Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

“That’s a good idea,” Mansoor said. “The state you’re in, it might take you ten more days, and you’ll feel better if you have a room of your own.” He felt self-conscious offering this privilege to his Gandhian friend. He sighed. “I couldn’t believe you were in a blast, yaar. I thought I was imagining it. But your eloquence was undiminished.”

“It’s like what you had said. One remembers nothing.”

“Something about the intensity of the sound and the speed with which things get rearranged,” Mansoor said, stroking his chin thoughtfully. “It’s like being sucked into a tornado. The mind doesn’t know how to process it. But you should have phoned us, yaar. That couple who came, the ones who run the association, they’re family friends.”

Ayub’s neck twitched. He had recognized the couple — but they had not recognized him — and he’d been very uneasy the whole time he’d been speaking to them and into the camera. Yet he’d gone ahead with the interview in hopes that his comrades would see that he was injured and that he’d given away nothing. At the same time he worried about his parents watching him on TV. “I would have called but I couldn’t remember the number and my mobile — I don’t know where it is.”

“The hospital has a directory,” Mansoor said. “But believe me, I understand. I couldn’t remember my own home number when the blast happened,” he said, looking triumphantly at his mother. All these years and they had never believed his story!

“Your mummy and papa’s number?” Afsheen repeated, sitting on the edge of the bed and looking around the shabby ward. The place was heady with the stink of sweat.

“Even that I can’t remember,” Ayub said, smiling.

“We’ll talk to the doctor and get you moved,” Afsheen said. “If you give me their name—”

This was the thing about his mother, Mansoor thought. Financial troubles or not, she was extremely generous.

“Mr. and Mrs. Azmi,” Ayub said, unable to lie anymore. “Of Azamgarh. And no need for the room, auntie.” But he did not push hard. Better to be put out of public view.

________

“What was he doing in the market?” his mother asked as they left the hospital in the car.

Mansoor knew there was a kernel of suspicion buried in her generous soul. He coughed. She’d never really cared for his friend, had been suspicious of his antecedents, his needlessly long stay. “He’s not from a rich background,” Mansoor said. “That’s why he was shopping in Sarojini Nagar. I told you — he’s a very impressive guy. He did his engineering and then he came to Delhi and decided to do social work. Can you imagine someone from our background doing that?”

She smiled and shook her head absently. Noticing her nervous tremor, he was angry, sad, afraid. Life was an endless parade of tragedies: solve one thing and another rushes to take its place. He was consumed by the idea that his mother, this noble creature with her dark thick skin and mauve lips and particular motherly creases, was going to die. He put his hand over hers. “But it’s bad luck for him,” Mansoor continued. “He doesn’t have much of an income and I think he’s the only son in India, so it’ll be tough for his parents.”

“We’ll take care of him,” his mother said, smiling.

“It’s so ironic,” he said to her. “He was the one in my NGO who was the most staunch believer in nonviolence. He’s the last person it should have happened to.”

________

Ayub, left alone in the ward, began to palpitate and lose his nerve. He’d always had a weakness for mothers, feared their telepathic abilities and felt that no matter what he said, Mrs. Ahmed would see through it. “She knows,” he thought. “That’s why she wasn’t smiling, and that’s why she came — out of curiosity.”

Before, for all his planning, he was an innocent, pure potentiality. Now, he was a murderer and a terrorist — worst of all, he was injured and in pain, which prevented him from thinking clearly about what he’d done. Why had the bomb gone off so quickly? He’d been told Shockie was the greatest bomb maker of his time.

Thinking of Shockie, he got inexplicably angry for a second and clutched the rusted nail.

Then he turned over on the bed. He knew that the people around him were here because of his efforts, that their wounds and tears were his doing — he’d heard the fat man who’d been talking on the mobile in the market moaning — but for that reason, it was satisfying that he too was hurt. He hadn’t exempted himself from the suffering he’d caused others.

The doctor had told him he would make it out with a slight limp if he did the right exercises. Ayub had smiled through his comments, aware of having hardened. So this is how it feels to be bad. Cold and sober.

Riding the flare of this feeling now, he got out of bed and started walking away. “Where are you going?” a nurse asked, calming another patient, but when he put up his pinky in the universal salute of wishing to pee, she looked away and he kept trudging. He came to a door that led out of the ward, amazed at the blindness of the doctors and the patients — a blindness like that of the shoppers he’d killed. He slipped out of the main entrance into the shameless afternoon light.

Buses, angry and green and gray, with oleaginous windows and robotic grimacing grilles, were blowing lightly down the road.

Originally, he was supposed to meet Shockie at the park after the bombing; he wondered how Shockie had responded when he, Ayub, hadn’t shown up. Did they think I was a double agent, that I went to the police? But, then, the bomb did go off — surely they heard about that. Would a double agent really set off a bomb?

The bomb had only killed fifteen and injured thirty. He wasn’t sure how to feel about it, except to say to himself, “It’s Indian propaganda. It was much bigger.”

Ayub passed a phalanx of dozing ambulances. But when he got to the lip of the hospital complex and hailed a rickshaw, he realized, with the despair of a man who has almost escaped, that he had no money. Someone had taken it from his pocket when he was lying in the mud, bleeding.

________

Mansoor came again in a few hours with his father, who fussed over Ayub and had him moved to a private room (Ayub had come back to the ward). “They’ve started making arrests already,” Sharif told Ayub. “The Indian Mujahideen has taken credit.” It pained Sharif to have to talk about yet another group of Muslims responsible for terror. He really did feel, as they moved Ayub to his room, that the world was closing in on him and his family, that it was bad luck to be back here again.

Ayub was frightened to hear about the arrests. “Did they say who did it?”

“You think there’s a reason?” Sharif said, mishearing. “They hate everyone, especially themselves.”

“You’ll appreciate this, uncle,” Ayub said, settling into his new bed, now echoing Mansoor’s statement to his mother. “I fought for the rights of people arrested for terror but I’ve never been on this side.” Suddenly, seeing his body, the whole injured extent of it, he was comforted. “One understands how the victims must feel about terrorists. They’re looking for revenge. They don’t want to listen to reason. What happened is so irrational that it makes people irrational.”

“Which is exactly what the terrorists want,” Sharif said. “How’s your eye?”

“It’s OK, uncle. One eye is nothing.”

“Better than the brain, I suppose.” He smiled weakly, saying the wrong thing as usual. “I should have had you start work that day itself — then you wouldn’t have had time to do shopping.” Sharif smiled again.