed at sad angles inside it. But her eyes were blurry; she left the pictures open too long; she was lost.

When Mansoor was leaving, Vikas Uncle said, “I want to give you something.” They went to the bathroom together. This was Vikas Uncle’s studio, a space that had been converted after the boys’ deaths—what was the use, after all, of two toilets? Above, water bled gauntly through the pipes, and notebooks lay in an abject circle on the floor around the toilet column. The bathing area was a chaos of equipment—black pieces of angled metal, tripods, cameras in their plastic hoods. From this pile Vikas Uncle fished out a bulky Minolta camera with a silver focus. “I’d kept it for the boys,” he said. “But I want you to have it.”

“No, uncle. Where will I use it?”

“Take it,” he said. “I know digital is in fashion these days, but the quality you can get from this is unparalleled. I’ve photographed some very beautiful ladies with this camera, when I was doing shoots for Cosmo.”



Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself.

“But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently.



“They gave you another thing?” his mother said when he came home. “They shouldn’t have. Anyway, their finances aren’t so good. Deepa was saying that these days, because there’s a new distribution system, it’s very difficult to get financing for art films.”

“I’m so old now,” Mansoor said, which was neither here nor there.

“Let me keep it,” she said, taking the camera from him.

He knew what would happen—it would disappear, like all the things Vikas Uncle had given him over the years. His mother had immense empathy for the Khuranas, but like so many people, she was superstitious about death, cautious about not letting it sneak into her house.





CHAPTER 13



Now, for the first time as an adult, Mansoor became curious about the Lajpat Nagar case. Then one day, on the way back from physio, having read in the newspaper that a hearing was scheduled in Patiala House, he directed the driver to take him to the court.

Mansoor had never been to the courts before—those barracks of Indian life crammed behind the colonial facades of Lutyens’s Delhi—but he had a chacha who was a lawyer and had heard a great deal about the institution. When his parents rang him on his mobile, he silenced it. He wanted time to himself.

He got out of the car and, after lightly acknowledging the guard at the entrance, walked through the open bricked corridors with their searching blind fingers of dead trees, their groggy supplicants in red and white sweaters. Through his swimming nervous vision he saw signs indicating the names of the courtrooms. Finally, he entered a courtroom the size of a classroom. At the front of the room, two lawyers in their penguinlike garb, their backs turned to the audience, were murmuring to the judge, who bent his head down from his high boatlike desk. When Mansoor sat down in the last row, his wrists almost spiritual with pain, one of the lawyers twisted around for a second and then went back to talking. A few moments later, several hassled-looking men with sweat-soaked shirts appeared at the door, carrying what seemed to be a Chinese changing screen, the type behind which naked women are always banished in old movies. Now the lawyers turned around completely. The men began to set up the screen near the front of the room.

“The proceeding is in camera,” the judge said suddenly.

There was a commotion and throat-clearing in the aisles next to Mansoor.

“In camera,” he repeated, irritated.

People began to rise.

“You have to get up,” a woman in a smart pantsuit instructed Mansoor.

Perplexed, having exited, Mansoor lingered now by the tea stall outside the Sessions Court, watching the dhaba-wallah fry samosas in a deep wok. He was in a philosophical mood, thinking back to the stories the Khuranas had told about the adjournments.

“You good name?” a voice interrupted him.

Mansoor turned around to see himself facing a man with a squashed, eager look about him; a neckless fellow with crooked teeth bejeweling his gums. Mansoor recognized him from the courtroom.

Mansoor mumbled, “Hello.”

“My name is Naushad,” the man said quickly, placing a palm on his chest. “I work for an NGO, Peace For All.” Peace For All, according to Naushad, focused on “communal harmony” and was looking to provide a just, speedy trial for the men arrested for the 1996 blast. “You’re a journalist?” he asked Mansoor.

“No, no—just a visitor,” Mansoor said, smiling slightly, now understanding the reason for his forwardness.

“You have a relative in the case?” Naushad asked in Hindi.