The Association of Small Bombs(84)

The ocean had come into these homes and dragged the people away. The floors of cement, where they existed, had busted through to reveal black melting radiant damp soil. Somehow the plastic objects had been spared. It was as if the dragging bag of the blue ocean had known to reject certain things. A skeleton of a small dog grew bright with age. He moved up the winding streets. I have to find someone, he thought. Nothing is lost yet. I am only twenty-seven! I have sixty more years—years in which to decide what I wish to do, to make incremental change. I will dedicate myself to normal life. This will be a turning point.

An explosion threw him to the ground.

No—he was alive. It was just a rotten branch falling off a tree. He tore open his shirt and looked at his chest. The scar, shaped like a square, was like a space demarcated for punching. “Help!” he screamed. “Help!” His voice went far and deep, tearing up his larynx, knotting and releasing it. “Help!” Deep, large, explosive sounds. “Help!” Where did this strength come from? Whom was he beseeching? “Help!”

Afterwards he became very tired and despairing and he sat down by a crooked doorframe and wept. “I am sorry, God,” he said finally, recalling his oldest companion—one he had forgotten. “Take me back.”

He was found dead on the beach a day later, from hunger and exhaustion.



The police back in Delhi, of course, did not know any of this. They went to the hospital and followed the trail of documents and paperwork to the Ahmeds’ house.



Mansoor was taken from the house while still in his morning Adidas shirt and Bermuda shorts.

“Do you know why they think Ayub is a terrorist?” his father—jogging down the driveway, sweating, hair scrambled on his head—asked Mansoor, as he was led away in a knot of policeman on a thin colony road. The neighbors, arms folded over low walls, watched.

Mansoor’s shame kept him from speaking. “No, nothing,” he said, hoping that his father’s plastic business, which could so easily be linked to bombs, wasn’t held against him.



That first night, Mansoor was taken to the thana and beaten on the back and legs with a hockey stick by two policemen on a broken concrete floor. As he whimpered and cried and begged for his parents—as he thought of his days in California—he never denied knowing Ayub, or the fact that Ayub had stayed with them, or that they had taken care of him in the hospital.

Wouldn’t this string of charitable actions only exonerate them?

“The person who helps a terrorist—he’s even worse than a terrorist,” a young policeman, who at first had seemed as afraid of Mansoor as Mansoor was of him—the man could barely grow a beard—screamed. Over the next few days, Mansoor became very frightened of this sociopathic policeman with no sideburns, this eunuch of an angry policeman. He seemed unafraid and undeterred by threats. He didn’t care a jot for Mansoor’s “connections,” and when his parents and Vikas Uncle visited the station, pressing the police for his release, for bail, Mansoor was beaten even harder and not allowed to meet them. He wanted to meet them to tell them not to come. He was too sensitive to physical pain. Oddly, though, his wrists did not hurt; it was his neck that sent out shockwaves of pain.

Usually you could meet family but under the terrorist law all restrictions were permitted. He sat in the cell and wept.

Eventually, Mansoor confessed to setting off the Sarojini Nagar blast with Ayub.



The Khuranas had, of course, become involved—they told the Ahmeds they thought of Mansoor as a son and couldn’t believe that the good news of the 1996 accused arrest had led to this.

Now that arrest, that search, seemed hollow. The obsession with the bomb, with terrorism, seemed hollow. But there was nothing to say. Only actions counted.

And in this the Khuranas, who claimed to be so involved in the world of terrorism, failed to make a difference, discovering that they too, at the end of the day, belonged to an NGO.



Mansoor sat crumpled against a wall of a cell. He knew he had brought this upon himself—upon his parents—and he shivered. He felt bad for them—for how much they loved their son, for how easily it could have been avoided. If he had only . . . but what would he have done? It was a closed loop. His life had ended as soon as Ayub had come into it.

How long had Ayub been a terrorist? Probably from the start. Is that why he converted me? Mansoor thought. And Mansoor began to shed religion, grew angry at it. “I hate religion,” he wrote on a notebook he was allowed when he was transferred to Tihar. “It’s what I hate most.” After the 1996 bomb, it was the second thing that had blinded him.



The Khuranas promised the Ahmeds that Mansoor would be out soon, but then months and years passed and nothing happened and Mansoor got used to his new life in Tihar Jail. He rose with the light and was locked down at four p.m. and spent the nights under a thin blanket on the floor of the roza ward, the Muslim ward, where, as if taunting him, everyone was highly religious, constantly putting their heads to the ground, staying there for hours in a retreat of penance, boredom, meditation. For an accused terrorist—his trial, of course, was still going on—he was allowed an unusual degree of freedom, not confined to the Anda cells, the solitary egg-shaped areas. It was as if the police knew he was no danger and so allowed him to interact with the general populace. The other prisoners, mostly poorer men, the sort he would have hired and fired in real life—it took Mansoor years to shed his classism—were impressed with him. Being a terrorist gave you a certain respect; it meant you had connections, and people asked him for help. But the real help he provided was with English, with reading legal documents, rewriting petitions, translating letters. He became known as “padhaku,” the “studious one.” His eyes got weak. He still hated religion but he saw it from a wise remove. Yes, he had become wise. He got up every morning and wrote of his boredom in a Bittoo notebook and thought of his life and came to the conclusion it couldn’t have gone any other way; he was still living out the phase that had started with the 1996 bomb; his mistake had been to think that it could go away overnight. But nothing did. You had to settle into tragedy as you settled into love or death. And he had settled. He was living at the bottom of the ocean of society. Sometimes, when the weather was good and he had come early to the hand pump where everyone washed and had traded his homemade rotis for a better place in the toilet queues and had found the one Chetan Bhagat novel in the library to read and had been able to garden and had received his thirty-rupee income for the day, he would feel almost happy.