Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

At home, unlacing his shoes, dumping out the sand that collected on the soles, feeling his stubble like a proof of advancing life, he did not sit down to calculate the odds of walking into a bomb. He knew enough about mathematics to understand it would only disappoint him. “I suppose I could speak to the police and to journalists about where they think bombs might be set off,” he thought, the old documentarian instinct asserting itself.

He saw Delhi as a city vibrant and roiling with possibility, with bombs as pockets of heat, geysers that sprayed up naturally.

He started visiting these markets at rush hour with his camera. There was the one limiting rule he set for himself, so that he not bore of the project, or simply go mad from the heat: he would film only at or around the time the boys had been killed in Lajpat Nagar. If this foreshortened the odds, so be it. As for filming, the act itself, he made sure he was inconspicuous; he did not want to scare away potential terrorists with his equipment. (He did not think, in his half-cracked state, that this way of thinking was extremely odd.)

His first visit was to Lajpat Nagar. Armed with a Betacam, entering the square, he set up a tripod in the ruined park in the middle. Immediately urchins and shopkeepers came up to him, asking what he was doing — people wild-eyed with the rushed newfound suspicion of bomb victims. When he told them he was the father of two victims, they quieted down, but they were obviously not pleased. Having suffered so much, they did not want to be filmed within the broken cages of their shops, shacks with the distended lips of shutters and fragmented beams.

From the park, Vikas took in the market in cinematic gulps, saw people traipsing over rubble, over blasted loops of cloth, old shoes — signs of the bomb that hadn’t been cleared away but were being compacted into the deep archaeology of the city. He thought of Tushar and Nakul, the parts of them that had been left behind here, merging with the earth.

After a while, he began to spread out. He went to GK, South Ex, Karol Bagh, Chandini Chowk, Sadar Bazaar, INA — places even denser than Lajpat Nagar, more eager to be blown up. He became a fixture in these markets, setting up his camera in the shacks of paanwallahs and tea sellers, buying their loyalty and canceling their grumbling with payments. He was making a movie about the bazaars of India, he explained. No, he was not with the police. To put them at ease, he described his other documentaries and exaggerated acquaintanceships with Bollywood stars.

“So why are you here if you know Raveena so well, sir?” one chaiwallah asked, referring to Raveena Tandon.

“Abe, what do you think, we can all sleep with her?” Vikas said.

There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.

And at these moments of light banter, it was possible to see a different Vikas emerge, one who had little do, at least externally, with the man who spent hours glued to his window as if it were a TV, looking for his boys out of powerful habit, his heart wrenched in place.

“It’ll be a tribute to the children,” he explained to his wife one day. “And one thing no one mentions is how brave the shopkeepers were,” he said. “After all, they have to go back to work right where the blast happened.” Though the record, in the case of Lajpat Nagar, at least in terms of bravery, had been mixed. Some shopkeepers had immediately leapt after their burning cars or their things, ignoring their injured assistants. The owner of the framing shop, a young macho Punju fellow with a lippy twenty-five-year-old wife and two young kids, had actually escaped the initial explosion and rolled into the alley between shops; then, overcome by greed, he had climbed through the burning tarpaulin to retrieve the cash from his box, only to be crushed by the falling A/C he’d had installed the week before.

But there were also instances of out-and-out heroism in this capitalist scramble. One of the shopkeepers, half his face blown off, had picked up a megaphone and warned customers to keep away. The assistants risked their lives to pull other assistants from the rubble. Mansoor ran away in fright but someone, some kind person, never to be named or found out, had taken the boys to the hospital; auto drivers, god bless their souls, had lined up outside the market, transporting victims to Moolchand and AIIMS for free. “I should make a separate documentary about them,” Vikas said.

He expected his wife to pick out holes but she said, “Don’t get killed in a bomb yourself.” Which, of course, was exactly what he wanted.

________

Deepa had not been idle during this period. Vikas came from a politically well-connected family — his grandfather had been an ICS officer and the chief commissioner of Chandigarh and a chacha had served as a cabinet secretary under Indira Gandhi; another cousin, Mukesh, was a friend of Venkaiah Naidu, the spokesperson of the BJP party.

Deepa, who had previously kept away from these family members on account of Vikas’s distaste for them (he hated anyone who didn’t flatter him about his art, who asked how he made money), now began approaching them for favors.

They were helpful. One of the more surprising moments at the chautha had been the appearance of Venkaiah Naidu — present at Mukesh’s behest — and now Mukesh said he would be happy to talk to Naidu again. “He’s not in power but I’m sure he’ll know the right person to talk to,” he said. Then, putting his paw on Deepa’s hand — he was a notorious groper of women, widely recognized as the colony’s lecher — he said, “Are you sure you want to meet the terrorists?”

She nodded. “Who knows how many years the trial will go on? Just once, I want to talk to one of them, to understand why they did this.”

“They wanted to disrupt the election in Kashmir,” Mukesh said, his eyes sympathetically grazing her grief-shattered face. “Will you have some tea?”

They sat in his office — he ran a construction business from a building across the street from the family complex — and drank tea. He reflected that it was the first time they’d ever sat together like this.

He’d always thought Deepa an exceptionally attractive woman, her exoticism enhanced somewhat by the fact that she was Christian and from the South, with sweater-gray eyes that seemed only a few nicks of color removed from her grayish-brown skin, a peculiar color that didn’t appear in Delhi, where the shades seemed to swing between black and white, Dravidian and Aryan (Mukesh himself was dark and hated the world for it).

Poor woman, he thought. Trapped in a doomed marriage with my depressed cousin (Vikas was ten years younger than Mukesh, but they were cousins) — a man who never knew how to handle women, who, with his nervous shifty mannerisms and sudden uncomfortable smiles, seemed to attract bad luck. You could see misfortune imprinted on people’s faces years before it hit them. Mukesh had always known that Vikas, the academic star of the family, would be a failure. Which is why he’d been surprised when Vikas had come one day to the communal drawing room with this sexy item at his side. Women work in mysterious ways; men do too. “Will you have biscuits with your chai?” he asked.

“No, no,” she said. “You have a nice office. Tushar and Nakul always wanted to see your construction machines and excavators.”

“You should have brought them.”

I thought you didn’t even own the machines, she wanted to say — you’re only a middleman — but she kept quiet. Mentioning the boys had opened up a door of mania and sickness right in the very center of her chest. She put down the tea.