Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

Whatever had been done to him had weakened him. He thought of how far he’d come, once again — from Tara to Azamgarh to Delhi to this beach, destined to perish and vanish the way the whole village had vanished. Had the villagers been taken out by dacoits? By bandits? By the government — cleared for some massive project? He became impatient for the bomb to go off. The coconuts yielded very little. He got up abruptly, gnashing his teeth, the muscles in his legs squeezed. He had the distinct feeling that he was in a dream — a hallucination like those he’d had on drugs.

This village at the edge of India, the complete absence of living things save for the jutting birds overhead, the mysterious mound of recently drunk coconuts — complete with the twisted straws brutally stuck back into the maws of the fruit — the bomb in his heart, the shabbiness of his clothes: none of it felt plausible, connected to the reality he’d known. He hoped he might fall asleep and wake up corrected. He put his fists against his blackly circled eyes. Twenty feet from him, water gushed on crumbling soil. His systems were shutting down; he could feel it — and it was right before he fell into sleep that he realized: sleep might trigger the bomb. He jerked awake. Brilliant. A person exhausts himself trying to avoid obvious postures only to fall into the default position of nature. Sleep. Everything major happened when you were sleeping. Plants grew. The earth, browsing the aisles of the sun, renewed itself. The truth about a place — its dangers, its crimes — came out. Why shouldn’t the bomb in me work the same way?

Suffering a fit of mania, he began to believe he controlled how the bomb worked. That he could turn it on and off with his mind. One with his body, he breathed deeply, yogically. Waves of tension passed up through his legs.

Suddenly feeling watched, he cast his gaze behind him, in an arc. He felt he was bringing the bomb up with concentration. Instead he vomited — a thin, colorless, sleek fluid. His system emptied itself out. Hunger, mania, vomiting — he didn’t understand. He was certain he would go off now. He was hungry for it.

He began singing. Haathi ka anda la. Aati kya khandala . A favorite of his and Tara’s. He was losing his mind. It was like that time in the fields of Azamgarh soon after he’d heard that Tara was going to America. This was the absurd singing of a man near death. A man looking to be finished and still throwing notes into the void. He let out his high-pitched laugh. It was like a tennis ball thrown high over a sparkling, waiting field. He got up suddenly and ran again. He ran through the town, past the shattered huts, huts that seemed bashed softly, rattled by the ocean, the wood fungal and ancient, the objects scattered around with such basaltic, modern randomness — plastic buckets, plastic bats, a bansuri — that he could make no sense of the people who’d lived there except to say they must have been happy and they must have used plastic.

The ocean had come into these homes and dragged the people away. The floors of cement, where they existed, had busted through to reveal black melting radiant damp soil. Somehow the plastic objects had been spared. It was as if the dragging bag of the blue ocean had known to reject certain things. A skeleton of a small dog grew bright with age. He moved up the winding streets. I have to find someone, he thought. Nothing is lost yet. I am only twenty-seven! I have sixty more years — years in which to decide what I wish to do, to make incremental change. I will dedicate myself to normal life. This will be a turning point.

An explosion threw him to the ground.

No — he was alive. It was just a rotten branch falling off a tree. He tore open his shirt and looked at his chest. The scar, shaped like a square, was like a space demarcated for punching. “Help!” he screamed. “Help!” His voice went far and deep, tearing up his larynx, knotting and releasing it. “Help!” Deep, large, explosive sounds. “Help!” Where did this strength come from? Whom was he beseeching? “Help!”

Afterwards he became very tired and despairing and he sat down by a crooked doorframe and wept. “I am sorry, God,” he said finally, recalling his oldest companion — one he had forgotten. “Take me back.”

He was found dead on the beach a day later, from hunger and exhaustion.

________

The police back in Delhi, of course, did not know any of this. They went to the hospital and followed the trail of documents and paperwork to the Ahmeds’ house.

________

Mansoor was taken from the house while still in his morning Adidas shirt and Bermuda shorts.

“Do you know why they think Ayub is a terrorist?” his father — jogging down the driveway, sweating, hair scrambled on his head — asked Mansoor, as he was led away in a knot of policeman on a thin colony road. The neighbors, arms folded over low walls, watched.

Mansoor’s shame kept him from speaking. “No, nothing,” he said, hoping that his father’s plastic business, which could so easily be linked to bombs, wasn’t held against him.

________

That first night, Mansoor was taken to the thana and beaten on the back and legs with a hockey stick by two policemen on a broken concrete floor. As he whimpered and cried and begged for his parents — as he thought of his days in California — he never denied knowing Ayub, or the fact that Ayub had stayed with them, or that they had taken care of him in the hospital.

Wouldn’t this string of charitable actions only exonerate them?

“The person who helps a terrorist — he’s even worse than a terrorist,” a young policeman, who at first had seemed as afraid of Mansoor as Mansoor was of him — the man could barely grow a beard — screamed. Over the next few days, Mansoor became very frightened of this sociopathic policeman with no sideburns, this eunuch of an angry policeman. He seemed unafraid and undeterred by threats. He didn’t care a jot for Mansoor’s “connections,” and when his parents and Vikas Uncle visited the station, pressing the police for his release, for bail, Mansoor was beaten even harder and not allowed to meet them. He wanted to meet them to tell them not to come. He was too sensitive to physical pain. Oddly, though, his wrists did not hurt; it was his neck that sent out shockwaves of pain.

Usually you could meet family but under the terrorist law all restrictions were permitted. He sat in the cell and wept.

Eventually, Mansoor confessed to setting off the Sarojini Nagar blast with Ayub.

________

The Khuranas had, of course, become involved — they told the Ahmeds they thought of Mansoor as a son and couldn’t believe that the good news of the 1996 accused arrest had led to this.

Now that arrest, that search, seemed hollow. The obsession with the bomb, with terrorism, seemed hollow. But there was nothing to say. Only actions counted.

And in this the Khuranas, who claimed to be so involved in the world of terrorism, failed to make a difference, discovering that they too, at the end of the day, belonged to an NGO.

________

Mansoor sat crumpled against a wall of a cell. He knew he had brought this upon himself — upon his parents — and he shivered. He felt bad for them — for how much they loved their son, for how easily it could have been avoided. If he had only… but what would he have done? It was a closed loop. His life had ended as soon as Ayub had come into it.

How long had Ayub been a terrorist? Probably from the start. Is that why he converted me? Mansoor thought. And Mansoor began to shed religion, grew angry at it. “I hate religion,” he wrote on a notebook he was allowed when he was transferred to Tihar. “It’s what I hate most.” After the 1996 bomb, it was the second thing that had blinded him.