The Association of Small Bombs(42)
“No.” Mansoor smiled again. He crushed the paper cup and chucked it into a bin, where it parachuted into a ridge between other crushed cups. “I just wanted to watch. Anyone can come. But I should go.”
“But people don’t really come just like that—that’s why I was asking. But you’re a Muslim, no?”
“Yes,” Mansoor said, amazed at this religious clairvoyance. But he was gifted with it too; he had somehow known Naushad was a Muslim before he announced his name. “Actually I was a victim of the blast,” Mansoor said. “But I don’t have any connection with the case.”
“You were injured in the blast?” Naushad said, pointing a finger down at the ground in surprise.
Mansoor nodded. “I was small. But I got shrapnel in my arm.”
At that moment, Mansoor felt he had pulled out a trump card; that he had absolved himself of suspicion in the eyes of the dhaba-wallah, who had been listening to the exchange in an absent way; sopping up the conversation the way his samosas were sopping up oil.
“Don’t take this the wrong way,” Naushad said, clearly excited. “But you can really help us.” He launched into an explanation. “We’ve been working for two or three years for people to give attention to the locked-up men. Everyone knows—even the judges—that the wrong men have been arrested. You can read it in the documents: there was no independent witness present when they were arrested. That’s why they keep adjourning. But the issue is that after 9/11 and the Parliament attack, no one wants to help these people. ‘They’re bloody terrorists; let them rot,’ they say. But, bhai, they haven’t even been proven to be terrorists! One is a papier-maché artisan. Another was a student in class eight when he came to Delhi to stay with his brothers. And the last one, he used to work with his family in a carpet shop in Kathmandu. These people’s lives have been ruined, and now six years have passed without a trial. So we’re making an effort to bring out the story in the press. And look, if someone like you, an educated person, a victim—if you say something, imagine how much more of a difference it’ll make. Let me write my name and e-mail and phone on a chit”—he had already taken out a tattered lined paper and was pressing a pen into it against a timber column in the tea shop—“and if you want to help please phone us or e-mail us. Here you go.” He handed Mansoor the chit. “As salaam aleikum,” he said.
“Wa aliekum as salaam,” Mansoor said.
Mansoor liked that the man did not press him, but it was also one of many encounters during a sullen winter and he did not make much of it. Instead, at home, Mansoor focused on coaxing his injured limbs to life, dipping his arms in alternating casseroles of hot and cold water and pulling up his sweater sleeves, his feet feeling cuffed to the marble floor. When he doused his arms in the water, his back ached; his body parts jostled and screamed for attention. When one part improved, the other took on the mantle of pain. Jaya explained that the computer, because of the intensity of attention it demanded, turned the muscles into hard microchips.
He was in the middle of this ritual when he got a call from his friend Darius.
Darius had been a schoolmate of Mansoor’s, but not someone he’d been particularly close with—whom had he been close with?—and so when Darius came on the phone, Mansoor was oddly excited.
“How are you, Mansoor?”
“Fit, yaar,” he said, turning back into the anxious-to-please second-tier-popular student he’d been in school.
They talked for a while about an elderly art teacher who had recently died of a stroke—she was a chain-smoking radical leftist who had made them paint antinuclear signs (INDIA: NO CLEAR POLICY) for half a year after the Pokhran tests—and then Darius said, “So I’m calling because you met my friend Naushad.”
It turned out that after a year at St. Stephen’s studying history, Darius had become an activist. “Anyway,” Darius went on, “he told me about his idea of getting you involved and I think it would be excellent. In fact I had told him about you at one point but I didn’t know you had come back to Delhi.”
Mansoor felt a dip in his mood. “Yaah, it’s a health issue.”
“Anyway,” Darius said in his unhearing way, “it’s a great group of people, very smart, and you’ll like Tara, who runs it. A Dipsite but she’s very eloquent. Anyway, I think these people are making quite a bit of difference. Wouldn’t hurt to come for at least one meeting.”
Mansoor didn’t want to go, but he had never really learned to say no, even after what had happened in the market with the Khurana boys, and so, on a rainy afternoon, he went over to the nursing home in Defence Colony where the group met—Tara’s mother, a doctor, ran the hospital.
The nursing home was a wide dish of a building smarting of disinfectant; the smell seemed to have struck dead the stunted palms in the front. Shivering, Mansoor climbed the stairs past the rooms with their sounds of conspiring patients and came to a bare room full of men and women sitting cross-legged in a circle. “You can sit down anywhere,” a woman said, her sharp canines visible. She was attractive, in a fair vampirish way, and must have been Tara.
Darius and Naushad got up and introduced Mansoor, who put his palms together, like a politician.
There were twenty people in all, most of them his age, some wearing checked shirts and pants, the women in modest salwar kameezes, a few heads dotted with skullcaps, gol topis, the Muslim women identifiable by their coquettish pink head scarfs.