The Association of Small Bombs(68)
“But what about the role of pornography?” Ayub had asked, unable, as usual, to put the full force of his mind into the conversation.
Mansoor continued. “I know that that’s why the Internet was probably started and where all the technological leaps happened. I’ve read this book, Reefer Madness; it was written by the same chap who wrote Fast Food Nation—have you read it? I think you’d like it. Anyway, in this book, he talks about the porn industry, but the point is—” How the tables have turned! Mansoor thought. Just a few months ago I was being lectured by this confident, self-contained, self-possessed sandy-haired pink-lipped hero and now I’m lecturing him! Though he didn’t see it that way; he felt only that Ayub was one of those people in his life who brought out the best in him, a rock around which conversation could smoothly bend and flow—a sympathetic ear. So he went on about porn, Islam, and the battle between the two for the pneumatic soul of the Internet.
“I don’t feel right taking the job,” Ayub said at the end of this conversation. “I’ve put your father in an awkward position. And also I know you’re in financial duress.”
“He needs a person he can trust,” Mansoor said. “Actually he’s been asking me to work with him, but he’s too bad-tempered and I fight back. That’s the only thing I would warn you about. Consider it short term. You should look for another job. When you mix friendship and business, sometimes both can go sour.”
It was with these thoughts raging in his head that Ayub wrote Tauqeer an impassioned e-mail from the cybercafe.
Two more days passed. Nothing. No reply. Should I go to the police? Are they trying to frame me? he wondered. Finally, disobeying orders, refusing the job, he left the Ahmeds’ residence in South Extension and went to stay in a cheap hotel in Daryaganj.
“He’s a very nice boy, your friend Ayub, very well mannered, well brought up,” Afsheen finally said—as if his niceness was more apparent when he was gone.
“Yaah, very decent chap,” Sharif said.
“I told you, you shouldn’t have offered him a job,” Mansoor said. “He’s too self-respecting.”
“That’s why he doesn’t have a job,” Sharif said. “This, let me tell you, is a problem with so many young Muslims. There’s discrimination, yes; it’s a fact of life—but at the same time there’s a lot of arrogance. Sometimes it’s better to start from a low place and then win trust and work your way up. Instead someone like your friend Ayub, he rejects things preemptively—” That word! Mansoor thought. How it had entered the lexicon! “Then he complains about this country.” That was Sharif’s proud side emerging—he was proud of having made it in a hostile environment.
“But it is very difficult to be constantly rejected,” Mansoor said. “You build a wall around yourself. Sometimes it’s a wall of arrogance.”
“Maybe, maybe,” Sharif said, not listening.
“Razia!” Afsheen said, calling the servant. “Bring the food.”
Cast out from Delhi, fleeing Azamgarh, rejected from bourgeois society, severed from the terrorist group—this is how Ayub felt in his hotel room with rats running up and down the corridor and drunk men in lungis lying near the entrance and making fun of whoever passed. Why is this my fate? Or is this too a sort of test? It occurred to Ayub that he had never really been alone—he always ran from one thing to the next. To be alone meant being alone with your thoughts, your consequences, your actions—it meant letting danger wash against your feet and holding steady on the beach of time even as the waves sucked the sand from under your toes. In the sordid room, centuries away from the palatial “den,” Ayub thought of that wonderful feeling of being on a beach, with the earth sliding and emptying beneath you, the soles of your feet caked with black cement-like sand. How he had loved the openness of the ocean the one time he had been to Bombay! It had rained the day before, so the ocean was overfull and boiling, but the sun came out and the beach, with its coconut and pav and chickpea vendors, steamed, and all of Bombay was ripe and bright as it sat around the ocean in a semicircle—he felt he could look through windows kilometers away. Such a shattering vista he’d never seen—the ocean bunched up and tilting and delivering boats toward the shore. He sweated profusely. He was a vain man and he was worried about whether his spray-on deodorant was working. Tara, at his side, made tracks on the beach with her clawlike feet. She had a waddling, confident way of walking. He loved putting his head in the cleft between her neck and shoulder and taking in her flat clean smell. They did touristy things—drinking sharifa milk shakes at the Haji Ali Juice Centre and then walking at low tide, past the curled-up medieval beggars, the touts selling religious books and trinkets, to the religious dome of Haji Ali. The path was slippery, beaten by waves. The shrine, like everything else, was under construction, wrapped in the fresh skeleton of a scaffolding, while behind it, on the low black wet rocks, people sat running their hands through the seawater.
His eyes were closed and he inhaled deeply on his hotel bed. He was lost in the movie of his past.
He read the papers the next day. No news of the “Indian Mujahideen,” which is what the group was called in the press. No news of arrests—when the police made even the slightest progress, they immediately gloated to their sidekicks in the media, subpar individuals who were thrilled, like all Indians, to be instructed and beloved by institutions, people who had lost the ability to think for themselves. It was the media he hated even more than the police, when he thought about it. The police the world over are ruthless, corrupt, brutal. He had read the biographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He knew what the blacks suffered in the U.S. But even there, in that unequal country, with its million injustices papered over by money, there had been a notable organ like the New York Times bearing witness, journalists who had written about Martin Luther King. What about here? How many times had Tara and he contacted some absent-looking, dead-eyed, dead-souled, half-listening journalist at a major newspaper, one of those people who nodded and took no notes and then shook his head and said, “But what’s the story?”