The Association of Small Bombs(74)
“In this kind of market, how can you have security? I’m sure the shopkeepers would be against it.”
Vikas, especially, had turned himself into a student of terror. He had come to see that people were blind to tragedy till they experienced it firsthand, and that they were willing to risk the unknown if it meant they could make money in the interim. This was the case not just with small Indian markets, with their reluctance to secure themselves, but with the U.S. as well: Airlines had known for years about the danger of hijackings, but had lobbied against security because it cost time and money to process passengers. Better to let a plane be occasionally hurled off track, the heads of the airlines reasoned, than to hemorrhage money in the terminals.
It didn’t occur to them that a hijacker might wish to plough a plane back into the country, invest the blown and fluted metal into the mineral-rich earth.
“When should we go meet them?” Deepa asked.
“Tomorrow, maybe,” Vikas said, putting his hand in hers.
In 2002, the Khuranas had founded the Association of Terror Victims. Over time, they’d come to realize that no one remembered the smaller blasts peppering the history of the country, blasts that vanished into a morgue of memories, overshadowed by bigger events. Therefore, the Khuranas reasoned, the thing to do was to corral the victims of these small blasts and create a group that could lobby for their rights and collectively remember the blasts in which they had lost their relatives or limbs. And why did the Khuranas want the blasts remembered?
Vikas grappled with this privately—was it just a zidd, the demand of a hurt child? Or was there substance to it? He decided it was important to remember in order to keep the past from repeating itself; the country was moving so fast, hurtling so enthusiastically into the future, that people had little idea of how easily everything could be undone. More important, a blast was a political tragedy, an act of war, in which people perished not because of their own mistakes but because of the mistakes of the government. Therefore it held that blast victims should be remembered the way dead soldiers are—Vikas always thought of the names of Indian soldiers who had fought in World War I inscribed in the sandstone biceps of India Gate, a monument the boys had loved, and where he had often taken them for ice cream, the three of them standing on the reddish earth, the boys asking if it was true that the flame inside the gate had been burning for a hundred years and Vikas not knowing the answer—was it possible? Weren’t all sorts of crazy things possible? The boys. How would they have been now, all these years later? Were they still alive somewhere else, being shown around monuments by another set of parents? Had they grown up in this alternative universe where they wore white office shirts and black pants and got ready for work, their adult heads emerging from sweat-stained collars, the shoes on their feet gleaming blackly, Tushar an earnest trainee in some firm, Nakul batting his handsome eyes at some girl who sat at the other end of the office, hiding herself in a giggling group of friends? Sometimes if he closed his eyes he could imagine them as adults and the vision would be so exact, his heart would stop and he would think they were alive or that, by thinking itself, they could be brought back to life and then he would chastise himself for admitting defeat so easily in 1996, for accepting the official cant that the boys were dead instead of brazenly imagining the opposite.
The bomb was so distant now that it did not quite seem real. When he went to Lajpat Nagar these days—and it was often—he tricked himself into believing nothing had happened, and in fact, it wasn’t hard to do: the market had covered over every sign of damage.
Yes, it had never happened. He was forty-seven, successful, with a loving wife and two boys and a daughter. It was the thought of Anusha that jolted him to the present, pricked him with dread. She was the most solid recurring evidence that his life had changed. He hated his daughter. She was cute and round-eyed with flowing streamers of hair and an odd interest in learning how things were made—she was always hugging the walls, asking how they had been poured by workers—but he wondered if she were a little slow. He didn’t want to be near her. Better to stay cramped in the markets of Delhi, among the throbbing crowds, shoulder-to-shoulder with death, with the city, the city that crammed you back into yourself.
Whereas his wife had grieved instantly, he only began to grieve after Anusha was born.
He didn’t see it as grieving, of course. He thought he was taking an interest in the larger world, an interest brought on by the bomb; he thought he was gathering material for a documentary. He filmed it all, became known as the eccentric with the movie camera; people in the markets learned to ignore him after a while.
He was making an encyclopedic film about Delhi, he told himself; capturing the fluctuations in the moods of places. But he was always a little vacant and bored when he carried out these explorations, just as he was vacant at home, draped in his Bhutanese gown.
He was only happy when he was leaving his house, shedding the yoke of this new life that had been thrust upon him.
His marriage fell apart. Deepa at first was patient, but then she became shrill in her disappointment. “Not again!” she shouted, confronting his cosmic sadness and anger.
She’d wasted too many years putting up with his depressions: depression over art, his parents, his kids—now a depression over his daughter. As she shouted at him to wake up from his grief, she became nauseated and started burping and went to the sink and retched, but finally all that came were tears, tears ransacking the dignity from her eyes. “Shame on you,” she said, coming back to the drawing room, where Vikas had not moved from the cloth embrace of the broad sofa chair as he read the Hindustan Times, the alpine slopes of hair on his feet visible as they rested on the ground beside the leather slippers. “You’re not a real man.”