Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

Together these voices created a viscid pressure in her brain. “Deepa? Do you want to ask him anything?” Vikas said.

She shook her head.

Vikas spoke now to Malik: “If you are guilty, if you’ve done this, remember there will be no peace for you or your families — not now or forever. You think you’re saving Kashmir, but you’re destroying it.” A bubble of spit formed on his lips and he considered spitting, but held himself back. He pulled out a photograph from his pocket. “Recognize them? My boys. They were blown up by you. What did they have to do with this?”

The man looked at the photos but said nothing.

Vikas turned to Jagdish, who repeated, “He won’t say anything.”

________

Malik was taken to a cell and stripped and beaten; they watched across the room as he howled. “He hasn’t said anything since we brought him in,” Mrs. Thapar explained.

Why did you bring him to us, then? Vikas wanted to ask.

“The toughest ones are the ones who don’t speak. Most just sign a confession and happily mention others; they say their own brothers have planted the bomb — they’re such cowards. Not this one. If he saw you , I thought he might talk. I’d told him journalists were coming to speak to him. I knew from the paper he reads who his favorite journalist is, and I’d told him that he was coming and he was excited.” She shook her head. “But nothing.”

Of course — nothing was free in this world, Vikas thought. They were being used too — as bait. “But the whole point was to talk to someone,” he said.

“I know, but there would have been no point talking to people who deny it.”

And it occurred to him now that the others who had been arrested were either broken or innocent, and this silent one was the closest they had come to finding a man who was guilty.

Within days of visiting Malik, Deepa began to disintegrate. Vikas came in from an excursion in a market and found her walking about and muttering in the drawing room with cake mix on her hands. The windows of the flat were open and birds came in and out, commuting, as at a railway station. When he asked her what the matter was, she said, “I’m looking for Nakul’s crane.” In addition to playing guitar, Nakul had a passion for origami, making delicate folds on small pieces of paper, twisting and pressing the paper on the floor like a person performing a ritual to keep something under the earth from exploding.

Vikas told her the cranes were in a shoe box under the bed — didn’t she remember?

“Oh,” she said, bringing her hand to her mouth and leaving a smear of batter there.

It didn’t stop — the confusion, the disintegration. Deepa, characterized by her bright, chirpy alertness, was now inert. When they’d come back from meeting Malik Aziz, Vikas had feared she might kill herself, and for a few days he’d stayed home, keeping her under intense watch, with Rajat and his friends making repeated visits. But he saw now what had happened to her was far worse, the mind vacating itself before the body could even act.

They’d been sleeping on the floor next to the bed ever since the boys had died. This was because the boys, though they were eleven and thirteen, coming into their male sounds and snores, had shared the bed with them every night, the limbs of the four Khuranas tangled ferociously, like a sprig of roots, dreams and sleep patterns merging and helixing, so that on one particular night, when Nakul screamed in his sleep, so did the other three, and the family woke with a common hoarse throat, looking around for intruders and then laughing. “We’re like tightly packed molecules,” Tushar had said, invoking the words of his science teacher and squeezing his mother close. Here, the Khuranas, who were generally no-nonsense, were indulgent. They were physical people — Vikas vigorously petting one or the other boy, mussing his hair, pulling his cheeks; Deepa cuddling with them as she had liked to wrap herself up in Vikas when they were first married.

Bundled, snuggling, the family fell into tight sleep. For Vikas, those nights of togetherness were the happiest of his life.

So — afraid to revisit those memories, they’d been sleeping on a thin mattress on the floor.

Then, one night, Deepa started letting out a low moaning sound — not crying, but a steady sob, like that of a dog. “What happened, darling?” Vikas asked, sitting up, his face covered with sweat, the underside of the bed visible, a tundra of dust.

She wouldn’t say. The moaning went on. He turned her over. “Deepa.” The house, closed in by the multiple cells of the relatives’ flats, was scary, lonely, dark. He shook her. Her eyes were open. She was not asleep. The sound was conscious. He was overcome, at that moment, by a panic he had never experienced before — the panic of a man alone in the world — and he put his hands on her small shoulders and shook her again. She wrapped her legs around his, still looking at the ceiling. Vikas pulled up her kurta and undid the drawstrings of her pajamas.

Soon, they were making love.

________

They did not discuss the lovemaking, but it continued every night for days and weeks. They had not been near each other’s bodies this way in ages and they entered old patterns and rhythms. They returned to the bed. No longer drugged with pills, they moved swiftly.

During the day, they grew silent around one another, Deepa returning to work, standing angrily before the oven all day, absorbing its heat. Vikas worried she might pass out from dehydration and went into the kitchen and brought her glasses of ice water, which she always took a sip of and put aside. She lost weight. At night, her body was birdlike and small. Then one day, they learned she was pregnant.

When the Khuranas received the news of the pregnancy at the office of their GP in East of Kailash, they fell silent. They’d known this was coming, had known what they were working toward, yet their actions had been suffused with denial, Vikas with his muddled commerce-student’s understanding of science telling himself, “Well, she’s forty; the chances of getting pregnant are lower,” and adding mentally, “We can always get an abortion,” imagining such a conversation would be easy to have given the higher risk of Down syndrome in a child born to an older mother. Deepa was in denial too, convinced they would kill themselves. She had thought that the lovemaking was simply a form of postponement. So it was a surprise to her when she was overcome by such raw, vivid emotion in the doctor’s office.

“This is an interesting situation,” Vikas said in the car on the way home, expecting Deepa to have a similar response. Instead she put her hand in his — cold, light fingers. Delhi even in December was dusty, lurid, sunlit, perplexingly dry, dug up on the megalomaniacal whims of urban planners and chief ministers, and it occurred to Vikas, as he drove, turning with the dips in the road, that Jagmohan, the politician, was the connective tissue between Vikas’s life in Delhi and the violence in Kashmir. Jagmohan, the demolition artist of the Indian state. Working swiftly, tirelessly, without imagination — a true peon — he’d bulldozed the slums of Delhi during the Emergency and knocked the city’s teeth out, what was termed at the time as “beautification.”

Vikas remembered this period of history acutely, the way one can only recall one’s college days. Twenty-one, he was commencing an MA in economics from DSE, already miserable, his future as a CA foaming at his feet while filmmaking was a distant flagless island beyond. His fellow students — especially of economics — knew better than to raise a fuss about politics and kept to themselves, huddled with exam guides and cups of tea. The situation appalled Vikas — who was already developing a social conscience in the apartheid halls of the university, where no two disciplines could debate each other — and one day, he followed the bread crumbs left by a newspaper to watch a demolition.