The Association of Small Bombs(76)
And putting on his clothes, offering to help with future school tuition, boasting about how the sale of the lands had swelled his bank account so much his kids couldn’t even squander it on TVs and cars, he was not so bad. She accepted.
He kept giving her money, but it was to slap the relationship back into the realm of transaction that she began asking for it directly, her eyes hard. The more she liked him the more she hardened herself against him.
They lived in a crowded complex—how long before everyone was talking about it? The servants, with their practiced clairvoyance, probably already knew.
“This is the advantage of being a do-gooder type,” Mukesh said. “They think I’m interfering with everyone’s business and so won’t think it’s unusual I’m sometimes at your house.” It was a shocking touch of self-awareness and Deepa saw now how being generally shameless could permit and cloak even more dire shamelessness. “I’ve told them I’m bringing homeopathic medicines for Anusha,” he said. It was true: he did bring medicines, for Anusha’s persistent colds, but Deepa didn’t let him give her any. “I want Anusha to grow up free of all pollutants,” she said, thinking suddenly of Tushar’s pleading, brimming reactions to the tetanus injection brandished by the bespectacled lady pediatrician, or Nakul’s habit of squirreling away homeopathic pellets for all kinds of maladies in a single bottle, so he could nibble on them every night till they were inevitably found and confiscated.
Vikas, cut off from family, knew nothing about this. He came home and saw his wife in the same pose with Anusha—scolding her for running around too much, for falling and injuring herself when she had been diagnosed with keloids.
“Why not restart your baking business?” Vikas asked, waking from the dead dream of his endless documentary about terror.
“I want to be there for her,” Deepa said, eyes pouring toward some faraway spot.
Over the years Deepa had started to blame herself for the boys’ visit to the market. If she had been present, if she hadn’t been so dead set on making up the shortfall in the family income by furiously baking, if she had known to intervene when her husband, lazing around, doing nothing, had nevertheless sent them all away in an auto on an obvious suicide mission . . . if she had asserted herself. “What are you doing that’s so important that you can’t take them?” she imagined saying to Vikas. She often shouted it out loud as she walked about the house on her increasingly troubled knees, hobbling quickly.
But it didn’t matter what she said to her husband, now or then. He continued to slip further and further into his dream of self-abnegation that predated even the boys’ deaths.
For a man who had dedicated his life to seeing, he noticed very little. What he was really good at was getting people to talk, but that was within the square jail of his camera lens.
She was alone with Anusha, always had been, so one day in 2002, when Vikas said they should invite Mansoor over for tea, that Mansoor had had a relapse of his bomb injury and was back in India, she said yes—what choice did she have?
This was before the association, before the Sarojini Nagar blast. But seeing Mansoor in their drawing room—young, able-bodied, grown-up, handsome, thin, holding out his wrists, his stormy eyebrows like two thoughts disagreeing with each other—freed something in both of them. After years, they began to talk to each other again. They remembered stray things about the boys—the way Tushar, the morning of the blast, had come into the bedroom soon after Deepa and Vikas had made love, looking hurt and surprised, unsure what had happened, but putting his hands on his hips in a school-ma’amish manner, intuiting something.
They remembered the high-pitched sound, like the Dopplering whistle of a train, that Nakul made during his imaginary cricket commentary as he ran back and forth in the bedroom, awaiting Mansoor’s visit—Mansoor’s visit, which the Khurana boys were always so excited about, as if having two of them wasn’t enough. But introducing a stranger always altered things, threw you into a new mood, forced you out of yourself, your small battles and jealousies; a new person signaled play. Tushar and Nakul were always their shiny boyish best around Mansoor. They had probably taken him to the market out of love and enthusiasm.
For the first time, the Khuranas found themselves forgiving the boys themselves. They had not known till now that the boys had needed to be forgiven.
But the boys had ruined their lives. The boys, not the bomb, had been their killers.
A booming cord of light fell over their necks as they sat in the drawing room. They were together again. They hugged and held each other.
The next day Deepa told Mukesh she wanted to end the affair. He looked at her sadly, his gray eyelids like two slow sloping slugs, mollusks with their own squirming life. Then he rolled the buttons through the buttonholes of his shirt and left.
A day later, he was back.
Deepa knew she must end it but was also addicted to it—to the numb pleasure, the dark routine, the certainty of his devotion; it had given her life, a feeling of independence from the domestic sphere. She had a secret. She stalked about the house powerfully now, not doting excessively on Anusha as she had before. She was a person again. Vikas was a befuddled aspect of her life, a sick branch that barely held on. They began to discuss ways they could memorialize the boys.