The Association of Small Bombs(85)

Delhi was just beyond these burning coil-wrapped walls. He was still inside Delhi.



His mother came to see him often. She would sit across from him, separated by two layers of barbed wire, and cry and he would too.

Tragedy had given her a certain physical strength even as it eroded her mind. Her forehead seemed oddly free of lines—or that’s how it seemed through the spiky wire.

“Crying won’t solve anything,” he’d shout at her. “Don’t come here if you’re only going to irritate me with your grief.”

Of course he was only angry with himself. He would only understand this after she had gone away.

Nevertheless, he wanted to hurt her again and again. This was his purpose on earth.

For having given birth to him.



One day, after many months of silence, Vikas Uncle came to see him in the prison. Vikas Uncle had developed some kind of rash on his face—it was raw and pink. He told Mansoor, his voice lilting with emotion, that Mansoor would be out in six months, that he was doing everything he could, that he had given his epic film about terrorism a narrative that started and ended with Mansoor and that he was confident its public release would speed up the process.



In fact, Vikas had become a broken man. His visit to Mansoor had been one of the lowest points of a long-simmering nervous breakdown.

When Mansoor had been arrested, he had thought he could get him out but had in fact discovered he was as powerless as before. He was hindered at every step, and often by people he knew. Gill, for example, had said, “He’s pukka a terrorist; don’t be fooled.”

“He’s like my son.”

“He’s a Muslim,” Gill said.

“He was injured in a blast.”

“Psychologically speaking that makes the most sense. You turn into what you hate,” Gill said, caressing his beard and seeming oddly, in that moment, like Sharif Ahmed with his glorious almost-autistic surety.

Vikas never saw him again.

Vikas left the association too. He was surprised by how callous his wife was, in the end. “I have to live my life,” she said when Vikas said they ought to do more—that they ought to sell their property and support the Ahmeds in their multiple cases because they were running out of money.

“Deepa.”

“We can’t live like paupers. We’ve suffered enough already. And what about Anusha?”

Anusha—Vikas turned to her and saw that he . . . felt nothing. She was a corridor down which he never should have gone.

He felt the blast had made Deepa selfish in a way he had never expected. She wanted only to live in a nice home and to take care of Anusha and to take trips with her. She wanted no traffic with the larger world. Whereas tragedy had only opened Vikas’s eyes.

They tried for a while to reconcile but in a fit of rage she told him about Mukesh. That was the last provocation for Vikas. Rushing down the stairs, shouting at Mukesh in his construction office, causing a scene on the property, he soon left Maharani Bagh for good.

He moved into a small flat in Sukhdev Vihar. There, alienated from everyone, he worked day and night on the documentary. But he also starved himself, subsisting only on bananas.

It would have amused him as he died, a year after he moved out—from a potassium overdose—to have discovered he’d suffered a fate of semi-starvation similar to Ayub’s.



His body was found in the flat by the sweeper and for a while people thought he had been murdered and there was a lot of talk about Deepa and Mukesh being involved. But then that too was forgotten. Deepa and Mukesh had long since stopped seeing each other.

Deepa returned to Bangalore with her daughter.



The Ahmeds lived lives of quiet, drowning desolation in those years when their son was in prison. They had lost the property case, of course—the minute the arrests hit the papers, the Sahnis had swooped in and the judge had turned against them—and having been bankrupted, had moved out to a tiny place in Batla House, not far from where Mansoor had visited the women in the “VC fund” years ago.

Living together, having lost all their friends, they became quite religious, praying and spending time doing charitable work with the Zakat Foundation.

Then one day, driving to an orphanage, Sharif felt the steering wheel of the car turning and banking away from him, as if the road were an ocean that could grasp and torque your rudder. He pushed the brake pedal. Nothing. He took the car to the mechanic. But the car kept disobeying him. Around the same time, Afsheen discovered that all the buttons on her kameezes were vanishing, even though the clothes were under lock and key in a Godrej.

It was when she found a lemon filled with blood behind a photograph of Mansoor that she became convinced someone was trying to drive them out of the property with black magic. Sharif and she began seeing a black magic expert who would help counter this force.

They knew superstition was against religion, but what choice did they have? And so they became wrapped up in this new religion of terror, till twelve years after his arrest, Mansoor was finally released for lack of evidence.



By this point much had changed. Shockie had been executed—controversially—and Malik had been hanged too. But the Ahmeds could never take joy in these kinds of executions. They wanted only to see their son.

Hobbled and old, they drove to the jail—the car now obeying them—on a gray day livid with dust. When they got to the entrance of the prison, the loo wind was slapping curtains of sand toward them and they couldn’t quite see Mansoor’s face as he came up to them with a plastic bag full of his things. But they all stood within the two flare-ups of particles, embracing.