The Association of Small Bombs(50)
CHAPTER 19
At home, Mansoor found himself in the grip of a profound anger. He kept looking back at the day of the bombing and seeing Mr. and Mrs. Khurana skulking about and talking in their bright house, tall human adults in their forties, Mr. Khurana in a white shirt and khaki pants, Deepa Auntie in a red kameez dyed with purple mangoes running down the front in parallel rows (how vividly he remembered the details of that day, as if it had been stained by the wine of memory), full of domestic swagger and confidence, lost in their adult world, discussing bills and the latest gossip about a relative who had left her husband, the kids playing around and under them, kids they were eager to shoo out. Why had they been so irresponsible—with him in particular? But Indians were like that, happy to be puppets of fate. “Chalta hai.” “It’s in God’s hands.” “Everything goes.”
When Mansoor had told Vikas Uncle he’d call his mother so she could pick him up, Vikas Uncle had perversely cajoled him into going with Tushar and Nakul to the market. “Don’t worry, yaar,” he’d said, sitting back lazily in the sofa chair, his arms forming a relaxed hammock behind his head. Mansoor hated him.
The Khuranas had never apologized to him.
Mansoor’s thoughts flew in a circle of rage. His wrists hurt, his back throbbed, he sweated, his sciatica sparked. In his room, he turned the pages of ten odd books strewn on his bed—the Chomskys, Roys, Dalrymples. He wasn’t reading them, but testing his pain; even turning a page hurt. He was a highly defective machine, sensitive to everything.
When he sat on the sofa in the drawing room, the same old drawing room with its chests from Korea and Indonesia, its frantic unreconstructed Orientalism, the Orientalism only allowed to people in the Orient, a sickly current, like that of a tube light about to die, vomiting the last of its milky light, filled the columns of his arms.
Surrounded by unfeeling objects, his parents off to the lawyers to discuss the case and to figure out how to keep the business running (Sharif ran a plastics consulting and supply company), he began to whimper. Nothing had changed for him since the day after the bomb, when he had come back home to this very pain.
During a moment of insanity, he imagined doing something different—becoming a full-time activist and teacher with the group, traveling around the country and educating people about communal violence and . . . carpal tunnel. What if he became a doctor or physiotherapist like that South Indian bore Jaya? Well, that would be amusing!
Eventually, out of loneliness and rage, Mansoor returned to volunteering for Peace For All.
CHAPTER 20
The group meetings were the same—the discussions about the 1996 inmates had been put on hold to develop strategies to protest Modi when he arrived in Delhi a few weeks from now—but Mansoor, sitting on the floor, a mute spectator to the verbal drama, haggard and uneasy, avoiding Ayub, began to notice something strange: his pain had become much worse after the nerve conduction test. Whereas before he’d experienced a snipping tension and tiredness and a subcutaneous wetness, now an elastic, electric current spread through his limbs, dizzying him with its dull throb, making him feel like an overly tightened string instrument.
He began to wonder if there was something to Ayub’s notion that the pain was partly mental, seeing how it had jumped after the diagnosis from the doctor. At home, on his bed, enclosed by a life-size poster of Tendulkar on one side and of Michael Jackson on the other—old posters from the age of fourteen he had never taken down or replaced—he began to read the book Ayub had given him, The Religion of Pain.
The book said straightforward things. Pain was a response to injury. But when pain didn’t go away it was because a deep-seated psychological pattern had been established; besides, back pain hadn’t existed till fifty years before—before that, people got ulcers when they were depressed; where were ulcers now? Replaced by back pain. Mansoor skipped pages, his wrists singing with pain, his chin sunk into his neck, the back of his neck stiff. He was a mannequin of pain, controlled by it; he altered his posture every few seconds and kept the bloated tuber of the hot-water bottle pressed to his lumbar.
Then Mansoor got to the part where the author proposed a solution.
The solutions seemed laughably simple. One, the author wrote, exercise frequently but don’t focus unduly, in your exercises, on the troubled part of the body; and two, visualize at night the body part that suffers from pain and imagine it getting better.
In normal circumstances, Mansoor would have shrugged these off, but he was so down and out that he decided to give them a try.
Miraculously, as the weeks wore on, he began to get better. Establishing a routine of Iyengar yoga poses, swimming a few turgid laps in the covered Gymkhana pool, and skidding forward on the treadmill in the gym, he felt his pain beginning to dissipate, clear out, the way a clogged sinus might suddenly give up the ghost of its liquid. The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.
(Later, when it was all over, when his life was coming to an end, he would think that he had probably started to recover because months of therapy had paid off; that he had been misdiagnosed during the nerve test; and that his recovery had been an act of faith and belief, the sort that can only take hold of a person when he is at his lowest.
But then, in the middle of this storm of circumstances, with his father’s fortune disappearing and the family in decline and his future uncertain and curtailed and the bomb still sitting vastly on the horizon of his past, like a furious private sun, always pulling him toward it—in the middle of this, this experiment with visualization, with accepting there might be other reasons for pain beside injury, had seemed like a paradigm shift.)