The Association of Small Bombs(6)
The man was much more at ease with the ice cream out of his hands. Taking a hankie out of his pocket, he wiped his face and then his forehead. “There’s a PCO nearby. We can phone from there.”
As they walked in the direction Mansoor had come from, Mansoor having gratefully demolished the ice cream (even as he dreaded the germs he’d imbibed), the man said, “You’re badly hurt, yaar. Maybe we should go to a hospital first. My car is parked nearby. Come with me.”
Till this point, Mansoor had been happy to walk with the man, but as soon as talk of the car came up, he recoiled. “No need, uncle. Let’s make the phone call.”
“But, son, the car’s right here. In the time we make the call we can get you treated.”
“But, uncle, my friends are in the market.”
“Let me open my car.”
Mansoor wanted to tell him about the traffic jam, but something came over him and he ran.
“Son!” the man shouted.
He ran fast, kicking up dirt with his heels; when he stopped, only a little beyond where he’d first spied the man, he was winded and ashamed. He looked over his shoulder to see if he was being pursued. He felt he’d done the right thing. He had grown up in a city full of stories about kidnappings and disappearances; had heard from his mother about how one maid dressed up her ward, a two-year-old, in rags, blackened his face, and took him out on the street to beg. The parents of the child were always wondering why the child was so tired when they came back home; then one day the mother was driving on the road and—Ah!
Mansoor walked with urgency. He did not want to be pursued by the fat kidnapper. He cursed himself for not having asked a lady for help.
His house was still at least a kilometer away and he’d made little progress. Heavy black smog sat over the road. A stranded ambulance screamed in traffic. Beyond, blinking, he could make out Moolchand flyover, and beyond that, the mirage of South Extension—smoke and haze and the familiar congested approach to home.
The Ahmeds were convinced their son was dead. Leaving AIIMS hospital, where Afsheen’s cousin promised to keep vigil, they headed to Moolchand hospital. One by one, in this manner, they made a desperate tour of the hospitals of South Delhi. Afsheen was sick and crying throughout. “Be positive,” Sharif said, as he watched his high-strung but sweet wife dissolving. “There’s no objective evidence that anything has happened.” He was at the steering wheel of the car. “He might be at someone’s house.”
“How could they do that? How can you be so irresponsible with someone else’s son? How many times have I told them I don’t want him to go out?”
“They’ve lost two kids.”
“They should lose two kids! They should lose everything!”
“Afsheen,” he said. But the truth was that he felt the same way.
The hospitals yielded nothing. But that night Sharif felt he’d come closer to the reality—and suffering—of the city than ever before: the tired grief-soaked expressions of patients; the exhaustion of nurses; the crumbling medical infrastructure; the weak tube lights flickering and clicking; the way in which doctors became bureaucrats the moment they were questioned. Sharif felt he ought to wash his hands of this country, this place he had fought so hard to make his own, enduring the jibes of his family members who claimed to lead happier lives in Dubai, Sharjah, Bahrain, Lahore.
By now the tears had dried up; husband and wife sat at the dashboard in rage-filled silence. “Let’s go to the police,” Afsheen said, half-crazed. “We should register a criminal case against the Khuranas.”
“We should have gone to the market earlier,” Sharif said, slapping his forehead.
They had gone to the market briefly before coming to AIIMS, springing through the debris, calling out for Mansoor. In doing so, they’d realized they were far from the only people searching for a relative in the market: half of Delhi seemed to be out in this dung of destruction, though, in the end, the death toll would be only thirteen dead with thirty injured—a small bomb. A typical bomb. A bomb of small consequences.
“Let’s go home first, in case he’s there,” Sharif said.
Home. The last time we’ll come back and be able to call it that, he thought, pulling up in his Esteem, the dark colony illuminated with the dirty electricity of the city. But as soon as he parked, he saw two individuals outlined in the light of the front landing.
Afsheen got out of the car and ran over and hugged and then slapped her son. The servant, who was sitting next to Mansoor, got up excitedly.
“How could this have happened?” Afsheen wept. “Why didn’t you phone us immediately?”
Sharif hugged his son tightly on the landing. He only now realized how tense he was, how much he loved his son. “Bring me some water,” he told the servant when he was inside, trying to control his emotions, the three of them holding each other in an odd huddle.
“We have to go help the Khuranas,” Afsheen said, looking up from her son.
CHAPTER 2
Vikas’s concern for Mansoor had long since given way to grief over his sons. It became his priority—and his wife’s—to spend as much time with them as possible, to not abandon their corpses for even a minute. It was as if, having failed to protect them in life, they felt double the responsibility to fulfill their duties in death. Still, the cremation, which happened the next day at Nigambodh Ghat, stunned them both. They howled as the boys were crushed to ashes.