Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

“They’re trying to show their classiness,” Afsheen observed.

They had underpriced the place, Mrs. Sahni told them when they sat down for coffee and biscuits and fizzing lime soda at the overly slick, cracked Formica table that is the hallmark of all Indian clubs. It was their mistake, she admitted. They had not realized that the scooter garage that came with the place was also worth a good ten lakhs. It was an honest blunder, she said; hence the confusion.

Sharif was enraged. The cheek of these people! Caught red-handed trying to sell it to someone else, and now, instead of apologizing, they ask for more!

“I’m very firm,” he said. “I’ve given the deposit.”

But then Afsheen interjected. “We’ll think about it,” she said, putting her hand on Sharif’s.

________

“What do you mean — we’ll think about it!” Sharif thundered at her in the car. “They’re wrong.”

“You do have a temper,” she said. “And you put people off with your pushiness. What’s ten lakhs in the long term? We like the property; we don’t want to fight — might as well pay it and get it over with.”

Mansoor, when he heard both sides of the argument, agreed with his mother.

But Sharif couldn’t accept it. He raged against his wife and son, against the Sahnis, and consulted his lawyer. Finally he decided that it would be cheaper to pay this ransom than to pay lawyers’ fees for decades.

________

The money was exchanged; the deal was completed in a urine-soaked registrar’s office in Bijwasan on a cold December day.

It was only when it was all over that the lawyer noticed a problem in the paperwork.

The property came with a lien, a debt, on it. For Rs. 20 crores. Rs. 200 million.

________

Mr. Sahni, when Sharif had first met him, had said he was in the export business — had boasted about how well he was doing, how he had two sons settled abroad, one in Toronto, another in Singapore. But there had been something off about the Sahnis from the start, Sharif realized. They owned this duplex in Asiad, in the heart of the city, but lived in a strange farmhouse-cum-bunker in Palam Vihar, an incomplete colony on the outskirts of Delhi, a crisscross of plots overgrown with thorny scrub and grass and keekar trees. There was something provisional about the house too — the furniture heavy and Punjabi, with no carpets covering the terrazzo floor and no art on the walls and twenty balloons up against the ceiling of the drawing room, the detritus of their granddaughter’s birthday, they’d said. But Sharif, who had been introduced to these people through Mahinder, was so grateful to have found a good house for himself, to find Hindus who would deal with Muslims, that he’d ignored all these signs and justified it to himself. And the Sahnis had justified it to Sharif too. “We want to give the money to our sons,” Mrs. Sahni had said in her sweet convent-educated voice. “It’s more useful to them, now that they’re living abroad. As for us, we like living in this greenery, away from the rush of Delhi. The drive to my school is just twenty minutes from here.”

Now, of course, Sharif saw it anew. A couple pushed into bankruptcy, pushed to the edge of Delhi, plotting an escape to Canada, seeking to offload the huge debt they’d taken on when the man’s export business went under. And they had found a sitting duck in Sharif but gotten greedy and tried to lure another duck. But Sharif in his pushy way had insisted that he be the victim. It didn’t help that he had a shitty lawyer and bad instincts with property. And so he had landed himself in the biggest financial trouble of his life — sinking under a debt of twenty crores.

________

The lawyer told him he could win the case in court. Sharif fired the lawyer and hired another one and settled in for a long legal battle. But he knew even before it had started that he would lose one way or another. After all, he should have looked at the papers before he signed. He had clawed his way into this tragedy.

“Why do we have such bad luck?” Afsheen cried at home.

“It’s that lawyer’s fault,” Mansoor said. “It’s his job to read the documents, to check them before signing. People in this country are incompetent.”

“I told your father not to deal with such people, but he insisted.”

Mansoor knew this wasn’t the case, but said nothing.

“Don’t worry,” she said, catching herself. “We’ll get out of this.”

________

“How do they think they can get away with this?” Mansoor asked his father later that day.

“People get away with a lot more in this country,” Sharif said. Again, he had the sense — the sense he’d had on the day of the blast, back in 1996—that this was punishment for staying on in an obviously hostile country. Many of his relatives had fled to Pakistan after the 1969 Gujarat riots; only he, bullheaded, had stayed on.

That evening, steeling himself, Sharif came up to Mansoor’s bedroom. Mansoor was sitting on the side of his bed, bent over, reading Deterring Democracy , by Noam Chomsky. When Mansoor had first arrived in Delhi, Sharif remembered, his muscles had been so tender that he couldn’t even lift a book, and Sharif had gone with him to a chemist in INA to purchase a reading stand — the sort apparently used by musicians — which held up books.

“Yaah, Papa?” Mansoor asked.

Sharif’s heart plunged. “Beta, Mummy and I think it would be best if you stayed in Delhi longer. There’s the financial issue and also it’s good if you get some rest. There’s no rush for college. We’d like you to be here with us. And Mahinder Uncle said he can get you an IT traineeship when you’re ready to type.” The words came out in a rehearsed flood.

Mansoor had known they were in trouble, but this much? That they’d suspend their son’s education abroad? “Of course, Papa,” he said, his voice reedy. “I was also going to say that. And I’m enjoying the NGO work. One semester here or there doesn’t matter.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yaah.”

Father and son considered each other across a void of total comprehension. Mansoor thought he was about to see his father cry.

“Good,” Sharif said, slapping his thigh. “It’ll be nice to have you around.”

After he left, Mansoor lay down on his bed and tried to not to cry himself.

Why he should feel so bad, when he hadn’t even loved his life in the U.S. — where he’d made as few friends as he’d made in school — confounded him. But he was torn about what he wanted. He didn’t want to be in India or the U.S. He wanted to be in a place free of pain and tragedy.

The discussions about the property went on at home; the tragedy became one of suspension; and Mansoor, after a gap of a few days, returned to the Peace For All meetings.

But now, sitting among the group members on the floor with their lazily folded legs (as if they were sitting up in a bed, drinking hot tea) and listening to their earnest debates about the civil code, he was disoriented, distracted, felt he didn’t have anything to do with this world or these people, that he’d stumbled into it by accident, during a period of boredom, and now that the period of boredom had been declared his life, he must return to serious things like programming.

“I’ll be staying on longer,” he told Tara and Ayub one day. “My health still hasn’t improved and the doctor has said I should rest another month.” This is the story the family had decided to share with strangers; they wanted to keep their suffering, their shame, private. “So I’ll be able to help in the next few months.” Though he felt and wanted the opposite: but the crucial thing, for Mansoor, was to get the announcement that he wasn’t going back out of the way.