Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

Mukesh knew from Deepa’s face that he was being watched too, carefully.

“How is the money situation?” he asked suddenly.

“Good,” she said, but in a way that made it clear she had whispered a thousand bad s before it.

“So Vikas is finishing his film about markets?”

Another pause. “Yes.”

“Good.” Mukesh smiled, bending down from his chair to do a card trick for Anusha: he always carried a pack of cards with him, fanning them in concert with his lecherous grin.

________

His visits became more frequent. He would come up in the middle of the day and play with Anusha; Deepa would watch him. Then, one morning, when Anusha was at her play school, Deepa led him into the bedroom and took off her clothes.

Mukesh looked on from the door, hard, amused. Her nakedness made him aware of his own clothes: a checked half-sleeve shirt, loose gray pants, black Batas.

She sat down on the bed, her buttocks on the sheet, and began to read a gray dusty book titled The Magic Mountain , which she lifted from the side table.

Mukesh sat down on the sofa in the room, clutching and mopping his brow. Now that he had what he’d wanted — now that he was so close to it — he had a mind to turn back.

After a while, he got up as if to leave, but then turned around and, still fully clothed — this is how he liked to do it — climbed onto the bed.

________

It was not love — what happened. Though she had opened herself to him in that bed, on that morning, she was not aroused when he speedily covered her body with his.

It was as if she would only let him have her by pretending to be dead.

________

Their passion took on the flat quality of those mornings with their archipelagoes of white light thrown on the floor, the bones of the windows visible and gaunt, Mukesh coming over and rummaging around in her life, her bed — she never thought of it as sex, but as rummaging .

She had long since evacuated the sphere of full feeling. In some ways Vikas had been right about her after she’d come back from visiting Malik — she was gone. What remained was a bright shadow, a disturbance of light intent on going on a little longer.

________

The trouble started when she began to fall in love with Mukesh, as she looked forward to these illicit visits, imagining the imprint of his hands on the old wooden railing that ran alongside the staircase — the hands with their blisters from breaking and peeling branches with Swiss knives on trips to Dalhousie; hands that dragged the sliding door at the entrance to the drawing room so it hung, like a man taken by the throat, a few inches above its rail on the ground.

That’s when she asked him for money.

That had been the implicit agreement from the start — that he would give her money for Anusha; he had offered it after the first visit as he buttoned up his shirt and put on his brutal black shoes: the patriarch getting dressed before his family, entertaining petitions. And they never once talked about his wife and two grown-up daughters. “I should go pick up Anusha,” she had said after that first time, still half-smiling, half-radiant, abashed, touching her hair, confused, scared. She too knew she had crossed a threshold and, having done it, could not say why. It was not out of attraction — she had no physical feelings for Mukesh, disliked his breath, disliked even the tender, consoling way he had held her, as if putting her in a hypnotic lock before committing his act — no, she felt only a warping stasis, the desire to be rid of a station of life, no matter the method or means. And Mukesh, with his kara-cuffed arms, his triple-ringed fingers with their superstitious ruby insets, his almost synthetic mustache, his filigreed eyes, was such a means — had become complicit with her mission even before she’d set out on it. So she’d let him play his part.

And putting on his clothes, offering to help with future school tuition, boasting about how the sale of the lands had swelled his bank account so much his kids couldn’t even squander it on TVs and cars, he was not so bad. She accepted.

________

He kept giving her money, but it was to slap the relationship back into the realm of transaction that she began asking for it directly, her eyes hard. The more she liked him the more she hardened herself against him.

They lived in a crowded complex — how long before everyone was talking about it? The servants, with their practiced clairvoyance, probably already knew.

“This is the advantage of being a do-gooder type,” Mukesh said. “They think I’m interfering with everyone’s business and so won’t think it’s unusual I’m sometimes at your house.” It was a shocking touch of self-awareness and Deepa saw now how being generally shameless could permit and cloak even more dire shamelessness. “I’ve told them I’m bringing homeopathic medicines for Anusha,” he said. It was true: he did bring medicines, for Anusha’s persistent colds, but Deepa didn’t let him give her any. “I want Anusha to grow up free of all pollutants,” she said, thinking suddenly of Tushar’s pleading, brimming reactions to the tetanus injection brandished by the bespectacled lady pediatrician, or Nakul’s habit of squirreling away homeopathic pellets for all kinds of maladies in a single bottle, so he could nibble on them every night till they were inevitably found and confiscated.

________

Vikas, cut off from family, knew nothing about this. He came home and saw his wife in the same pose with Anusha — scolding her for running around too much, for falling and injuring herself when she had been diagnosed with keloids.

“Why not restart your baking business?” Vikas asked, waking from the dead dream of his endless documentary about terror.

“I want to be there for her,” Deepa said, eyes pouring toward some faraway spot.

Over the years Deepa had started to blame herself for the boys’ visit to the market. If she had been present, if she hadn’t been so dead set on making up the shortfall in the family income by furiously baking, if she had known to intervene when her husband, lazing around, doing nothing, had nevertheless sent them all away in an auto on an obvious suicide mission… if she had asserted herself. “What are you doing that’s so important that you can’t take them?” she imagined saying to Vikas. She often shouted it out loud as she walked about the house on her increasingly troubled knees, hobbling quickly.

But it didn’t matter what she said to her husband, now or then. He continued to slip further and further into his dream of self-abnegation that predated even the boys’ deaths.

________

For a man who had dedicated his life to seeing, he noticed very little. What he was really good at was getting people to talk, but that was within the square jail of his camera lens.

________

She was alone with Anusha, always had been, so one day in 2002, when Vikas said they should invite Mansoor over for tea, that Mansoor had had a relapse of his bomb injury and was back in India, she said yes — what choice did she have?

________

This was before the association, before the Sarojini Nagar blast. But seeing Mansoor in their drawing room — young, able-bodied, grown-up, handsome, thin, holding out his wrists, his stormy eyebrows like two thoughts disagreeing with each other — freed something in both of them. After years, they began to talk to each other again. They remembered stray things about the boys — the way Tushar, the morning of the blast, had come into the bedroom soon after Deepa and Vikas had made love, looking hurt and surprised, unsure what had happened, but putting his hands on his hips in a school-ma’amish manner, intuiting something.