Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

“Still. This is one thing we must avoid,” Shockie said. “Where our illogic must not extend. We need the support of our people. Accidentally blowing them up won’t help.”

From his expression, it appeared he had done this a lot. How many people had this man killed over the course of his life? Ayub wondered. Had it achieved anything? Kashmir, where he started, was as ravaged by violence as before, with little shift in the needle of negotiation. And in this country Muslims were still killed, detained, fired, disappeared. How did this man justify his life to himself? Ayub looked again at the tipless fingers and thought, I supposed he has suffered too, having gone through immense pain — and that has hardened him.

With these preliminaries over, Shockie began to sketch out the plan.

________

The plan was to cause as much damage to the economy as possible — for this reason, the blast was to be set off in the week before the festival of Diwali, at the end of October. Ayub was to drop off a bag with a bomb in Sarojini Nagar, a crowded open-air market where people shopped for fake branded T-shirts and clothes. “This Logus T-shirt is from there,” Ayub said, pointing to his chest.

Shockie smiled. “So it’s a good target, then.”

“Why not one of the malls?” Ayub asked.

“There’s too much security,” Shockie said, shaking his head and looking around with an intelligent alert scanning gaze, his arms thrown over the cement bench. Ayub noticed that a heart had been carved into the rough billion-peaked concrete. How did they do it? With knives? This mania for defacing things — he had never understood it.

“But the security at these malls isn’t so good,” Ayub said. “If you look upper-class, they let you through anywhere. The Ansal Plaza in Khel Gaon, especially.” He would feel less guilty, he thought, killing the rich rather than the poor.

“It’s your first time,” Shockie said. “Next time we’ll look at the malls. First do this. It sounds easy to you, but it’s not. A million things can go wrong and they’re never the things you expect.” He put up his hands. “You see these fingers? I lost them in an explosion in Jaipur. As for the Lajpat Nagar blast, where your friend was hurt, the first time it didn’t go off. We were so worried about being seen, spent so much time putting on disguises, that we didn’t even think this could happen.” His mouth curled; he had a lost, self-pleased look on his face. “Do this first and you’ll learn yourself what your capabilities are.”

Ayub withdrew a little from Shockie on the bench. Ahead, in the park, the game of cricket was ending. An argument had broken out between teams. How could I have worried they’d notice anything? They barely notice they’re playing , they’re so busy fighting.

“Fine, boss,” Ayub said, nodding.

________

In the end, his role was so small, he felt foolish about the buildup, the training, the waiting — is this all it came to? Dropping off a bag at Sarojini Nagar, a market so crowded it was surprising no one had set off a bomb there? Some people will die, he thought, that’s true. But they’ll expand the market’s security after the blast. The MCD will push the encroaching shops back from the road. And the crowds will be funneled through one of those security doorways you see at cinemas and airports. No — I’m only doing the inevitable. If not me, then someone else. I’m pointing out the flaws in the system. Terror is a form of urban planning.

Back in his hotel room, he remembered that Mohammed Atta, the famous World Trade Center hijacker, had been a student of urban planning in Hamburg, in Germany. Was there a connection between the two things — terror and planning? It was possible. Atta, in his religious way, had wanted to design the perfect Islamic city — his thesis was on Aleppo, in Syria. In the end, though, his urge to design took a different form — he brought down the twin monstrosities of the towers over Manhattan, and there, in a single day, he accomplished what no other planner could have, erasing the cold shadows of those vile boastful buildings from the sun-filled streets of the city. Did Atta think of his task this way? Did he realize he was doing in death what he could never do in life — putting his degree into practice?

As Ayub sat on the hotel bed, his hands became damp. He felt he was intimately connected, in that moment, to Atta — felt that he might even be him, the dead man’s spirit somehow invading his. And what is the difference between him and me? he thought. Atta too had a gaunt, Tauqeer-like, Skeletor look about him. A young student abroad, alienated from German society, he had strong convictions and beliefs about his home, Cairo, but no way to implement them. So, growing from within, leaping angrily across the Atlantic, he smashed the high locks on the gates of the West — but for what, exactly? Ayub had thought about this often since joining the group. Earlier he’d felt the attack was just revenge against American imperialism, but now he’d come to see that the reasons for such aggression would have to be idiosyncratic, personal. Did Atta wish to make a name for himself in history? Did he think this was the only way to enter al-Qaeda’s name into American consciousness? Or did he feel — as Tauqeer suggested about India — that America, in beginning two retaliatory wars, would end up ruining its economy and self-immolating? Was it really economic? As Ayub thought these things through in the hotel, with its softly thudding rats and the throttled, overused soap visible in the bathroom on its steel holder, he was convinced this could not be the case. There was too much blood involved — blood tossed against the mile-high windows of the WTC like a libation — for the reasons to not be emotional and hotheaded, even if it took the hijackers a year of training to accomplish their goals. Killing others and then yourself is the most visceral experience possible. Atta must have felt himself full of sexual hate for the people piled high in the towers, bodies in a vertical morgue. He saw the opening between the two towers as a vagina into which to shove the hard-nosed dick of the plane. Sitting at the controls, his curly hair tight on his skull, eyes rubbery, underslept, blackly circled, he must have seen someone appear at the window and look at him — a woman, maybe, a blond American woman. At that moment he got an erection. At that moment he slammed into her alarmed face.

________

On the day of the blast, Ayub went to the local mosque and prayed, worrying the entire time that he was being noticed. He wanted to phone his parents, but he’d been expressly forbidden from making contact. He was to play it safe, treat it like any other day, and for this reason, after he’d prayed and the sun was up and the day had begun in its thousand polluted particularities, he called Mansoor and told him that he had thought about it some more and he would like to talk to his father about the job after all.

“OK, boss,” Mansoor said, his heart leaping at how far his friend had sunk. If Ayub worked for his father, then he was truly not competition anymore; he had been removed from the nervy world of activism. “Just remember, he’s a little brusque sometimes. He shouts at people who work for him but he’s well meaning. And because of the court case, I’m not sure how much he’ll be able to pay you.” Actually the case was beginning to go well. After a year of threatening and frothing and refusing to show up for hearings, the Sahnis had phoned Sharif the other day and asked if he would consider settling out of court. At first, Sharif, injured and doubly cautious, refused to engage with them. “How do we know it’s not a trick?” he asked Afsheen. “Last time we trusted them you know what happened. And this must mean we’re winning — that they’re coming to us with their tails between their legs. No. I don’t want to talk to them. Let them spend their money on the case.”