Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

When a Sikh auntie leading a coolie into a maroon train jostled Shockie, Shockie shouted, “Hey!”

“Move!” the woman shrieked at him.

“You move, you witch.”

And with that, she was gone, swallowed up by the dark maw of the train.

Invigorated, he lit a cigarette, broadening his shoulders as he brought the light to the Gold Flake hanging from his lips. He had always enjoyed the rudeness of Delhi.

A few minutes later, in Taukir’s Maruti 800, Shockie gripped the plastic handrest above the window and looked out. Delhi — baked in exquisite concrete shapes — rose, cracked, spread out. It made no sense — the endlessness, the expanse. In Kashmir, no matter how confusing a town was, you could always shrink it down to size by looking at it from a hill. Delhi — flat, burning, mixed-up, smashed together from pieces of tin and tarpaulin, spreading on the arid plains of the North — offered no respite from itself. Delhi never ended. The houses along the road were like that too: jammed together, the balconies cramped with cycles, boxes, brooms, pots, clotheslines, buckets, the city minutely re-creating itself down to the smallest cell. From one balcony a boy with a runny nose waved to another. A woman with big haunches sat astride a stool next to a parked scooter; she was peeling onions into a steel plate and laughing. Before municipal walls painted with pictures of weapon-toting gods — meant to keep men from urinating — men urinated. Delhi. Fuck. I love it too.

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Taukir lived with two spinsterish sisters and a mother whose eyes were dreamy with cataracts. The ladies served a hot lunch of watery daal and tinda and ghia, but Shockie was so excited he could barely eat. “No, no, bas,” he said, whenever the younger of the sisters, not unattractive, gave him a phulka. The man and his house seemed very modern, with many cheap clocks adorning the walls; you had a sense that whatever money the family had earned had been spent on clothes. “When can we go to buy the materials for the chocolate?” Shockie asked Taukir.

Shockie wasn’t sure how much the sisters knew; he felt proud and confident nevertheless, puffed up like the phulka he set about tearing on his steel plate.

Taukir provided several ideas for where they could go.

“Chawri Bazaar is better than all those,” Shockie said.

After wiping his mouth with a towel, he signaled to Meraj and they went out to buy materials.

A car bomb is made by putting together a 9V battery, an LPG cylinder, a clock, a transformer, a mining detonator, and four meters of wire — red and yellow, to distinguish circuits. The cylinder is then put in the dicky while the wiring and the timer are packed in the bonnet.

The clock was easy to buy — they got it from a shop in Chandni Chowk, the Red Fort a merciless mirage in the distance. The 9V battery they acquired from an electrician’s shop in Jangpura, where an old Punjabi man sat among sooty tables taking paternal pride in every piece of equipment. Shockie understood the fellow. He himself took a certain sensual, even feminine, pleasure in shopping for materials for a bomb; he might have been a man out to buy wedding fixtures for his beloved sister. But he had to keep his instinct for haggling and jolliness to a minimum. You had to make as little an impression as possible, and it was crucial to get material of the highest possible quality for the lowest possible price. You did not want your bomb to go phut when the day came — something that happened all the time, even to the best bomb makers. It had certainly happened to Shockie. One of his bombs had fizzled and let out a small burp of fire. This was in a market in Jaipur. He ran away before being caught, but two of his fingers were burned and had to be chopped off at the ends. He lost some feeling in his hand too, but it was for the best. It marked him as serious. When bomb makers met each other, they inevitably looked at each other’s hands.

Taukir came along with them on these excursions, looking alternately keen-eyed and lanky and then despondent and distracted, one arm looped behind his back and clutching the other hand in that lackadaisical, half-stand-at-ease, half-chastised posture that is the hallmark of bored people at rest.

They shopped in a conspicuous group of three because the Indian police often prosecuted terrorists on circumstantial evidence, trying to damn them with statements like, “Why was he shopping alone with a shawl pulled over his face?” Thus, the revolutionaries reasoned, if you had three people carrying out a task meant for one, you defeated the police’s logic with your illogic.

After two days of shopping in different parts of Delhi and arranging the materials on the floor of a room in Taukir’s house — a room that obviously belonged to the sisters and mother, who had been sent away to the village the day after Shockie and Meraj arrived — Shockie said, “Now, let’s see the car. It’s still parked outside?”

Taukir let out a noncommittal sound.

“You’ve parked it somewhere else?” Shockie repeated, getting up from his chair and smoothing his curly hair, an unnatural motion for a man who liked the puffs and curls of his plumage.

“Ji, sir, that’s my car,” Taukir said, finding his voice.

“And where’s the car for us?” Shockie said.

“Well, we have to steal it.”

“I see,” Shockie said. “Let me go steal it now.”

Before Taukir could react, Shockie was up and heading outside the house. He came across Taukir’s 800, the one in which they’d been driven from the station. Like every other vehicle in Delhi, it was a dented and dirt-spattered specimen, ruined as an old tooth.

As if conducting an examination, Shockie put his fist through the front window. The window came away, the crystalline fracture smeared with blood from his hairy arm.

“No!” Taukir screamed, coming outside. “What are you doing, sir?”

But Shockie said nothing, simply walking away, drops of blood falling on the earth.

________

The May heat was horrifying, violating the privacy of all things while also forcing you into yourself. Shockie closed his eyes against the ferocious prehistoric explosions of the sun. As he looked for a PCO from which to call headquarters and abort the mission — he had tied up his minor wound with a hankie — he cursed under his breath. They fucking want freedom but this fucking cheapness will never go away .

When Shockie had headed out for the mission from Kathmandu, he had been reassured that he would not need to steal a car — he had fumbled this crime before, and besides, he disliked all aspects of the job that made him feel like a common criminal.

Packets of gutka dangled in front of a shop like strings on a bride’s veil. Within the shop, the shopkeeper fished out items from the shelves with a pole. Shockie was about to ask the man if he knew where he could find a PCO when his eyes fell on another Maruti 800, parked on the side of the road — an ugly little blue thing with maroon fittings, tinted windows, and colorful plastic floral designs taped to the top of the windscreen.

The street was dense with scooters and bicyclists.

In a matter of seconds, Shockie bounded up to the car, hugged himself against the onslaught of vehicles and people, and then, in a swift motion that would have shocked anyone watching this avuncular fair fellow from a distance, put his hands on the petrol cap, stuck a blade under the metal, heaved with all his might, and ripped it off.

Every muscle in his left hand — his stronger hand, after that debacle in Jaipur — was afire. Carrying the petrol cap in his hand, making heavy strides in the traffic, he walked to Taukir’s house.

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