The Association of Small Bombs(81)

“What?”

Ayub craned his head toward the door. “I don’t want your father to know.” Now he told him a story he’d thought up earlier. For all his pain, Ayub’s ability to fabricate hadn’t gone away; it had got better with desperation. He said he had enraged so many policemen over the years with his activism that they had vowed to take revenge on him; one had come by and threatened him with arrest.

“Which one?” Mansoor asked.

“I wish I knew his name. He was a sub-inspector with the Delhi cadre. But he said they can take me away under POTA anytime.”

“But I have a connection,” Mansoor said, thinking of Vikas Uncle.

“The connection won’t help. It’s a deep issue. I’ve revealed too much corruption in the police.”

“We can go to the press,” Mansoor said.

“Mansoor bhai, you have to trust me. This is the one time none of this will help. You saw how the press reacted to our rally—why will they come help us? And a Muslim injured in the blast? They can easily pin it on me. Religious, young—they don’t need evidence.”

“I was also injured in a blast.”

“That’s different. You were little.”

Mansoor paused. He was wondering at this story.



Soon after, Sharif came in and asked Mansoor to accompany him to the photocopier in the hospital complex to make a copy of Ayub’s prescription. Mansoor, nodding to Ayub, went out with him. He had assured Ayub he wouldn’t tell the secret, yet he wasn’t sure why he should keep it from his father. Still, as he walked with his father, he became aware of how burdened Sharif had become, a neckless man sunk in the worry suit of his body. Mansoor decided to help his friend.



Going back to Ayub’s room—his father was now on the phone talking to a business contact in the lobby of the hospital—Mansoor said, “What do you need?”

“Honestly? Thousand rupees.”

“That’s easy. Here’s six hundred.” Mansoor’s pulse raced. Would he be arrested too?

“You don’t need to worry,” Ayub said. “They won’t do anything to you. Their issue with me is personal.”

“It still sounds dangerous. We should tell my family friend.”

“If you tell them, it’ll only cause more drama. Believe me, the best situation is for me to go.” At that moment, stuffing the money into pajama pockets, Ayub smiled. In that smile Mansoor suddenly knew that Ayub had done it, that he’d planted the bomb.

Mansoor was thrown out of himself. His emotions and facial gestures got scrambled. He smiled and blinked and frowned and twitched; he didn’t seem to have control over his hands, which felt around his face as if for the first time, as if touching the face of a lover in the dark and discovering it is your enemy, or worse: a cold corpse, the corpse of a loved one. His stomach muscles cramped. The food he’d eaten earlier that day troubled the top of his throat.

Ayub stood up jauntily and put a friendly hand on Mansoor’s shoulder. “You’ll be OK.”

“Yes.” Mansoor smiled.

“Good. You go from the stairs,” Ayub said. “I’ll take the lift.” They walked out into the corridor in opposite directions.

But going down the stairwell, that pouring cuboid of negative space, the undersides of the zags of staircase above furiously black with beards of dust, Mansoor became worried. Everything swirled in the stairwell; a bat flew up, circling, wafting through the unmarked stories. Mansoor sweated, his heart beating weirdly.

When he came to the lobby he half-expected to see his father and Ayub chatting. But neither was there. His father, it turned out, was already in the car, getting lathered with the aftershave of air-conditioning; he had left Mansoor missed calls to join him in the car.

So Mansoor walked across the lot to the pale blue Honda City and got in.

His father was sitting in the back, scratching his stubble like a happy animal, playing “Yeh Shaam Mastani” on the stereo—his favorite song, partly because it was the only one he knew how to play on guitar; late in life, Sharif had developed a fixation that he ought to learn one musical instrument.

As the car started, Sharif unconsciously put his thick hand on his son’s—the hands were plastic and large, puffy, covered in ridges, fair. His fingers were so much fatter than Mansoor’s. He seems to be made of a different material from me, Mansoor thought.

But they did not talk the whole way home.



At home Mansoor was disoriented, unable to speak at dinner, which was illuminated by the faint light of the generator—the electricity had gone. “Poor boy, you’re tired,” his mother said. Mansoor, smiling sweetly and dumbly, neither agreed nor disagreed.

It was only in his room that night, in that palace of air-conditioning, that he began to shiver. The shivers were uncontrollable. His ribs hurt. His teeth clattered and sang and slid against each other, testy with enamel. His body was out of control. He got up and sat on the desk but his palm vibrated on the table like a mobile. “No,” he said out loud.

He thought of Ayub and wondered where he was now. But it was no concern of his. He was just Ayub’s friend. He had only come to see Ayub in the hospital. It was Ayub’s free choice to go wherever he wanted. This relaxed Mansoor. Then the shivering began again.