The Association of Small Bombs(53)
“The women?” said Mansoor.
“No. Not the women, the graffiti, the buildings—nothing. I expected all these things. What I noticed was the things that were missing. Old people, for example. I realized you could go days without seeing an old person. Where are they? I asked my brother. Why aren’t there old people in New York?” He looked at Mansoor. “They’re all in retirement homes, of course. Hidden away from sight the way dead people are immediately put in a morgue or buried. In America, you see, you’re not supposed to take care of the elderly. You’re supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams. But what happens when you grow old? Will your individualism save you? No—you’ll be put away like the dead. In America, you see, you die twice—once when you grow old, and once when you actually die. But the illusion of youth must be preserved at all costs. This is what I felt about New York. It was a place you could waste your whole life without thinking once about others—until you too were put away and replaced by the young. I could suddenly see why al-Qaeda wanted to target New York. It’s a place that prides itself on being the most awake, but it’s asleep to reality.”
“Everyone I met was struggling with depression,” Mansoor said, agreeing. “It was almost fashionable to be depressed. I didn’t think about it then, but it was because many of them were cut off from their families. They had no way of making meaning. That’s what happened to me too: the wrist problem, it was a type of depression.” He turned to Ayub. “I just remembered something you said when we first talked. That your pain only went away when you started thinking about others.”
“Not just that,” Ayub said. “But when I found God.”
Mansoor’s mind was aswirl. He was on the verge of something great, of something new, and his entire worldview had been blotted out. He saw now that his selfishness stretched all the way back to the bomb: how holding on to fear, not facing up to the panic attacks, was a form of selfishness, of thinking your fate was in your hands, when in fact it was all up to the Almighty. If his family had believed in God, they would have continued as they had before the blast. Instead, they’d been visited by a string of holy men—gaunt, bent men with silver stubble and bronze lockets and bright eyes and patrician faces who asked him to bend beside them as they offered prayers, who greedily drank the cold coffee and mirchi toast his mother offered. . . . Yes, the family had been eager to thank God, but not to trust Him. The bomb had induced in the family a kind of hypochondria. They saw the bomb everywhere they went. It was not God they worshipped, but the bomb.
As these revelations crowded him on his bed, Mansoor felt a tug of regret in his chest.
He paved over this feeling by attacking books on religion eagerly (the same eagerness with which he’d devoured The Fountainhead on the steps of the plaza at his university) and saw within them a template for how to live, the point of obscure customs like keeping women modest and veiled—it was not to oppress women, he saw, but to reduce the sum of lust in society. Ever since he’d come back to Delhi from California, he’d thought of sex less, because he saw less flesh on the street. Thus, if there were no lascivious hoardings and cutouts of lingerie models in Delhi Times and on FTV, one would think of sex even less.
As he made these observations, he felt the centuries between him and Mohammed collapsing and had the distinct sense that the words and wisdom passed down through the Quran and the Hadiths and al-Tabari were meant for someone of his disposition and body type. As for God himself, He was a universal blank, a lack of ego, a way of accepting and admitting that you were a small person, that your problems were small, that you should care about things bigger than yourself.
Going deeper into learning about Islam, Mansoor could see how a crisis of values was afoot not only in the Western world but in India, which had become a lapdog of the West, eager to imbibe its worst ideas while ditching its best ones. This crisis was most evident on TV, with its profusion of sex (probably where his own sex obsession had started, he thought); in the rapid construction of malls; in the increased incidence of divorce and suicide and rape and depression; most of all, in the profusion of health problems and clinics catering to them.
I’ve embodied these problems, he thought. I came from a background without God. I had nothing to keep me from imbibing, without discrimination, everything that gave me pleasure. I fell for the false prophet Ayn Rand. But then I got lucky. At my lowest, when I could find no way to go on, I met Ayub and found God.
Then, one day, Mansoor found himself back at Lajpat Nagar. He was dazed to be back. He hadn’t been to the market in years, had avoided it in that unself-aware way in which it is possible to sidestep any part of a city—that’s what cities are, devices to sidestep things—and now here he was, standing in the crush of tin and tarpaulin, everything smaller than he remembered it, also more modern: How many years had passed! He came across the framing shop, a small cube of glass, and could remember exactly where he’d been standing when the bomb went off, the earth-shattering stillness that followed, partly because he’d gone deaf and partly because everyone was in shock. He scanned the ground outside the shop instinctively for scars, cyclonic ditches left by the explosion. But there was no sign of the bomb in the market. Like all other tragedies, it had been covered up; the market had gone into a huddle of concrete and commerce around the blast, paving over the scars like a jungle coming back over a burnt field. Even the fence of the park had been repaired, painted an unrusting golden yellow. The only thing that had really changed about the market, apart from the natural modern face-lifts to the shops, was that cars—those chariots of misery and fire—had been banished from the square. Which was why, even as the square seemed smaller to Mansoor, it felt less dangerous. Men in white shirts and women in colorful clothes streamed past, but there was no physical threat from smashing marauding vehicles. A cow with rock-black eyes munched something in a corner, its horns rubbed down to nubs.