The Association of Small Bombs(62)
“That’s a very good speech,” Shockie said. “You should be a politician.”
Ayub grew exasperated. Maybe this wasn’t the best idea after all. The door he’d been about to walk through closed a little. He had an inkling of how life would look if he retreated—how he could rebuild it. The sounds of hammers and construction were at his back. All of India was under renovation. Why was he so eager to destroy it? “It looks like you won’t be convinced,” Ayub said, curling his lips. “So forget it.”
“You see my problem,” Shockie said. “It’s a problem of trust. But there is a way. If you can get me to meet Malik Aziz, who is a friend of mine, I’ll be convinced.”
“You know Malik?” Ayub said. “It’s not that easy.”
“I just want to see him,” Shockie said.
“For that you can go to the trial,” Ayub said. “If you’re confident and well dressed you can enter anywhere.”
“How is he?” Shockie asked.
Confused by the direction of the conversation, Ayub said, “You know he hasn’t spoken in six years, right? Some of the ideas of nonviolence I got from him. He’s one of the major exemplars of such protest in the country. Even the foreign media has covered him.”
Poor Malik! Shockie thought. Who loved to talk! “I know,” Shockie lied.
But now an intimacy developed between them. Shockie suddenly decided to trust Ayub.
At a certain point all such work is risk. The question is when you are willing to take it. In any case, the danger existed regardless of where you hunted for it; often it came from the most unexpected source.
The group operated out of a series of safe houses in the countryside of Uttar Pradesh. For Ayub, everything connected to the group was new. His fellow revolutionaries, shady figures he might or might not have heard about in the news, were serene individuals. Wrapped in woodsmoke, they conversed quietly, surrounded by sacks of cement or grain inside small huts. Several of the men in the group were educated, young professional types who’d given up their careers in big towns. Tauqeer was a former software engineer; Rafiq had an MA in psychology and had worked for Coca-Cola in marketing; Mohammed was a renowned hacker. These men greeted Ayub with interest, suspicion, condescension. He’d forgotten what it meant to be the junior member of a group after having a free run with Peace For All.
Ayub had always railed against Muslims who turned to violence (though he had been sure, after working with inmates for years, that many of the bombs were planted by Hindus to frame Muslims), but now he found himself on the cutting edge of news events, on the verge of becoming a news maker. He marveled at how this group of men, gathered in a warm, dark room, could alter the political future of a country. “If we disrupt the economy,” one was saying as he chewed a bit of bread, his legs dangling from a ledge in the hut, “then Modi automatically goes.” Ayub had been introduced as a new member with no criminal record, who could infiltrate Modi’s inner circle—he had boasted of his connection with Tara, whose parents were rich, well-connected BJP supporters.
The men, because they were educated, talked in economic terms. Plant enough bombs, Tauqeer said (he had a memorable face with gaunt cheekbones, a prayer callus on his forehead, and black whorls where the cheekbones jutted out of his face), and you create uncertainty in the economy and investment dries up. “This so-called economic boom is fragile,” he said. “It’s caused simply by a cost advantage on the Indian side. The investors are like hawks. They’ll move to another country or state the minute they feel it’s dangerous. And Modi too will be voted out of power.” He was arguing, in effect, that there was no need to kill Modi directly. Just taking aim at the economy of Gujarat, the apple on Modi’s head (or was it vice versa?), was enough.
“And think about what happens if he’s killed,” Rafiq said.
Ayub had an image of riots, bloodshed, babies speared from the stomachs of pregnant mothers—real images; he’d seen them a thousand times when he’d screened the documentary about the Gujarat riots for schools.
“We shouldn’t be afraid of such consequences,” Tauqeer, obviously the leader, burst in. “We should welcome them. Unlike our friend Rafiq here,” he said, turning to Ayub, “I don’t share such a rosy view of our fellow Muslims. They’re corrupt, cowardly, hypocritical, and busy fighting among themselves. There’s no difference between them and Hindus, if you ask me. The Muslims in this country are Indians first and Muslims second.” (It occurred to Ayub that just months earlier, he would have considered this a good thing.) “Having a few more riots will awaken them to the reality in this country.” Ayub saw now that he was being addressed directly—that he was considered one of those Muslims who had woken up after the riots. But was he the only one? All these people are young. I suspect they too only took this extreme step after the riots, he thought.
How much blood will we have to shed to create a million versions of me?
Tauqeer produced an inhaler and sucked on it. So that wasn’t just a rumor, that he was asthmatic. Taking a puff, he said, “You want?”
The five men in the room laughed.
“In the old days they had hookahs,” Tauqeer said, laughing.
The men traveled to a forest outside the city of Hubli, in Karnataka—a dry, arid region famous for its sweets and reddish rotis. At this time Shockie’s position in the group became clearer to Ayub. He was a handler, an uncle who watched his reckless wards with his hands behind his back and eyes slightly absent till danger presented itself. Always dressed in a sleeveless sweater, whatever the weather, he wore dusty black pants with astonishingly sharp pleats. Later, Ayub would learn that Shockie, the son of a presswali, took a dandy’s pride, despite his thinning curly hair, in wearing ironed clothes. Shockie kept a distance as they practiced and conducted training drills in the forest. The practice, Ayub had imagined, would be easy, a way of killing time before the actual killing. But it was exhausting. He was made to run through the bramble and brush till he collapsed. He lay in a puddle of his own vomit. Screaming, he hung for an hour from a branch on a tree, a branch that refused to spare him by breaking off, despite his prayers. He was left in a forest with a compass and no Odomos or light and made to find his way back to the camp in the forest. How could such training be possibly useful in the jungles of urban India?