The Association of Small Bombs(52)
His hands were much better now and his fear of typing gradually went away. In fact, whenever he felt fear, or pain—the manifestation of fear—he kept going.
The Internet, which had been closed to him for so long, now was thrown open again and he dashed off e-mails to friends and read Yahoo! News and Rolling Stone as he had in the past.
It was when he almost visited a porn website that he began to recall what had caused this trauma in the first place.
When he’d moved to the U.S., he’d been fully healed. The pain in his right arm and wrist were in the past; the bomb itself was in the past. But the bomb, churning the materials of the city, eking a war zone out of a regular market, had ruined Delhi for him. He spent his childhood doing homework and pecking brutally at the keyboard. He had no desire to leave the house, to risk another encounter with a bomb, and when he did try to leave, to visit friends, to hang out with them at PVR and Priya (where the boys often got into A movies by showing the bemused lads in the ticket booths the hair on their legs as proof of age), his parents encouraged him to stay home. “Watch a movie here,” they said. “Invite your friends. Lamhe has such a good selection of LDs.” So he never left.
When he went to the U.S. and found himself suddenly alive, free of fear, he’d been enraged about all the time he’d wasted; angry at his parents in conspiring with the bomb to keep him indoors.
Encountering freedom for the first time, he threw himself into everything: he drank, smoked, partied, smoked up, even kissed a girl in the corner of a room during a party. He was amazed at how quickly the inhibitions he’d rehearsed over a lifetime—the belief, for example, that one shouldn’t have sex before marriage—fell away. He was like a snake overdue for shedding its skin. And with every inhibition he shed, he was angrier at his parents—parents who had first exposed him to the bomb instead of protecting him and had then punished him by keeping him indoors, where he learned and experienced nothing (in this new atmosphere of freedom, he forgot that much of his imprisonment was self-imposed, brought on by fear and panic attacks—he had been afraid of Delhi the way he later became afraid of typing, thinking that, just as Delhi might rip off his face in a sudden upwelling of fire, the machine might cripple him for life). He briefly stopped communicating with his parents. He led what he would later call a “dissipated life.” It was after a weekend of drinking that his wrists gave way.
He made no connection between his wrists and his new life; he seemed incapable of making connections of any kind on his own (another symptom of an overprotected childhood). But even then he knew that he was overusing the computer—if not to study, then to watch porn.
He had become addicted to porn. The obsession with porn was an aspect of an obsession with sex. When he arrived in the U.S., he’d only seen a few pictures—his dial-up Internet in Delhi wasn’t fast enough to load videos. That changed quickly. His roommate Eddy, with his Cheshire cat grin, watched porn on his computer openly, obsessively, keeping the door ajar so that the moans of women wafted down the corridors of the dorm. Dealing with some problem of his own—Eddy had been a football player in school, but was possibly gay; he had the largest collection of shoes Mansoor had ever seen, and he cried easily—Eddy plastered the walls with posters of seminude women from Maxim magazine. In the day, with the sun beating against the windows, the room emitted a rank yellowish glow—the glow of an adult store. Mansoor had not known how to resist this assault on the walls. Perhaps he didn’t want to resist—he wanted to buck stereotypes about Muslims, stereotypes that were flourishing after 9/11, and anyway he too liked porn. He talked with disgust to girls about Eddy’s pitiful misogyny but watched days’ worth of porn, on his own, in secret, when Eddy was gone or asleep. He felt guilty, felt watched by God, but it was overruled by the great pleasure of seeing blond naked bodies trapped in his laptop monitor, providing him a template in which to fit the unapproachable girls who roamed the hallways in their towels.
Around the same time he read The Fountainhead and became obsessed with becoming a great programmer at the expense of everything else.
But his body had been unable to take it, and he’d come reeling back to India, his wrists aflame. Now, in India, in the mosque, he saw his body was simply rejecting this selfish way of life; it was begging him to pause, reconsider. And he did. He thought about who he actually was: a mild person, brought up with firm good Muslim values, someone who thrived not on pursuing individual pleasures, but on being among people like himself, living a life of moderation: praying, exercising, thinking healthy thoughts. The more he realized the connection between the mind and the brain, the more he wished to keep his mind clean. If you had horrible thoughts, if you carried rage against your parents and sexual fury against women in your head, as he had—how could you be healthy, happy? Your body imploded. You became the bomb.
When he told Ayub this, shared these revelations, Ayub said, “Again, you’re coming up against the Western belief in the individual.” They were walking once more in the shopping complex near Holy Child Nursing Home. “There are no higher values, people in the West say. Live by your own instincts, for yourself, for your own pleasure. You know, I went once to New York. My brother works for a man in the diamond business in Dubai and I went along. I transported the diamonds in my pocket. That’s how all diamonds are taken—they’re too precious to put in a suitcase. You know what struck me about New York?”