The Association of Small Bombs(83)
“Did I need to have surgery? Was I very sick?”
“You are the bomb,” the doctor said.
Ayub moaned and tried to turn over.
The doctor tapped his chest with a blunt cold metal instrument. “We’ve put a bomb in you. It’s a new kind of bomb, since you’re curious. It isn’t timed. It goes off when you move your body in a particular way.”
Ayub’s broad shoulders shook and compressed. His leg muscles tensed. “What did I do?”
“We know who you’re working for,” the man in the corner said. It was Tauqeer after all.
The doctor helped Ayub off the table. “It’s OK,” he said. “You can walk. Here,” he said. “Put this shirt on.” Ayub complied, hunching himself to accept the shirt. He was very weak.
He must have been walked some distance in this drowsy state, because when he came to, he was on a deserted beach.
Tauqeer and the doctor were gone. The hut was gone. The birds struggled in the wind like flies in honey. The sounds were enormous, the ocean regally hushing the beach. It was beautiful. He tried not to move—to avoid the secret configuration that might set off the bomb. With one hand he picked at the sand, kneaded it. What a waste of a life, of talent. Did he believe he would explode? Of course. Stranger things have happened. He had never experienced such a fear of the body before, not even with his back pain, or the bomb he’d planted in Delhi. The body itself was abhorrent. It could be made subservient to anything. It could work for despots, tyrants, fascists, terrorists—it could work for machines. He realized the pointlessness, at a time like this, of having a mind. He kept imagining the form the explosion would take, how it might gush out of him like a white star, pelting the ocean with soft embers and pieces of his skin. What was a bomb, really? A means of separation, of opening. A factory of undoing. It took the violent forces of civilization and applied them to the very opposite aims with a childlike glee. A bomb was a child. A tantrum directed at all things. A wail of a being that hadn’t got its own way. The choice of suicide over defeat. Ayub, in his reading of Marxist history and leftist theory, had always been interested in the role of bombs; now he too was a weapon, part of a long evolution of revolution. In that instant, he was connected to the bomb throwers of the past and the bomb men of the future. Entire cities of exploding people might exist someday. He saw a hut in the distance. Casting aside fear for an instant, he got up and ran.
He punched out holes in the sand with his feet, breathing, hyperventilating. His pellucid, cellophane-like toenails, advancing feelers of dead skin, were small helmets of death on the living crab of the foot. The metal object implanted in his chest rattled. His body, for all its glaring tension, was free of pain. Arriving at the hut, he panted and waited, hoping someone would show up. But it was a bombed-out husk. No one was there. He saw an entire village of husks leading up a hill.
He wondered if this was a place that had gone extinct in an experiment of the sort that was being carried out on him. Tired and hungry, his eyes fastened on a glistening mound of coconuts—green balls with flattened heads and straws sticking out of them. The hunger was so bad, it overrode his fear of dying. On his knees he got before the mound of coconuts and sucked the tart juice from the used husks. It came out one drop at a time. It was pink overhead, the sky. He knew he had to go to the police.
Whatever had been done to him had weakened him. He thought of how far he’d come, once again—from Tara to Azamgarh to Delhi to this beach, destined to perish and vanish the way the whole village had vanished. Had the villagers been taken out by dacoits? By bandits? By the government—cleared for some massive project? He became impatient for the bomb to go off. The coconuts yielded very little. He got up abruptly, gnashing his teeth, the muscles in his legs squeezed. He had the distinct feeling that he was in a dream—a hallucination like those he’d had on drugs.
This village at the edge of India, the complete absence of living things save for the jutting birds overhead, the mysterious mound of recently drunk coconuts—complete with the twisted straws brutally stuck back into the maws of the fruit—the bomb in his heart, the shabbiness of his clothes: none of it felt plausible, connected to the reality he’d known. He hoped he might fall asleep and wake up corrected. He put his fists against his blackly circled eyes. Twenty feet from him, water gushed on crumbling soil. His systems were shutting down; he could feel it—and it was right before he fell into sleep that he realized: sleep might trigger the bomb. He jerked awake. Brilliant. A person exhausts himself trying to avoid obvious postures only to fall into the default position of nature. Sleep. Everything major happened when you were sleeping. Plants grew. The earth, browsing the aisles of the sun, renewed itself. The truth about a place—its dangers, its crimes—came out. Why shouldn’t the bomb in me work the same way?
Suffering a fit of mania, he began to believe he controlled how the bomb worked. That he could turn it on and off with his mind. One with his body, he breathed deeply, yogically. Waves of tension passed up through his legs.
Suddenly feeling watched, he cast his gaze behind him, in an arc. He felt he was bringing the bomb up with concentration. Instead he vomited—a thin, colorless, sleek fluid. His system emptied itself out. Hunger, mania, vomiting—he didn’t understand. He was certain he would go off now. He was hungry for it.
He began singing. Haathi ka anda la. Aati kya khandala. A favorite of his and Tara’s. He was losing his mind. It was like that time in the fields of Azamgarh soon after he’d heard that Tara was going to America. This was the absurd singing of a man near death. A man looking to be finished and still throwing notes into the void. He let out his high-pitched laugh. It was like a tennis ball thrown high over a sparkling, waiting field. He got up suddenly and ran again. He ran through the town, past the shattered huts, huts that seemed bashed softly, rattled by the ocean, the wood fungal and ancient, the objects scattered around with such basaltic, modern randomness—plastic buckets, plastic bats, a bansuri—that he could make no sense of the people who’d lived there except to say they must have been happy and they must have used plastic.