Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

“How could they do that? How can you be so irresponsible with someone else’s son? How many times have I told them I don’t want him to go out?”

“They’ve lost two kids.”

“They should lose two kids! They should lose everything!”

“Afsheen,” he said. But the truth was that he felt the same way.

The hospitals yielded nothing. But that night Sharif felt he’d come closer to the reality — and suffering — of the city than ever before: the tired grief-soaked expressions of patients; the exhaustion of nurses; the crumbling medical infrastructure; the weak tube lights flickering and clicking; the way in which doctors became bureaucrats the moment they were questioned. Sharif felt he ought to wash his hands of this country, this place he had fought so hard to make his own, enduring the jibes of his family members who claimed to lead happier lives in Dubai, Sharjah, Bahrain, Lahore.

By now the tears had dried up; husband and wife sat at the dashboard in rage-filled silence. “Let’s go to the police,” Afsheen said, half-crazed. “We should register a criminal case against the Khuranas.”

“We should have gone to the market earlier,” Sharif said, slapping his forehead.

They had gone to the market briefly before coming to AIIMS, springing through the debris, calling out for Mansoor. In doing so, they’d realized they were far from the only people searching for a relative in the market: half of Delhi seemed to be out in this dung of destruction, though, in the end, the death toll would be only thirteen dead with thirty injured — a small bomb. A typical bomb. A bomb of small consequences.

“Let’s go home first, in case he’s there,” Sharif said.

Home. The last time we’ll come back and be able to call it that, he thought, pulling up in his Esteem, the dark colony illuminated with the dirty electricity of the city. But as soon as he parked, he saw two individuals outlined in the light of the front landing.

Afsheen got out of the car and ran over and hugged and then slapped her son. The servant, who was sitting next to Mansoor, got up excitedly.

“How could this have happened?” Afsheen wept. “Why didn’t you phone us immediately?”

Sharif hugged his son tightly on the landing. He only now realized how tense he was, how much he loved his son. “Bring me some water,” he told the servant when he was inside, trying to control his emotions, the three of them holding each other in an odd huddle.

“We have to go help the Khuranas,” Afsheen said, looking up from her son.

Vikas’s concern for Mansoor had long since given way to grief over his sons. It became his priority — and his wife’s — to spend as much time with them as possible, to not abandon their corpses for even a minute. It was as if, having failed to protect them in life, they felt double the responsibility to fulfill their duties in death. Still, the cremation, which happened the next day at Nigambodh Ghat, stunned them both. They howled as the boys were crushed to ashes.

The bodies had been taken away briefly the night before for a postmortem so the doctors could recover pieces of the bomb from Tushar’s and Nakul’s corpses. The leftover pieces — bright triangles of metal, serrated edges of bottle caps, nails — glittered in the pyre.

Deepa, weeping violently, her hair pouring everywhere, gray from smoke, screamed, “Take me away.” Vikas watched with his arms behind his back, like a military man at the funeral of his entire squadron.

The members of the Khurana clan did not see each other frequently, but they took the responsibilities of family life seriously, and after the cremation, they came from their flats and gathered around the couple in their house to console and comfort them. Rajat, Vikas’s youngest brother, a handsome fellow in his thirties with an unfashionable mustache and an air of self-important family-oriented efficiency, pulverized sleeping pills with a rolling pin and dissolved them in the couple’s tea; that they drank this hot cocktail without noticing was a sign, to him, of how far gone they were. Bunty Masi went through the kitchen drawers, collecting knives and dropping them into a jute bag she took home. The Khuranas’ close friends, writers and filmmakers and decent professional types, came together and sat in a grief-stricken huddle; the blow had been so big, it had the potential to damage an entire friend group.

Others crowded on the floor, offering homilies, stories, banalities. Everyone (save for two patriarchs) agreed it was impossible to imagine what the Khuranas were going through.

________

The bombing happened at six p.m. on a Tuesday. By nine p.m. a group calling itself the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force had called Zee TV and NDTV and claimed credit for the attack. The family members discussed the group and its intentions and fell back on their normal scorn for Muslims. “They can’t live in peace, these Muslims. Anywhere they show up, they’re at war,” one Masi said. “A violent religion of violent people. In the Quran, it’s written — no Muslim is supposed to rest till he’s drunk the blood of seventy-two unbelievers.”

“Kashmiris have always been filthy people. The whole winter passes and they don’t bathe. That’s why Srinagar stinks so much.”

“The problem is they believe they’ll receive seventy-two virgins in heaven.”

“You’re saying this, but I work with Muslims every day. All the craftsmen and weavers are Muslim. You go to their locality and each of them has twenty children.”

________

The Ahmeds too were adjusting to this new world — this world in which their son had nearly perished and in which his two close friends had died before his eyes.

The doctor who had seen Mansoor on the day of the blast said he was very lucky: some other object or person nearby must have absorbed the shockwave. It was the shockwave that killed most people. If you inhaled at the moment of the blast, which was the natural impulse, the compressing air got inside you and tore up your lungs and you died of “massive trauma.” “You, young chap,” the old doctor said, slapping Mansoor’s cheek in a friendly but unsettling manner, “you’ve only got a fracture and some stitches in your hand — things that all boys of your age get. Soldier’s wounds.” Then he slapped him again and prescribed a few months of physiotherapy. Mansoor was allowed to take home all the shrapnel that had been pulled out of his arm — twenty pellets — in a plastic bag.

“Should we take him to VIMHANS?” Afsheen asked afterwards, referring to the mental health institute on Ring Road.

“Tell me what happened, how it felt,” Sharif said to the boy.

“You can’t just ask like that!” Afsheen said. “There’s a proper process for these things.”

But the boy was happy as he was, at home. “Please, Mama, I don’t want to go anywhere,” he begged.

“See, Afsheen, what’s the rush?” Sharif said.

In any case, the Ahmeds found themselves very busy with the cremation and funeral rites of the Khurana boys. Blessed with good fortune, they experienced a strong obligation to be present for their unlucky friends and they went and sat in the Khuranas’ flat every day, ignoring the abuses hurled at Muslims by Vikas’s relatives — relatives who were either not aware they were Muslim, or wished to harangue them in a sidelong manner.

“Only another mother can understand what you’re going through,” Afsheen cried in Hindi, sitting on her knees by Deepa in the Khuranas’ drawing room. “Mansoor keeps saying his life should also be taken away if Tushar’s and Nakul’s were, and I have to tell him, No, beta, no, don’t have these thoughts.”