The Association of Small Bombs(67)
Ayub was disarmed by the question. “It was good. My father is trying to sell organic vegetables. He’s ahead of his time, but it was good to spend time with him. It humbles you, to be with your parents, to realize you’re not as original as you think. I had always thought I was being a big renegade by being an activist, but it’s probably a bigger rebellion to sell organic goods in Azamgarh. Now he wants to provide updates to farmers through his mobile.” He smiled. “The only problem is that both him and my mother are becoming blind. They both had diabetes but they got into this naturopathy business and didn’t do any of the things the doctors told them. As I say this I realize their attitude isn’t so different from mine. I too probably would have done something like that, with my suspicion of science. I guess what I’m saying is that I’m my parents’ child.”
“What about your brothers?” Mansoor asked.
“They’re both in Dubai. They send money to my parents but they hardly come. I don’t blame them. When you grow up in Azamgarh, all you want to do is escape it. People are confused why I came back.”
Why did you? Mansoor wanted to ask, but said nothing.
Ayub put a hand on his forehead. “I feel feverish.” But what he meant to say was, How did it happen? How did my gift for speech suddenly return?
Mansoor tried to bring Ayub along to the Peace For All meetings, but Ayub refused. Mansoor thought, “He’ll come around; it’s God’s will.” In the meantime, the two men prayed together, with Mansoor happily leading the way.
It was turning out to be a hideous October, an October of dengue and death, and the waiting grew longer and Ayub’s days as a guest stretched on. He was only allowed to contact Tauqeer through a cybercafe using a new Hotmail account every time, but he was given no answer beyond: wait.
“How long is your friend staying?” Sharif asked Mansoor one day.
Mansoor snapped, “How does it matter?”
Ayub visited many parts of Delhi, did all the sightseeing he’d never bothered with before, and wondered if this waiting too was a kind of test—to see if he would give up and go to the police. Certainly he’d had a lot of time to consider what he was doing—and he’d come to the very reasonable conclusion it was indefensible, and that Delhi would respond to a bomb the way it responded to everything: with indifference. He saw the point now of a large attack like 9/11. It guaranteed you were taken seriously. It made sure death wasn’t wasted, as Tauqeer had implied. But what would a big attack, a 9/11, look like in this city? As he contemplated these ideas in Mansoor’s house in South Ex, he felt he was losing his mind, splitting in two, the difference between his polite exterior self and the violence inside growing too great. He felt an actual line passing through the center of his face, splitting it into left and right.
“My job search has still not yielded anything,” he said for the millionth time after coming home from a day of sightseeing.
“Maybe I can help you,” Sharif said one day over dinner, in a rare moment of relaxation. He had just put his fingers in his mouth to cleanse them of the last bits of food and was leaning back heavily in his chair. “What kind of job would you like?”
As Ayub answered, Sharif said, “Arre, Mansoor should have told me earlier—you should work for me.” Sharif ran a consulting business out of an office in Zakir Nagar; he was a plastics engineer and helped companies set up manufacturing and packaging plants in the country.
Ayub had wondered, more than once, why he’d been embedded so conspicuously in an alien family, where his inertia and lack of direction would be instantly noticed, where he was, in a sense, already under trial, being studied by Mansoor’s parents, not just as an individual but as a specimen of their son’s interests—it is through the osmotic medium of their children’s friends, after all, that parents accidentally learn the most about their own children. And now he’d been noticed to the point of awkwardness. Being offered a job was a kind of ultimatum. “No, no, uncle—you should get someone more qualified,” he sputtered.
When he looked at Mansoor for help across the table, Mansoor smiled back encouragingly, his eyes kind under the dense eyebrows.
“It’s this kind of attitude that’s preventing you from finding a job,” Sharif said, thumping him on his back and revealing his large hollow-looking teeth in a smile.
“Thank you, uncle,” he said. But hadn’t Mansoor told him the business was suffering?
“I have to leave,” he thought later, when he was back in the den. Tauqeer and co. have sent me here, tricked me into staying for weeks with the promise of an attack, and now I’m going to jeopardize my friend and his family’s position even further by becoming his father’s employee.
That night, from the cybercafe in South Extension, he wrote another e-mail to his comrades—aware, as he typed, of the strangeness of sneaking out to write e-mails (he had told Mansoor he was going out to buy cigarettes) when he could easily write them from his friend’s fancy Pentium, which Mansoor used mostly to surf Islamic message boards. “It’s funny,” Mansoor had said before he’d left. “It makes sense that Islam would benefit so much from the Internet. In a way, Islam was an early form of the Internet—egalitarian, allowing anyone of any class and race to connect to anyone else, breaking down traditional hierarchies.”