The Association of Small Bombs(7)
The bodies had been taken away briefly the night before for a postmortem so the doctors could recover pieces of the bomb from Tushar’s and Nakul’s corpses. The leftover pieces—bright triangles of metal, serrated edges of bottle caps, nails—glittered in the pyre.
Deepa, weeping violently, her hair pouring everywhere, gray from smoke, screamed, “Take me away.” Vikas watched with his arms behind his back, like a military man at the funeral of his entire squadron.
The members of the Khurana clan did not see each other frequently, but they took the responsibilities of family life seriously, and after the cremation, they came from their flats and gathered around the couple in their house to console and comfort them. Rajat, Vikas’s youngest brother, a handsome fellow in his thirties with an unfashionable mustache and an air of self-important family-oriented efficiency, pulverized sleeping pills with a rolling pin and dissolved them in the couple’s tea; that they drank this hot cocktail without noticing was a sign, to him, of how far gone they were. Bunty Masi went through the kitchen drawers, collecting knives and dropping them into a jute bag she took home. The Khuranas’ close friends, writers and filmmakers and decent professional types, came together and sat in a grief-stricken huddle; the blow had been so big, it had the potential to damage an entire friend group.
Others crowded on the floor, offering homilies, stories, banalities. Everyone (save for two patriarchs) agreed it was impossible to imagine what the Khuranas were going through.
The bombing happened at six p.m. on a Tuesday. By nine p.m. a group calling itself the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force had called Zee TV and NDTV and claimed credit for the attack. The family members discussed the group and its intentions and fell back on their normal scorn for Muslims. “They can’t live in peace, these Muslims. Anywhere they show up, they’re at war,” one Masi said. “A violent religion of violent people. In the Quran, it’s written—no Muslim is supposed to rest till he’s drunk the blood of seventy-two unbelievers.”
“Kashmiris have always been filthy people. The whole winter passes and they don’t bathe. That’s why Srinagar stinks so much.”
“The problem is they believe they’ll receive seventy-two virgins in heaven.”
“You’re saying this, but I work with Muslims every day. All the craftsmen and weavers are Muslim. You go to their locality and each of them has twenty children.”
The Ahmeds too were adjusting to this new world—this world in which their son had nearly perished and in which his two close friends had died before his eyes.
The doctor who had seen Mansoor on the day of the blast said he was very lucky: some other object or person nearby must have absorbed the shockwave. It was the shockwave that killed most people. If you inhaled at the moment of the blast, which was the natural impulse, the compressing air got inside you and tore up your lungs and you died of “massive trauma.” “You, young chap,” the old doctor said, slapping Mansoor’s cheek in a friendly but unsettling manner, “you’ve only got a fracture and some stitches in your hand—things that all boys of your age get. Soldier’s wounds.” Then he slapped him again and prescribed a few months of physiotherapy. Mansoor was allowed to take home all the shrapnel that had been pulled out of his arm—twenty pellets—in a plastic bag.
“Should we take him to VIMHANS?” Afsheen asked afterwards, referring to the mental health institute on Ring Road.
“Tell me what happened, how it felt,” Sharif said to the boy.
“You can’t just ask like that!” Afsheen said. “There’s a proper process for these things.”
But the boy was happy as he was, at home. “Please, Mama, I don’t want to go anywhere,” he begged.
“See, Afsheen, what’s the rush?” Sharif said.
In any case, the Ahmeds found themselves very busy with the cremation and funeral rites of the Khurana boys. Blessed with good fortune, they experienced a strong obligation to be present for their unlucky friends and they went and sat in the Khuranas’ flat every day, ignoring the abuses hurled at Muslims by Vikas’s relatives—relatives who were either not aware they were Muslim, or wished to harangue them in a sidelong manner.
“Only another mother can understand what you’re going through,” Afsheen cried in Hindi, sitting on her knees by Deepa in the Khuranas’ drawing room. “Mansoor keeps saying his life should also be taken away if Tushar’s and Nakul’s were, and I have to tell him, No, beta, no, don’t have these thoughts.”
Deepa barely registered Afsheen’s presence. “They were such good friends, all of them. Best friends.” She sniffled again, covering her sharp nose with her bony hands, and then said, “I’m so sorry. I’m crying too much.”
“Cry. It’s OK to cry.”
Sharif spent time with an ashen, shocked-looking Vikas. “The terrorists were Kashmiri fellows,” he said, in the measured and serious way of someone unused to emotions, someone obviously puffed up by the opportunity to proffer advice. “It’ll be easy to find these people. They’re not professionals. The important thing is that you take care of Deepa. She needs you. I’ll ask Mansoor if he saw anything suspicious at the market.”
Mansoor was the one who provided the Khurana family with an eyewitness account of the boys’ deaths, putting an end to morbid speculation about their final moments. But he’d been unable to explain to his parents why he’d walked away. “Why didn’t you phone us, beta?” Afsheen said.