The Association of Small Bombs(61)

How would this fellow feel if he knew I was behind the blast? How would he respond? But this was the terrible thing about the profession—you could take credit for nothing. When blasts were mentioned, Shockie tried to clear his mind completely and respond with the mild shock of a civilian. He saw that he was on dangerous turf. “You will have to leave your family,” he said suddenly.

“Yes, sir.”

“No contact with your mother or father.” (He himself had never followed this rule, but that had been a different, less brutal time. The internationalization of terror, the increased scrutiny in the press, had changed everything.) “You can’t even know if they die. For you, they are dead from this moment.”

“Yes, sir,” Ayub said, surprised at how quickly the man’s tone had shifted, how he had gone from a harmless middle-aged uncle to a priest, delivering well-worn mantras and cleaning his nose occasionally by squeezing his nostrils with his fingers. He might have been stating the prayers for a marriage. There was something practical, nasal, and strict about it.

“You give up money, drinks, happiness. You give up everything. You’re ready for that?”

“Yes,” Ayub said.

Shockie paused, still testing him out. What was that expression on his face—that ready, watchful, but resigned expression?

“Why do you want to do this?” he asked him directly.

“To take revenge,” Ayub said.

“On who?” asked Shockie.

“On Modi,” said Ayub.

“For who?” said Shockie.

“For Muslims.”

“Why do you hate him so much?” Shockie asked. “He’s just a man.”

“He’s not a man; he’s a symbol.”

“There’s something else,” Shockie said. “A man like you doesn’t turn to revolution just like that. What do you want? Are you angry? You want to show the world you’re a hero?”

Ayub considered this. The reasons were murky in his head, all the more so because he had lived them out with such intensity. Death. I want to die. Some weeks ago, he had taken a drug in the field. The drug was mixed with milk and peddled by the local witch doctor. What had followed was a series of terrifying hallucinations. First the fields, bulging under the sodium lamp of the sun, had changed colors, parted, leapt about, danced with flames of murmuring wheat. He could touch and see everything for kilometers around. Then, as he’d walked, he’d had a strong sense that all the people around him—the men in their small square stalls, selling bidis and phone chargers; the auto drivers; the farmers whipping their skeletal bulls; the man selling pomegranates by the circuit house; the boy riding his bicycle to and from the shabby hotel; the frightened women in burqas clustered outside their homes, awaiting their husbands from the Gulf—were monkeys. Yes, monkeys, animals. That’s what people were when you took away the basic veneer of civilization. And he’d had a vision then of Tara, a vision of love. What was Tara but a lost monkey from a powerful family of monkeys, who’d fallen down from her tree and randomly played with a poor monkey far from its own family? No, there was nothing to do but feel sad about Tara—what fault was it of hers? She had been pulled back into the thicket of her family and that was how it should be. As for him, he was a small, wounded, seeking animal, one who had strayed from the path a long time ago; he saw now that his time in Delhi, with Tara, had been a conference of the weak. They thought they were changing the world, but everyone except for him could see they were weak, damaged animals, clasping each other.

Why am I so wounded? he thought. But that is the fate of certain people. They lose themselves and never find themselves again.

He saw too, in this vision on drugs, that the world was dictated by power (he did not think, as he would later, that the reason he’d had such nihilistic visions was that he was depressed). What was Modi but a violent, screaming animal demanding the death and destruction of other clans? There were two ways to handle such a fat chest-beating monkey: to hide away forever in the forest or to attack him and his clan. In an instant, hallucinating, the field leaping about, he grasped the swift logic of violence. The world existed in a state of battle between clans and races. Each clan rose at the expense of the other. Whenever one came up, it was important to cut it down to size with violence. . . . He thought of 9/11, a crime that had, for all its religious implications, always seemed opaque to him, and it was clear that, in world historical terms, if you thought of the world as a jungle, what had happened was simple, obvious: sensing the rising power of one group, Atta and company had attacked the temple of that group.

As for death? It did not matter. We are only animals, and if we give a complex name to our grief, it is because we like to pretend otherwise.

A clan is more important than the animal. In fact, it is in grief that we become most like animals, hiding, curling up, refusing to accept the truth of someone’s goneness, acting as if the person gone is a part of ourselves.

It was during this hallucination that Ayub decided to give himself to revolution and violence. “I tried nonviolence,” he told Shockie now. “I was a big believer in Gandhi. You could say I was a self-hating Muslim. I wanted equality between Hindus and Muslims, brotherhood. I thought the majority could be persuaded with such action. At one point, when the farmer suicides were happening in Andhra and Maharashtra, I even staged a protest where Muslims threatened to take the poison and kill themselves. It was nonviolence taken to its full extreme. But the press gave it no attention. Now I see it’s a world where everything operates by force. If you sit and let people go on, then they will. I had always thought you had to educate others about your pain, show them how to solve it. Now I realize you have to make them feel it.”