The Association of Small Bombs(46)

The couple selling the property were acquaintances of Sharif’s college friend Mahinder; they were liberal and friendly and when they had met Sharif, they had talked enthusiastically about their various Muslim friends. “Do you know Arif Khan? He was the vice chancellor of AMU at one point.” These connections doubled Sharif’s relief.

But as the day approached to meet and sign the actual deed and to transfer the full amount, problems began to occur.

The Sahnis, who had been so warm and effusive when Sharif had met them, became hard to pin down. One week they were on vacation in Goa. Another week they were visiting their eldest son in Toronto, then the younger one in Singapore. They returned Sharif’s calls erratically, and finally, not at all.

“Do you think they’re trying to cheat us?” Sharif asked Afsheen.

“I don’t know,” Afsheen said. “You should ask Mahinder.”

“They gave you a chit—so you don’t need to worry about the money,” Mahinder said when Sharif called him. “You’ll get that back. But the thing we need to find out is if they’ve found someone else who’s offering them a higher price. People are greedy. She’s a school principal but people who run schools are no better than anyone else. In fact, sometimes they’re even greedier than others because they think they’re being corrupt for a good cause.”

“So what should we do?” Sharif asked.

“Let me investigate,” Mahinder said.

During this time, Sharif kept phoning the Sahnis to set up a date. He drove past the house in the Asiad like a despondent lover, wondering why these perfect situations didn’t work out for him. And he felt the loss of his money—which he hadn’t really lost, but was in limbo—keenly.

Then Mahinder confirmed what they’d both suspected: the Sahnis had found another buyer willing to pay a higher price.



Sharif now sprang into action. His lawyer served the Sahnis a show-cause notice for breach of contract. The Sahnis appeared in court, furious, no longer the mild paternal Punjabis they’d pretended to be. But then the Sahnis’ lawyer, a young woman in a suit, muddled things and admitted they’d taken money from two parties and the judge, snorting and shaking his head, issued a stay order.

The Sahnis turned out to be horrible, unapologetic people.

“How dare you take us to court,” Mrs. Sahni fumed at Sharif outside the court. “Is this any way to behave? You expect us to sell you our property now?”

Strange woman, thought Sharif—she acts like the property is some kind of business partnership between us. When in fact, as soon as she sells me the property, everything will be over in our relationship.

Sharif told the Sahnis that they had given him no choice. He had called about twenty times and been swatted away with excuses at every turn.

“You’re too pushy,” Mr. Sahni said. “We told you it would take time. When you saw the property I told you we didn’t want the deposit till we came back from Canada. You only insisted.”

But you accepted the money! Sharif wanted to say. Still, he kept quiet. He knew how to use silence; his goatee enhanced his impassivity.

For a few days, the Sahnis blustered—on the phone and through their lawyer. Sharif, advised by Mahinder and his lawyer, kept his nerve and refused to respond to these provocations. Finally Mrs. Sahni called and said she would like to meet the Ahmeds at the Golf Club.

“They’re trying to show their classiness,” Afsheen observed.

They had underpriced the place, Mrs. Sahni told them when they sat down for coffee and biscuits and fizzing lime soda at the overly slick, cracked Formica table that is the hallmark of all Indian clubs. It was their mistake, she admitted. They had not realized that the scooter garage that came with the place was also worth a good ten lakhs. It was an honest blunder, she said; hence the confusion.

Sharif was enraged. The cheek of these people! Caught red-handed trying to sell it to someone else, and now, instead of apologizing, they ask for more!

“I’m very firm,” he said. “I’ve given the deposit.”

But then Afsheen interjected. “We’ll think about it,” she said, putting her hand on Sharif’s.



“What do you mean—we’ll think about it!” Sharif thundered at her in the car. “They’re wrong.”

“You do have a temper,” she said. “And you put people off with your pushiness. What’s ten lakhs in the long term? We like the property; we don’t want to fight—might as well pay it and get it over with.”

Mansoor, when he heard both sides of the argument, agreed with his mother.

But Sharif couldn’t accept it. He raged against his wife and son, against the Sahnis, and consulted his lawyer. Finally he decided that it would be cheaper to pay this ransom than to pay lawyers’ fees for decades.



The money was exchanged; the deal was completed in a urine-soaked registrar’s office in Bijwasan on a cold December day.

It was only when it was all over that the lawyer noticed a problem in the paperwork.

The property came with a lien, a debt, on it. For Rs. 20 crores. Rs. 200 million.



Mr. Sahni, when Sharif had first met him, had said he was in the export business—had boasted about how well he was doing, how he had two sons settled abroad, one in Toronto, another in Singapore. But there had been something off about the Sahnis from the start, Sharif realized. They owned this duplex in Asiad, in the heart of the city, but lived in a strange farmhouse-cum-bunker in Palam Vihar, an incomplete colony on the outskirts of Delhi, a crisscross of plots overgrown with thorny scrub and grass and keekar trees. There was something provisional about the house too—the furniture heavy and Punjabi, with no carpets covering the terrazzo floor and no art on the walls and twenty balloons up against the ceiling of the drawing room, the detritus of their granddaughter’s birthday, they’d said. But Sharif, who had been introduced to these people through Mahinder, was so grateful to have found a good house for himself, to find Hindus who would deal with Muslims, that he’d ignored all these signs and justified it to himself. And the Sahnis had justified it to Sharif too. “We want to give the money to our sons,” Mrs. Sahni had said in her sweet convent-educated voice. “It’s more useful to them, now that they’re living abroad. As for us, we like living in this greenery, away from the rush of Delhi. The drive to my school is just twenty minutes from here.”