The Association of Small Bombs(55)
“That’s the type of site we need to start,” Mansoor told Ayub. “Something that connects old values with new problems.” He knew he sounded idealistic, but he suppressed his self-consciousness. “I know someone who can help with videos for the site,” he told Ayub, thinking, in that circular way of his, of Vikas Uncle.
CHAPTER 21
Ayub felt close to Mansoor too. When Mansoor had opened up to him about sex, he had been surprised and touched. After that he had started considering him a close friend.
They began to go for walks together in the parks of Delhi—Lodhi Garden, the Mehrauli complex; they even drove out one day to Coronation Park. Then one evening, in the park of Khan-I-Khana, with its powerful pocked tomb and its aura of a thousand bats, Ayub told Mansoor. “Tara and I. We have something special between us.” He felt shy and fumbled with a leaf in his hand. “We’ve been together for two years, before Peace For All.”
“I knew about it,” Mansoor said, smiling broadly.
“Oh, we were trying to hide it,” Ayub said.
Mansoor had noticed the tension between Ayub and Tara. They assiduously avoided each other during meetings and looked away when the other spoke. Mansoor felt happy for Ayub. Tara was a tall, sensible, brilliant woman with a comical face like a touched-up, feminized version of the principal in Archie comics. But this made her beauty accessible. Her smile gave her away as a sincere person—not one driven to the icy, egotistical, inhumane extremes of activism. Mansoor often stared at her during meetings—she was the only Hindu girl there, and the most cheerful and confident. “You would be good together,” he said.
For a while it seemed that Mansoor, with the newfound glow of religion, could be happy for anyone. Then negativity once again took his world hostage.
CHAPTER 22
Mansoor was sitting with Tara and Ayub at a dhaba in JNU, drinking cutting tea, when it started.
After Ayub had told him about Tara, the three of them had started going out together, eating pizza and burgers and lime ice at Nirula’s, savoring tea from Tara’s and Ayub’s favorite dhabas, and discussing their dreams.
Tara wanted to start a communal harmony institute, one in which common values would be shared and discussed. “There’s a big scope for that,” she said. “You can see people have a hunger to discuss these issues when you go to schools. But there isn’t any outlet for them.”
Ayub wanted to get into politics. “People like me need to take some initiative,” he said. “That’s why I left engineering. My whole family was in shock. Every day they send me messages through relatives trying to see that I’m not on drugs. They can’t fathom why someone like me would do something of this sort.” He grinned and pressed his hand for a second onto Tara’s palm, which was open limply on the table, as if this were an old joke between them. Tara, who was slumped forward on the table—she slumped when she was happy and at ease with people—smiled at him, a tiny candle of a smile, one that created intimacy in the crowded dhaba with its students debating Marxism and whatnot.
“So what do you want to do, Mansoor? Be an engineer?” Tara asked, looking across at him after that private moment.
“Me? Be an activist, I suppose,” he said. But he was gulping now, for reasons he couldn’t understand.
He noticed that Tara was pressing her other hand against Ayub’s under the dhaba table.
That’s when it started. It was as instantaneous as pain. It was jealousy.
He didn’t know why or how it took hold—but there it was, lurking powerfully. This relationship, Mansoor thought, it’s just Ayub’s way out of poverty, out of being lower-class. That’s why he’s in this NGO—to attach himself to this rich, idealistic girl.
As for Tara, she likes having power over these desperate Muslim men.
But Mansoor was thinking of himself. As the three of them had ventured out together, he had become more and more attracted to Tara. His blood jumped in her presence. Her perfume, her mysterious unfashionable waft of coconut, even her sweat—all this turned him on. All the old sexual obsessions returned. But he had no way to exorcize these thoughts now—wasn’t allowed to masturbate. At home, in his room, not masturbating took up all his time; it was almost as all-consuming as watching porn and masturbating.
He wanted to talk to Ayub about this struggle against sexual impulses but felt guilty that he was struggling over his girlfriend.
As the weeks went on, Mansoor’s struggle became solitary. Thoughts and images about sex, about undressed women, shot like arrows of flesh through his brain. Stop, he shouted, at home, down on the marble floor, praying. When he visualized the happy round of cricket with Tushar and Nakul in the park, a naked Elizabeth Hurley stalked onto the pitch, interrupting the game.
Please, God, Mansoor prayed. Are you testing me?
Then one day he lost control and masturbated and was filled with disgust and cursed himself: May your wrists go black!
But in this way, slowly, he fell into a trap of masturbation and self-hate.
So when he met Ayub and Tara a few days after the encounter at JNU—they were at Flavors now—and they told him excitedly that they were organizing one of the largest mass protests in Delhi’s history to interrupt Narendra Modi’s visit to the city, that they had corralled activists from all over the city, Mansoor could only nod grimly. He was a miserable, poisonous person, he felt, unworthy of God.