The Association of Small Bombs(56)

“We want to bring the city to a standstill,” Tara was saying. “If necessary, we want people to court arrest. You know what Gandhi said the Jews of Europe should do when faced with Hitler?”

“No,” Mansoor said, though he’d heard her say this a million times.

“Commit mass suicide,” Tara said, savoring the words with the intensity of someone who has obviously not considered it seriously. “Throw themselves from cliffs. Think of it. If the Jews were able to muster that kind of courage, the Holocaust would have never happened. We want to get to that level of nonviolence.”

“But doesn’t suicide count as violence?” Ayub asked rhetorically.

“You’re right. It does. But you’re allowed that kind of contradiction when you’re up against a completely unrepentant force.”

“I see,” Mansoor said, interrupting this public lovemaking of activists. “And what about the 1996 blast accused?” There had been a lull on that front. Mansoor and Ayub and Tara had written editorials together about the accused and mailed them to the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, and the Pioneer but had not heard back; the editors at these papers, it seemed, were not interested in the unique slant of a victim asking for a terrorist’s release.

“We’ll work on that after the rally,” Tara said in her direct, no-nonsense way.



“Everything OK with you, boss?” Ayub asked him when Tara had gone to the toilet.

“Of course,” he said, though he meant the opposite.



When Mansoor looked at himself in the mirror at home, he saw a dark, small, pathetic person, an ugly person, a person who shouldn’t have lived. He saw that these feelings had nothing to do with the bomb. This was who he was.





AYUB AZMI’S RESPONSE TO TERROR


   MARCH 2003–OCTOBER 2003





CHAPTER 23



Ayub and Tara had been planning the rally for months, even before Mansoor had joined the NGO. To see it on the horizon excited them. Then, in March, it happened.

Ayub and Tara came to the roads near the India International Centre worked up and expectant—having not slept the previous night, having stayed up reading selections from Gandhi’s Autobiography, Ambedkar’s essays, the speeches of MLK and Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. “It’s so touching, the sense of empowerment Islam gave to all these colonial people, to slaves. America’s attempt to crush Islam is an attempt to destroy the self-esteem of the rising, conquered people,” Ayub had said. Tara had nodded her head in agreement.

Then, in the late morning, right before the rally began, Ayub faxed the police about the protest from the market near the site of the event; this was a loophole activists exploited. You were supposed to inform the police about any rally you held, but there was no statute on exactly when you told them, as long as it was before and in writing.

Doing it in person was too dangerous since the police would ask you to lead them to the rally.

Yet, when Ayub joined the crowd on the road—hundreds of men and women chanting and holding up signs—he found the police already there, battalions pouring forth from Gypsies and coming up to the protesters, asking them questions and gently herding them onto the sidewalk. “You can’t do that,” Ayub said. “It’s a nonviolent protest.”

“You shut up, you terrorist,” a policeman—younger than Ayub, livid with youth—said.

Ayub was wearing his skullcap.

Ayub made to attack him but a couple of older policemen, blasé in their interaction with the disaffected, pushed him aside.

“Arrest me,” Ayub said, holding out his wrists.

“You’re not worth an arrest,” a policeman with gray hair said, stepping out to shout at a pimply activist who started running at the bark from the policeman.

Then something terrible happened on that spring day. The crowd dispersed.



The next day when Tara and Ayub opened the paper, there wasn’t even a mention of the protest.



Tara and Ayub debated what had happened with the members of the NGO—all of them, including Mansoor, had attended the disappointing protest—and fell privately into despair. Ayub began to believe that nonviolence didn’t work. He’d had this feeling for a long time but had said nothing to Tara about it. In the NGO room, where they often met to kiss before meetings—they had still never made love—he scolded her. “I knew it wouldn’t work.”

“I didn’t personally tell people not to come,” she said bitterly.

“But we should have known.”

“You prepared for it too!”

Ayub went on ranting for a while—frothing, gesticulating, blaming Tara for her na?veté, for her earnestness—till he finally stopped. “I’m sorry.” He lived like this—in these explosions of passion. He was a passionate person.

Nevertheless, his loss of faith in nonviolence cut deep. He believed nonviolence suffered the fundamental problem of having no traffic with the media. The media reveled in sex and violence—how could nonviolence, with its graying temples and wise posture, match up?

Ayub tried to come up with alternatives—nonviolent spectacles, theater, protests—but all these needed participants and an audience.

He was not prepared when, a week later, Tara broke things off with him.