Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

Back at the house, Meraj and Taukir were playing cards on a sofa in sulky silence, light filtering dustily through the old Punjabi-style grilles of the house. The sofa had been put together by joining two metal trunks and covering it with a dhurrie.

“While you were sitting, I’ve done the job,” Shockie said, coming in. He handed them the petrol cap.

“Was the car close by?” Meraj asked, turning it over.

Taukir looked away.

“Give me some water and go get a key made,” Shockie instructed them.

________

While Taukir and Meraj had the key made at a shop (this was a flaw in the 800’s design; the key used to open the petrol cap could also be used to start the car), Shockie feasted at a local dhaba and admired the women at the tables with their gluttonous husbands.

He wanted to ram his penis into their wives. He imagined pinning the dhaba owner’s wife on a table and ripping off her kurta. Soon after, he went up to her and asked for another paratha. “Just one?” she said. She wore a nose ring and was obviously recently married.

“Yes, madam,” he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.

________

Meraj and Taukir returned with a new key.

But in the morning, when the three men walked down the alleys to the spot where Shockie had found the blue Maruti, it was gone.

“Bhainchod,” Shockie said. “I thought it belonged to that shopkeeper. It must be in the lane behind this one.”

But after looking for a few hours, searching the neighborhood in an auto, they had still found nothing.

So now, their mental scores settled, they did what they would have normally done — went to Nizamuddin, a rich neighborhood; found a shabby car orphaned outside a fancy house; stole the petrol cap; had the key made (at a different shop) and returned the next day and drove it away.

________

In an alley near Taukir’s house, they removed the license plates from the stolen car, packed wires in the bonnet, and put the LPG cylinder in the back. Like a person sprinkling petals on a bed, Shockie grimly filled the dicky with nails and ball bearings and scrap. He rued the lack of ammonium nitrate — it would have been good to visit the agro fair and buy a sack. Fertilizer was more explosive than natural gas.

This part of the operation was the most dangerous — scarier than running amok in Delhi with the police possibly at your back. Bomb makers, like most people, are undone not by others but by themselves. Shockie knew countless stories of bomb makers who had lost eyes, limbs, hands, dicks to premature explosions; knew operatives who’d succeeded in blackening and burning their faces so that the skin peeled off for months and ran down their backs in rivulets and they looked like hideous ghouls, unable to do the anonymous work of revolution without exciting the pitying, curious stares of onlookers — the same looks you hoped to elicit for the craters you left behind.

Even the greats were not immune to this curse of bomb makers, Shockie knew. Take Ramzi Yousef. He flew to New York in 1993 without a visa, snuck into the country after being let go from an immigration prison in Queens (it was overcrowded), and then, after setting off practice fertilizer bombs in the New Jersey countryside, hired a man at a local mosque to drive a rented van packed with explosives into the basement of the World Trade Center.

The night the bomb went off, buckling but not capsizing the first tower, injuring thousands but killing only three, Yousef flew first class on Pakistan International Airlines over the plumes of his explosion. All good. But then he got to Pakistan and tried to assassinate Benazir Bhutto and ended up in the hospital with burns (the pipe bomb he’d been preparing exploded in his face as he tried to clean the lead azide in the pipe). The police suspected him and he had to run away. A year or two later, he found himself in Manila. His plan was now to assassinate the Pope, who was visiting, and Bill Clinton, who was coming to one-up the Pope. His comrades and he had robes and crosses with which to Christianize themselves. On a plane from Manila to Tokyo, testing out a new device, he attached a tiny explosive fashioned from a Casio Databank watch under his seat. When he got off at Seoul’s airport, the stopover, a Japanese businessman took his place. In midair, en route from Seoul to Tokyo, the seat exploded, painting the inner ribs of the aircraft with the guts of the businessman. The plane, weaving wildly through the air like a gutless firework rocket, did not crash.

So now, back in his Manila flat, Yousef — invincible, a genius of terror, perhaps the greatest terrorist who ever lived — cooked a virulent soup of chemicals on the stove. Or no. He was cooking to get rid of the evidence. But as the chemicals vanished, huge clouds of smoke appeared and his comrades and he fled the apartment in fright, leaving behind chemistry books, canisters of fertilizer, passports, wires, Rough Rider condoms.

Yousef escaped to Pakistan but was arrested later in a hotel in Islamabad as he puffed his hair with gel and stuck explosives up the ass of a doll.

A genius of terror. Shockie’s heart pounded. He wanted to be like Yousef, the Kashmiri Yousef, but even Yousef, who had shocked America — who had almost toppled a building that seemed to snick heaven like a finger, who had tried to blow up jetliners over the Pacific and kill the Pope — even Yousef was fallible.

Shockie prayed as he attached the wires in the corroded belly of the car. Like so many rich people’s cars, it was poorly maintained.

He blew the dust from the machinery with his mouth and inhaled the rich petroleum blackness. He made the other two men stand with him as he risked his face.

________

The bomb did not explode during assembly. But afterwards he was tired; he had a headache and his arms hurt — more so than when he had violently tugged the scab of the petrol cap from the rump of the Maruti — and he stayed up all night on the bed of the spinsters, his head throbbing and the city mocking him with its million nocturnal honks, wondering: What will it be for? Am I ruining it by not sleeping? Will my nerves be too shot to pull off the blast?

________

They drove the car to the market the next evening. They were all bathed, and they had all gone to the mosque and prayed — even Shockie, who found prayer distasteful and feminine. They were in good clothes and disguised with thick spectacles and false mustaches (Meraj wore dark glasses, for contrast). If anyone asked them, they were to say they had come to buy clothes and gifts for their sister’s wedding. They’d even brought pictures of a woman in a fake marriage album (not one of Taukir’s sisters but a random pinup girl ripped from the walls of a seedy photography studio) to show how they were trying to buy wedding bangles that matched her dupatta.

Shockie, in the middle of the night, unable to sleep, had masturbated to this woman, completing the fantasy that had begun with the dhaba owner’s bride.

The market was packed — just as he had hoped. It was a Sunday. Driving carefully through the obstacle course of pedestrians and cyclists and thelas, they entered the central square of Lajpat Nagar Market — if you could call it a square. Encroachment had softened the sides and the corners of the market; there were buildings and shacks on all sides, and a park in the middle with a rusted fence and rubbish collecting on the brown mound where grass had once grown. Shockie was pleased with this choice of venue. He’d visited Lajpat Nagar on his previous trip to Delhi and had decided, with his friend Malik, that it would make an excellent target.

They parked the car in front of Shingar Dupatte, a women’s clothing shop.