The Association of Small Bombs(57)
CHAPTER 24
Tara had become tired of Ayub, of his brilliance, his neediness, his delusions of grandeur; she felt she deserved more. In December of the previous year, in anticipation of an eventual breakup, she had secretly applied to Brandeis for a master’s in social work. When she was admitted soon after the failure of the rally, she confronted Ayub and told him she wanted to break up.
Ayub, when he heard what she had to say, stood up from the bed in the NGO room, his eyes livid. “How dare you, you bitch!” he frothed, full of his normal uncontrolled anger.
“It’s my life!” Tara said.
“How dare you!” He thought she was doing this because the rally had failed.
They calmed down after a while and made up, sitting on the bed together, cajoling each other, feverishly discussing whether Ayub could find a way to go to the U.S. too.
But then, suddenly, Tara said, “I don’t like your smell.”
Ayub looked on in cool shock. Tara’s fairness, then, on the bed, was frightening to Ayub—like porcelain, speaking of centuries of superb breeding, of Aryan excitement.
“Brandeis, applying, going abroad—these are all excuses to get away from you,” Tara said. “I like you, admire you, but—something isn’t right. I don’t like the smell of your breath,” she repeated, as if shocked with the truth of this, formulating it for herself.
Ayub looked out of the window. From the room he could see an alley, and beyond, a backyard festooned with clotheslines. In the alley, a car had broken down between two flowing gutters. Beneath it, a runway of needles, discarded by the hospital, glistened in the sunshine, the garbage ponderously overflowing, everything protected by the rusty, aggressive fragrance of the air conditioner, in whose lungs the krill of pollution stuck.
Ayub’s heart got mixed up with the freezing waves of the air conditioner. A few days later, he left Delhi and returned to his hometown, Azamgarh.
When Mansoor heard of Ayub’s departure, he was shocked. “Where did you go?” he SMSed Ayub.
“Decided to start a job as an area salesman for Eveready,” Ayub SMSed back. “KEEP THE FIGHT ALIVE.”
Area salesman? For a battery company? What about Tara?
Tara was not helpful either. “Oh, that’s what he said? I think he’s gone to visit his father, who’s ill.” She threw her hair back and laughed her rich, upper-class tinkling laugh. “He’s so eccentric.”
CHAPTER 25
Ayub started working in his father’s “organick” nursery in Azamgarh, digging up turnips and potatoes under the hot UP sun.
He’d come very far, in a sense. Starting from a lower-middle-class Muslim family in UP he’d made his way to Delhi and established himself with his wit and charm and intelligence. Like Mansoor, he’d dealt with pain—the pain of separation, of being out of one’s depth, fearing one’s mortality—but had cured himself. (Unlike Mansoor, he hadn’t had the luxury of physiotherapy.) But he saw now that freedom from pain was a kind of sentence too—your mind, free to cast about in any direction, latched on to every outcome, every path, every regret. Whereas pain was focusing and drew you into yourself. It cut off options.
Sometimes, working on his father’s farm, Ayub tightened his neck, wishing the pain would return. It didn’t. He’d made himself too sturdy through religion and exercise. But his mind began to flower outward, became crowded with mirages. Tara stood knee-deep in a field of wheat, a few meters beyond him, hunched over and ready and sly, her eyes blinking and the soft, sensual braid tossed over her shoulder. A rumble in the distance made him glance up and he thought he saw an airplane flaming overhead, but it was just a trigger of sunlight. At night, in bed, he dreamed of school bullies and friends who had let him down out of jealousy when he’d had a little success in college as a festival organizer. A mild person, he’d always gone out of his way to put others at ease, to not threaten them with his intelligence. Now he regretted it.
He kept endlessly revising the day of the rally, his conversation with Tara, the swiftness with which everything had fallen apart.
Why hadn’t he said more when she’d broken up with him? But there was a part of him that was addicted to defeat. Even as he’d received the stabbing message from Tara, that part of him had swelled with brilliance and promise and negative fulfillment.
Ayub dug holes and toiled under the sun.
“We can show you a girl,” his mother said.
His mind was coming unmoored. The field, with its hideous infinity of dirt packed into a few acres, didn’t help.
He could have boarded a train and gone back, but he had no money and no real way of making any; his work with the Muslim community had taught him how difficult it was for educated Muslims to get jobs or even housing and this paranoia infected every future he could imagine for himself in Delhi. And the more he thought about money, the more he regretted how things had turned out with Tara—not only had they got along, but she had paid him a salary. “To hear you talk,” she’d once laughed. He was irritated by this comment, but once he began to speak, his self-consciousness fell away and he looked at her with unembarrassed frankness. “So what if I love to talk! I’m good at it.”
But there was also anger in him about how well she knew him, and he would be turned on and would wish to make love to her.