The Association of Small Bombs(82)

“Are we going to go today to see him?” his mother asked in the morning.

She was clearly enjoying this routine of spending time with her son.

“Let me call his room in the hospital and find out if he’s awake.”

“He’ll of course be awake. They wake you at six in the hospitals and they keep you up the whole day with checkups and plates of food. That’s what we’re being charged four thousand per day for.” Her generosity did not preclude harping.

Clutching his Nokia, Mansoor called the hospital. After an interminable wait, the receptionist came back to him and said, “He’s not there.”

“Oh?”

“He’s gone. There’s no one in that room. Has he checked out? We have a queue of patients.” He was surprised by her lack of concern.

“He’s left the hospital,” Mansoor told his mother.

She crinkled her expressive moon-shaped forehead in surprise. “Very strange.”

“He’s like that. I knew he would behave this way if you got him a room. He’s too self-respecting. It’s how he left after we offered him a job.”

“I only hope he gets better,” his mother said. “And his poor parents are coming also.”



Mansoor prayed that nothing had happened, that Ayub had not been caught, that all of this fell behind them.

Then, the unraveling began—but in the strangest way.





CHAPTER 32



For years, the Delhi police, as well as Khurana and Gill—first individually, then collaboratively—had been tracking Shockie. Three years after the 1996 blast, Malik had actually broken down and fingered Shockie, though he had returned quickly to a contrite silence.

Ever since then there had been a bounty on Shockie’s head and a great deal of intelligence expended in failing to capture him. So it was a surprise when, a few days after the Sarojini Nagar blast, he was arrested.

It was a triumphant moment for everyone. A flighty, bald, wet-eyed man was produced in the lockup. He looked like an electrician—like someone you might hire for handiwork at Lajpat Nagar. There was nothing terroristic about him. Gill and the Khuranas watched with delight from behind a glass window as he was interrogated and beaten.

After three days of torture, he angrily confessed. “The real mastermind is Ayub Azmi. He’s done the last ten blasts. I’ve been his servant.”

“Who’s that?”

“A young man,” Shockie said. “An activist from Azamgarh. That’s why he was never detected. He was injured in the Sarojini Nagar blast.” Shockie secretly blamed Ayub for his arrest. Actually, he had become quite attached to Ayub, the way he had been attached to Malik, and had stayed on in Delhi hoping Ayub would reappear at the park. But it was Shockie’s constant presence in the park that had attracted the attention of a paranoid man who lived on the periphery. Soon after this man had contacted the police and a policeman had matched Shockie to his photo.



After escaping from Delhi, Ayub went to the base near Hubli. But when he got there, exhausted—his exhaustion only fully expressing itself now, as it does at the tail end of journeys that have been soaked and powered by adrenaline—Tauqeer, looking gaunt and ill only wanted to know where Shockie was.

“I thought he had come back.”

“Obviously he didn’t.”

“I assumed he had.” Ayub unconsciously covered his gashed left eye; it was lacking a patch now. No one in the group appeared to notice or care.

Soon after, the group learned Shockie had been arrested, and in a panic—but a smooth one; the group was made for panicky situations, even looked forward to them—split up into cells and went in different directions. Shafi and Rafiq went north, to Kathmandu. Waris and Karim headed to Gujarat. Ayub and Tauqeer hurtled overland, in the back of a truck, to a secluded beach in Kerala. Once there, Tauqeer and he settled into a hut on the beach.

The first two days were almost pleasant. Ayub liked Tauqeer now and they talked about Palestine and Carlos the Jackal. Then one evening, after going out for a walk, Tauqeer vanished.

The problem with this was that Tauqeer locked the door whenever he left; Ayub couldn’t get out of the hut. For a few hours he sat cross-legged in the sand.

He could hear the ocean susurrating beyond and after a while, he pounded the door and threw his bulk against it but the force was useless; the door was metal, clasped with a chitkani outside.

He sat back down in the sand and told himself not to worry. Tauqeer would come back for him.

Night came—no Tauqeer. He drowsed and drooled, hungry. He hadn’t eaten in a day. He was thirsty too; to get to the water under the sand, he began to dig.

He passed out. When he woke the next day, he was in another hut, on an operating table of some sort. “I’m glad you found me,” he said with a smile, still surprisingly weak. “Is there a drip here? Some glucose?”

He had a vague memory of waking and trying to open the door of the hut and then passing out again.

The doctor, who was wearing a face mask, said to another man in the dark corner, “Our friend is awake.” He had kind eyes that closed into slits.

“Tauqeer bhai?” Ayub asked. “Are you there? Was the key to the hut lost or what?”

The man in the shadows did not answer.

Ayub became aware that he was undressed to his waist. More to the point: there was a strange square scar on his chest, where a scalpel had been recently applied. The skin was reddish, welted, peeling.