Family Planning
THE BOMBING, FOR which Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were not present, was a flat, percussive event that began under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800, though of course that detail, that detail about the car, could only be confirmed later. A good bombing begins everywhere at once.
A crowded market also begins everywhere at once, and Lajpat Nagar exemplified this type of tumult. A formless swamp of shacks, it bubbled here and there with faces and rolling carts and sloping beggars. It probably held four seasons at once in its gigantic span, all of them hot. When you got from one end of the market to the other, the wooden carts with their shiny aluminum wheels had so rearranged themselves that the market you were in was technically no longer the market you had entered: a Heisenbergian nightmare of motion and ambiguity. So the truth of the matter is that no one really saw the parked car till it came apart in a dizzying flock of shards.
Strange sights were reported. A blue fiberglass rooftop came uncorked from a shop and clattered down on a bus a few meters away; the bus braked, the rooftop slid forward, leaked a gorgeous stream of sand, and fell to the ground; the bus proceeded to crack it under its tires and keep going, its passengers dazed, even amused. (In a great city, what happens in one part never perplexes the other parts.) Back in the market, people collapsed, then got up, their hands pressed to their wounds, as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk. Most startling of all, for the survivors and rescue workers both, was the realization that the main dusty square was rooted so firmly by half a dozen massive trees, trees that had gone all but unnoticed in all those years, their shadows dingy with commerce, their branches cranked low with hanging wares, their droppings of mulberry collected and sold—until the bomb had loosened the green gums of the trees and sent down a shower of leaves, which Mr. Khurana kicked up on the ground as he tried to uncover the bodies of his two sons.
But the leaves, turned crisp, shards themselves, offered nothing. His sons were dead at a nearby hospital and he had come too late.
The two boys were the sum total of the Khuranas’ children, eleven and thirteen, eager to be sent out on errands; and on this particular day they had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khuranas’ old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there (the boy with them having escaped with a fracture), he said, “They’d gone to pick up my watch from the watch man.” His wife didn’t stop him, and in fact colluded in the lie. “All the watches were stopped,” she said. “The way they know the time the bomb went off is by taking the average of all the stopped watches in the watch man’s hut.”
Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty—repairing an old TV that should have, by now, been replaced by one of those self-financing foreign brands—would have, in those tragic weeks that followed the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together. But of course they were poor, at least compared to their friends, and no amount of suave English, the sort that issued uncontrollably from their mouths, could change that; no amount of sobbing in Victorian sentences or chest beating before the Oxonian anchors on The News Tonight, who interviewed them, who stoked their outrage, could drape them or their dead children in the glow of foregone success: Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were forty and forty, and they had suffered the defining tragedy of their lives, and so all other competing tragedies were relegated to mere facts of existence. For a month afterwards, they made do without the TV, which for all they knew was still sitting in the basement workshop of the electrician, its hidden berths of microchips heavy with dust, its screen screwed off and put facedown on the floor, looking into nothing. They only caught their own mugs on The News Tonight because a neighbor knocked on their door and welcomed them into his house to watch the news. He was friendly with them ever after.
Now Mr. Khurana, who had been a troubled, twitchy sleeper ever since he’d become a documentary filmmaker years ago, began to suffer from dreams that impressed him deeply, and he never failed to discuss them with his wife or his collaborators. He didn’t mention that he was terrified during their nightly unspooling; that he slept in the crook of his wife’s armpit like a baby, his body greased with sweat, his leg rotating out like the blade of a misfired fan. But the dreams were truly notable, and in the first and most frequent one, he became, for a few minutes, the bomb. The best way to describe what he felt would be to say that first he was blind, then he could see everything. This is what it felt like to be a bomb. You were coiled up, majestic with blackness, unaware that the universe outside you existed, and then a wire snapped and ripped open your eyelids all the way around and you had a vision of the world that was 360 degrees, and everything in your purview was doomed by seeing.
In the dream, the market—where he had been many times, his collar usually popped—was so vivid in his mind, so three-dimensional, that he sometimes lingered on details for hours of dream time. A single foot thrust into the dark cube of a shop would become gangrenous and huge with meaning; it would kick right against the inner wall of his temple, and he would wake up just before he could see the children flying through the shop front outside which they’d been found facedown, a sash of blood showing through the blackened cotton on their backs.
In the mornings he’d rouse Mrs. Khurana and they’d make eerily passionate love, using more muscle than necessary, their insides lurid with lactic acid, and then both would stack their slack bodies against each other and cry, so that later in the evening, when Mrs. Khurana returned from her errands and began to unwrap the sheet from its bulge of bed, she’d notice two parallel lines of salt that marked where they had lain in the morning, shoulders soggy with tears.
But both of them were grateful for each other, for how little they reminisced, how they refused to apply the butterfly effect backwards to their lives or ruin themselves with what-ifs; that neither blamed the other for the fact that the children had taken an auto-rickshaw, hotboxed with May pollution, to Lajpat Nagar that evening. Why bother, when the entire circuitry of their brains had been rewired to send up flares of grief? Why bother with talk? You lift a spoon from a claw of thick stew and you weep. You wrap your hand around an armrest on a bus (sometimes Deepa Khurana would ride to school with the children for the PTA) and it is as if the burning steel was riven from the earth only to remind you of the hotness at the core, to which your children will be returned. Under the shower there is the outline of your body for water to fall around, then a sputter and dry-throated silence in which you are sheathed in the same soap that you remember scrubbing off the shoulders of your boys. No action is safe from meaning. The boys had stored, between them, all the world’s possibilities: Nakul had been handsome and sporty; Tushar had been plump and responsible—what does it matter? Who’s to say that this is what they would have remained? Who’s to say, Mr. and Mrs. Khurana, that you lost something you knew?
At the cremation, which occurred on the stepped bank of a Yamuna River canal speckled with a thousand ripply eyes of oil, tendrils of overgrown hypochondriac plants thrust deep into the medicinal murk, Mr. Khurana noticed that outside the ring of burning flesh and wood, little snotty children ran naked playing with upright rubber tires. Behind them a cow was dreadlocked in ropes and eating ash and the wild village children kicked it in the gut. He shouldn’t have, but in the middle of the final prayers Mr. Khurana stepped out and shouted, shooing, the entire funeral party dropping back from the wavy black carpet of fire shadow. The children, not his, just looked at him and with beautiful synchronicity dove headfirst into the water, the rubber tires bobbing behind them, but the cow eyed him with muckraking glee and put its long wet tongue into the earth. The prayers continued but a tremor was evident: if the chanting had sounded before like the low buzzing of bees, the vocal swarm had now cleared and thinned as if to accommodate the linger of a gunshot. The exhilaration of Mr. Khurana’s grief gave way to the simple fact that he was a person, naked in his actions, and that as a person he was condemned to feel shame. He felt eyes rebuking him with sudden blinks between solemn verses. He stopped thinking of his two boys as they burned away before him in a flame that combed the air with its spikes of heat and sudden bone crack of bark. More ash for the cow.
“WHERE ARE THE boys?” Vikas Khurana asked. He was with his wife in his flat. The sun was setting, oiling the trees outside with light. The Khuranas lived—unusually, for a couple at the end of the twentieth century in upper-middle-class Delhi—in a joint family compound, though even this compound, which spanned half an acre of Maharani Bagh, was joint only in name: the three buildings had been diced into six flats, and the common kitchen, once anchored by the grandparents, was now a formal space, reopened only for communal occasions like Diwali or Rakhi. The family members saw each other as often as people do in apartment complexes.
When Deepa gave him the answer he expected—they were probably stuck in traffic—he glanced from the first-floor window through the folds and dust-filled crevices of the complex for signs of life. Nothing. Only Nepali servants lingering in the street with milk thermoses, dusk swirling around their crew-cut hair in the form of clouds of mosquitoes, and closer, pigeons shaking dirt off their wings, the shades on their necks—greens, magentas, yellows—stabbing in their brilliance. “Every year the mosquitoes come earlier,” Vikas said. “Apparently, Vibha’s son has malaria.”
“That’s because the Yamuna is oxygen dead,” Deepa said. She was icing a cake on the dining table, dripping white frosting through a cone of paper in her hand. A talented baker, she sold her cakes to kitty parties and birthdays for extra income.
Vikas changed into shorts and went out for a walk. He’d become fidgety waiting for the boys, who’d left a while ago in an auto with their cricketing friend Mansoor. After dropping Mansoor at South Ex, they were supposed to reverse course and stop at Lajpat Nagar to pick up the TV, enthroned on the electrician’s worktable after springing a mysterious green line across the screen. The TV had been out for repair for days, but Vikas had made no move to fetch it till today, when a day-night South Africa–Australia cricket match was scheduled.
He was an art filmmaker and did not keep regular hours; he could arrange his day around cricket matches if he wished.
It was a bit early for a walk. Most of the regulars were indoors, or at work; the sun burned up the roads despite the ashoka and neem and peepul trees plugging up the sky on both sides; and the sounds of traffic on Mathura Road conveyed speed and impatience, with honks traveling down the avenue like javelins thrown by ghosts.
Vikas walked pensively, uncomfortably, dismayed by the imperfection of the circumstances and his own mood. Soon, though, he fell into a rhythm and was making rounds of the park where the boys played most evenings. It was there, at the corner of that park, near a small temple abutting a garbage dump, that another walker, Mr. Monga, came up to him.
“Did you hear? There’s been a blast in Lajpat Nagar,” Monga said, speaking to Vikas but looking down the serene colony street for other walkers, his eyes vivid with gossip and excitement. “Why now, in this hot month, I don’t know,” he said, casting another glance down the alley and twitching his shoulders, shoulders that seemed deformed under the big-pored cotton of his white polo shirt. “Could be related to the elections.” The Hindu nationalist BJP had come to power six days earlier, with a tight majority.
When did it happen? is all Vikas wanted to know.
“Just now, yaar. I heard because my missus had gone to Bon Ton and she was coming through Ashram and traffic was very bad, so she asked a DTC guy.”
The rest of it unfolded at high speed. Vikas bolted from the periphery of the park, raced down the avenues—aware, as he ran, of the terrible flaws in the sidewalk, the tilts and burps in the blistered tiles—and got into his car and drove off. He told his wife nothing—she was busy upstairs with an order for a silver anniversary and he didn’t wish to panic her. But because he had shared his fears with neither his wife nor Mr. Monga, whom he had batted off with an excuse, he was more fearful than he otherwise would have been.
Strangely, though, as he drove, his mind was not on his boys but on their friend Mansoor Ahmed, who was the same age as the older one, Tushar. Vikas would never be able to live it down if something happened to Mansoor, if he died on his watch—Mansoor, who had been born to the Ahmeds after seven years of infertility and whom they protected with all their parental paranoia, only letting him go out to visit the Khuranas, whom they counted among their best (and only Hindu) friends. Vikas, for this reason, had a strong bond with the boy—stronger, at times, than the one he shared with his own sons; he relished Mansoor’s intelligence and sensitivity, found him more receptive to the arts and to listening, and always used him as a cudgel with which to shame his sons (Vikas had always been self-hating when it came to family). When Mansoor came over, he tried to give him a taste of the freedom he was denied by his parents. Sending him with the boys, instead of dropping him off personally, had been his idea.
Monga was right, though—traffic was horrible, and almost out of petrol, the car swung uneasily through the rush hour streets, its needle shaking near E. “Shit, shit, shit,” Vikas muttered, the panic in his heart displaced by the unperturbed pace of traffic.
The boys had left together in an auto, flagging one down from Mathura Road even as the chaperoning servant kept telling them, “Move back! Your mother’s going to scold you!”
“I’ll scold you,” said Tushar, brimming with the manic energy that consumed him at dusk, the city with its ferocious horns and traffic and tired efflorescence not exactly helping matters.
But when the boys got into the auto, squeezing their small brown legs together, they were quiet and serious as they expected auto riders to be. They watched the traffic from the open sides of the vehicle, and occasionally pointed out fancy cars to each other. “Oye, the new model of the Rover Montego’s come out?” Nakul, the younger one, asked.
“They make them in Oxford,” Tushar said.
“Where are we going, can you please tell me?” the alcohol-scented auto driver asked.
“Let’s go to Lajpat Nagar first,” Tushar said. “That’s OK, no?” he said, turning to Mansoor.
Mansoor grinned. He knew he was supposed to be dropped home first, but he liked being bossed around by rebellious people so he could break the rules and be let off the hook.
At twelve, Mansoor had an amazing, ingratiating grin, and a mouthful of crooked teeth that would never be fixed.
A few minutes later, the boys strolled around Lajpat Nagar together, Tushar teasing Mansoor and slapping his back and Nakul carrying himself proudly, combing his hair and fine-tuning it with his fingers like a radio. “And that’s the framing shop where we got that Founder’s Day photo framed,” Nakul said. “We bought Sorry and backgammon from the shop behind it.”
“They sell classy English willow bats there,” Tushar chimed in, though he was a terrible cricketer.
Mansoor, unused to being out on his own, took in the sights and sounds. The crowds consisted of a particular kind of Delhiite Mansoor recognized immediately. This sort of Delhiite was slightly malnourished, wore shiny polyester clothes, grew a black mustache, had a fondness for stud earrings, kept his pants hitched too high, let his fingers roam his nose, used slightly loose, lackadaisical hand gestures, and had a cynical dumb face that could never seem grave (the women looked the same, but with lighter mustaches and cheap floral saris).
“Where are we going?” Mansoor was asking when an explosion ripped his sentence in two and stuffed half of it back in his mouth.
Later, everyone reported seeing a gushing white star, and there was a long silence before the screams started, as if, even in pain, people watched each other first to see how to act.
When Mansoor woke up, the market was burning. People lay in positions of repose. Mothers were folded bloodily over daughters; office-going men were limp on their backs with briefcases burning beside them; and shopkeepers crawled on their elbows while cars burst into flames inches from their faces. Through a woman’s ripped kurta Mansoor spied his first breast. His own wrist was oozing blood but the sensation was far from him, like something hidden in another corner of the market.
People began climbing over the corpses with the guilty looks of burglars, their hair frazzled and wild and faces half-black. Mansoor, lifting himself up too, saw Tushar lying on the ground and staring up at the sky, his lips wet and open, his curly hair full of sand, or another whitish substance blasted off a wall. Nakul was next to him with his arm over his face like a worker dozing in the sun.
“Tushar! Nakul!” He was unable to hear himself. But when he crawled over to shake them, a sharp pain erupted in his hand and he looked up to see a torn leather shoe pressing down on it and then a disfigured man disappearing over him and the bodies.
“Uncle!” Mansoor screamed. But the man was gone and others—gory, bleeding—kept coming.
Then a hand gripped Mansoor’s shoulder. “Get up, son,” the disembodied voice said—a kindly voice, the voice of the earth, full of pity and groaning patience. But an old instinct about not talking to strangers took hold and Mansoor ran from the burning square.
By now Afsheen Ahmed had become very anxious about her son’s absence and had called Deepa Khurana.
“He’s still not reached?” Deepa said, cramming the phone between her ear and shoulder and gazing out the windows, her hands covered in cake mix. “They must have got stuck in a jam on Ring Road—there’s lots of construction happening near Ashram. And the boys were supposed to go to Lajpat Nagar after dropping Mansoor. It could be that they went there first. They’re all such independent boys already.”
When Afsheen heard this, she turned cold. “Deepa, there’s been a blast there.”
“Rush hour is still going on,” Deepa said. “They should be reaching just now.”
“A bomb.”
“I see,” Deepa said, surprised at how stern she herself sounded. She’d always believed that misfortune was brought on by those who worried it into existence.
“I heard it on the radio. I was in the kitchen and it was playing on the servants’ radio.” Afsheen was now crying.
“Afsheen,” said Deepa, softer.
Soon after, Deepa got off the phone and went to the landing of the flat and looked down the stairs. No sign of her husband. “Go find sahib,” she instructed Hari, the servant, who took off quickly, his Hawaii slippers thwacking. Deepa washed her cake-smeared hands, absently running a palm through her hair and leaving a white streak there, like Indira Gandhi. Then she went down in her faded kurta to the gate. When she saw the car was missing, she swore loudly. Where had her husband gone and when would he return? He couldn’t be trusted. He was absentminded.
She strode to the main road and hailed an auto herself. It never occurred to her to ask any of Vikas’s relatives in the complex for help.
In any case, Vikas—deep in the disinfected, bloated governmental belly of the hospital—beat them all to it. He found Tushar and Nakul laid out flat on a dhurrie amid other bodies. Nakul’s pretty eyes were blasted open in fright. Tushar slept peacefully, as he always had. Getting down on his haunches, rocking on his heels, Vikas pressed their cold, burned cheeks and wept, adding his fluids to theirs.
When he looked up (hours later, it seemed), Sharif and Afsheen Ahmed were standing over him—Sharif, fat and hassled-looking, with his black disordered beard, his checked shirt and black pants swelling around his belly; Afsheen, dark, her oval face ruined with tears, her slim body wrapped in an elegant chikan salwar, the whiteness of her clothes out of place on this tarmac of death. Vikas’s own clothes had long ago turned the color of soot, of radically vaporized skin and bone. “I’m so sorry,” Vikas said—his first words in the morgue. “I’m so, so sorry.”
Mansoor was still walking.
When the explosion had happened, he had panicked and run away from the burning square and into the shacks. Then, as he searched for a PCO to call home or a stranger to lead him to a phone (he prayed for his phone number, which had vanished from his mind), the dark, sunless alleys distending with people swarming away from and toward the explosion, he panicked again. He’d never been alone anywhere in Delhi, let alone a market after an explosion.
“Did someone’s LPG cylinder burst?” a woman asked.
Mansoor was unsure if he was being talked to.
“Must have been Arora’s compressor,” another man, this one with a terrible tumor growing out of his neck, said.
“They shouldn’t have installed it. The wires here can’t take the load, but they don’t listen even if they’re being told at the association meeting.”
Another boom came from the market—perhaps an actual LPG cylinder going up in a blue column—and the men and women packed together in the alley screamed and there was a muscular pushing and everyone surged out to the main road, where Mansoor, coming across the fresh, untouched life of the city, its towering buses and belts of filth and mud, felt suddenly acute with life, with smoke.
“Bhaiya, you’re OK?” an auto driver asked, walking away from his vehicle with his hands on his hips, but Mansoor instinctively moved away from him, trying to stanch the bleeding in his right wrist with his left hand. He wondered if he had gotten his tetanus booster on time. He had always wondered about the efficacy and necessity of these injections, but now he was grateful.
The auto driver’s top few shirt buttons were undone; a locket flared in the light amid the drowsy sparse chest hairs. “I’m fine, uncle,” Mansoor said for reasons he could not understand.
From the jammed roads—the crowds gathering there and pooling around a stopped bus, pointing—he could tell something exceptional had happened. Then a woman who could have been his grandmother said, “A bomb just burst here.”
A bomb. He had survived, witnessed, walked through a bomb blast. He couldn’t believe it. He had heard of bomb blasts before, of course—they were always in the news and had been recently because of the 1996 World Cup; some of the matches scheduled in Sri Lanka had been canceled because of bomb threats by the LTTE, an organization his father called “ruthless.” “In this country, they’re always accusing Muslims of terrorism,” Sharif had said, bringing his soft paws together—he was a fat man with unemotional features that were childlike, even pitiable, in their conviction—“when the most dangerous terrorists have been Hindus and Sikhs. You know who blew up Rajiv Gandhi? Hindus. A woman from the LTTE, the same group that set off the bombs in Colombo that so scared the Australian team. You know who killed Rajiv’s mother, Indira? Her sardar bodyguards. So when people say—” He shook his head. “It makes me angry when the proof is right there, the statistics are there, and the journalists won’t consult them.”
“Gandhi-ji’s assassin was also a Hindu.”
“Yes,” said Sharif. “We’re very lucky that that was the case. Your Nana-ji was in Aligarh when it happened.” Sharif ’s grandfather had been a freedom fighter, an associate of Sir Syed Ahmed Khan; Sharif was proud of this fact, and loved telling Mansoor about it. Mansoor, though not interested, liked sending his father into raptures of open-ended conversation so he could daydream about the girls he loved in school. He was, he felt, a tragic romantic hero. He stared at girls shyly and gave them poems that he claimed to have written but that he had copied from his mother’s thick Emily Dickinson anthology; she had an MA in English from LSR and had been a theater actress and a counselor at Air Force Bal Bharati School before becoming a housewife.
How far he’d come, in the space of a few hours, from that home life!
Mansoor, tired, bleeding, walked on Ring Road, past a mandi with its nauseating smell of rotten, overripe fruit and covering of blue tarpaulin. After spending a few minutes on the jammed road outside the market, listening to people speculate about the bomb, whether it had been planted by Muslims—listening, in other words, to people intent on gossiping about the tragedy rather than heeding a victim passing before them—he had made the decision to walk home. Of course, he only knew the city from the insides of an air-conditioned car. How far was home from here? Fifteen, twenty minutes? The streets with their bracing angles scrolled and zagged in his mind’s eye, unfurling at whatever speed the vantage of the car provided.
By the time he was outside the mandi, he was exhausted, and worried about how he would navigate the thundering pitiless straight-shooting traffic on the main road. His body tensed; he held his bleeding wrist, disgusted by the stickiness, and walked on.
It became easy to avoid oncoming traffic; he pressed close to the edge of the mandi, often standing in the way of cursing, bell-ringing cyclists, and he only had to jump out of the way when a cow browsed toward him (he had once been knocked down in Bhogal by a bull, losing a milk tooth, and that had been the end of his mandi-going ways).
Dusk deepened, coloring the sky a polluted pink; birds wheeled restlessly overhead, as if waiting for rush hour to end so they could head down to collect their spoils. Mansoor ambled past a school on his left; crossed between hawkers smoking peanuts in black vessels on the sidewalk; dodged cakes of cow dung; and wondered, with a half smile, if his parents would be impressed with his presence of mind, his ability to navigate the city after the shock of the explosion. Then the smile fell away as he remembered Tushar and Nakul. What had happened to them? Were they—dead? And why had he run? If he were to go back and play the thoughts running through his head at the moment he had left them, they would have been something like this: They’re brothers. They can take care of themselves. Or: Didn’t I tell them I didn’t want to go to the market? Why did they force me?
Men and women and kids and dogs passed by, unaware of who he was, why he was bleeding, why he stood in his upper-class shorts alone on a city sidewalk. Their faces were sweaty and private in the Petromax lights switched on by the street carts.
“Sir,” Mansoor said to one man in his twenties, but Mansoor was too feeble and the man passed him by.
“Uncle,” he said to another man who walked by, licking an ice cream. And this man stopped and studied Mansoor with eyes that were either surprised or glaring. He was middle-aged and paunchy and mustachioed and his tongue shot out to keep the sides of the softie from melting.
“Talk,” the man said.
Mansoor told him what had happened: the blast, the market, the boys, the walk.
Perhaps because he lacked another option, the paunchy man with the unblinking, ambling eyes kept licking the sides of his ice cream, sculpting it into a manageable shape with his tongue.
“Where do you live?” he asked.
“South Ex,” Mansoor said.
“In part one or two?”
“Two.” How was this relevant?
“Your parents are at home?”
“Yes, uncle.”
“And your friends’ mummy and daddy?”
“At home also, uncle.”
He shook his head seriously. Then he said, “Will you have some ice cream?”
The man was much more at ease with the ice cream out of his hands. Taking a hankie out of his pocket, he wiped his face and then his forehead. “There’s a PCO nearby. We can phone from there.”
As they walked in the direction Mansoor had come from, Mansoor having gratefully demolished the ice cream (even as he dreaded the germs he’d imbibed), the man said, “You’re badly hurt, yaar. Maybe we should go to a hospital first. My car is parked nearby. Come with me.”
Till this point, Mansoor had been happy to walk with the man, but as soon as talk of the car came up, he recoiled. “No need, uncle. Let’s make the phone call.”
“But, son, the car’s right here. In the time we make the call we can get you treated.”
“But, uncle, my friends are in the market.”
“Let me open my car.”
Mansoor wanted to tell him about the traffic jam, but something came over him and he ran.
“Son!” the man shouted.
He ran fast, kicking up dirt with his heels; when he stopped, only a little beyond where he’d first spied the man, he was winded and ashamed. He looked over his shoulder to see if he was being pursued. He felt he’d done the right thing. He had grown up in a city full of stories about kidnappings and disappearances; had heard from his mother about how one maid dressed up her ward, a two-year-old, in rags, blackened his face, and took him out on the street to beg. The parents of the child were always wondering why the child was so tired when they came back home; then one day the mother was driving on the road and—Ah!
Mansoor walked with urgency. He did not want to be pursued by the fat kidnapper. He cursed himself for not having asked a lady for help.
His house was still at least a kilometer away and he’d made little progress. Heavy black smog sat over the road. A stranded ambulance screamed in traffic. Beyond, blinking, he could make out Moolchand flyover, and beyond that, the mirage of South Extension—smoke and haze and the familiar congested approach to home.
The Ahmeds were convinced their son was dead. Leaving AIIMS hospital, where Afsheen’s cousin promised to keep vigil, they headed to Moolchand hospital. One by one, in this manner, they made a desperate tour of the hospitals of South Delhi. Afsheen was sick and crying throughout. “Be positive,” Sharif said, as he watched his high-strung but sweet wife dissolving. “There’s no objective evidence that anything has happened.” He was at the steering wheel of the car. “He might be at someone’s house.”
“How could they do that? How can you be so irresponsible with someone else’s son? How many times have I told them I don’t want him to go out?”
“They’ve lost two kids.”
“They should lose two kids! They should lose everything!”
“Afsheen,” he said. But the truth was that he felt the same way.
The hospitals yielded nothing. But that night Sharif felt he’d come closer to the reality—and suffering—of the city than ever before: the tired grief-soaked expressions of patients; the exhaustion of nurses; the crumbling medical infrastructure; the weak tube lights flickering and clicking; the way in which doctors became bureaucrats the moment they were questioned. Sharif felt he ought to wash his hands of this country, this place he had fought so hard to make his own, enduring the jibes of his family members who claimed to lead happier lives in Dubai, Sharjah, Bahrain, Lahore.
By now the tears had dried up; husband and wife sat at the dashboard in rage-filled silence. “Let’s go to the police,” Afsheen said, half-crazed. “We should register a criminal case against the Khuranas.”
“We should have gone to the market earlier,” Sharif said, slapping his forehead.
They had gone to the market briefly before coming to AIIMS, springing through the debris, calling out for Mansoor. In doing so, they’d realized they were far from the only people searching for a relative in the market: half of Delhi seemed to be out in this dung of destruction, though, in the end, the death toll would be only thirteen dead with thirty injured—a small bomb. A typical bomb. A bomb of small consequences.
“Let’s go home first, in case he’s there,” Sharif said.
Home. The last time we’ll come back and be able to call it that, he thought, pulling up in his Esteem, the dark colony illuminated with the dirty electricity of the city. But as soon as he parked, he saw two individuals outlined in the light of the front landing.
Afsheen got out of the car and ran over and hugged and then slapped her son. The servant, who was sitting next to Mansoor, got up excitedly.
“How could this have happened?” Afsheen wept. “Why didn’t you phone us immediately?”
Sharif hugged his son tightly on the landing. He only now realized how tense he was, how much he loved his son. “Bring me some water,” he told the servant when he was inside, trying to control his emotions, the three of them holding each other in an odd huddle.
“We have to go help the Khuranas,” Afsheen said, looking up from her son.
VIKAS’S CONCERN FOR Mansoor had long since given way to grief over his sons. It became his priority—and his wife’s—to spend as much time with them as possible, to not abandon their corpses for even a minute. It was as if, having failed to protect them in life, they felt double the responsibility to fulfill their duties in death. Still, the cremation, which happened the next day at Nigambodh Ghat, stunned them both. They howled as the boys were crushed to ashes.
The bodies had been taken away briefly the night before for a postmortem so the doctors could recover pieces of the bomb from Tushar’s and Nakul’s corpses. The leftover pieces—bright triangles of metal, serrated edges of bottle caps, nails—glittered in the pyre.
Deepa, weeping violently, her hair pouring everywhere, gray from smoke, screamed, “Take me away.” Vikas watched with his arms behind his back, like a military man at the funeral of his entire squadron.
The members of the Khurana clan did not see each other frequently, but they took the responsibilities of family life seriously, and after the cremation, they came from their flats and gathered around the couple in their house to console and comfort them. Rajat, Vikas’s youngest brother, a handsome fellow in his thirties with an unfashionable mustache and an air of self-important family-oriented efficiency, pulverized sleeping pills with a rolling pin and dissolved them in the couple’s tea; that they drank this hot cocktail without noticing was a sign, to him, of how far gone they were. Bunty Masi went through the kitchen drawers, collecting knives and dropping them into a jute bag she took home. The Khuranas’ close friends, writers and filmmakers and decent professional types, came together and sat in a grief-stricken huddle; the blow had been so big, it had the potential to damage an entire friend group.
Others crowded on the floor, offering homilies, stories, banalities. Everyone (save for two patriarchs) agreed it was impossible to imagine what the Khuranas were going through.
The bombing happened at six p.m. on a Tuesday. By nine p.m. a group calling itself the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force had called Zee TV and NDTV and claimed credit for the attack. The family members discussed the group and its intentions and fell back on their normal scorn for Muslims. “They can’t live in peace, these Muslims. Anywhere they show up, they’re at war,” one Masi said. “A violent religion of violent people. In the Quran, it’s written—no Muslim is supposed to rest till he’s drunk the blood of seventy-two unbelievers.”
“Kashmiris have always been filthy people. The whole winter passes and they don’t bathe. That’s why Srinagar stinks so much.”
“The problem is they believe they’ll receive seventy-two virgins in heaven.”
“You’re saying this, but I work with Muslims every day. All the craftsmen and weavers are Muslim. You go to their locality and each of them has twenty children.”
The Ahmeds too were adjusting to this new world—this world in which their son had nearly perished and in which his two close friends had died before his eyes.
The doctor who had seen Mansoor on the day of the blast said he was very lucky: some other object or person nearby must have absorbed the shockwave. It was the shockwave that killed most people. If you inhaled at the moment of the blast, which was the natural impulse, the compressing air got inside you and tore up your lungs and you died of “massive trauma.” “You, young chap,” the old doctor said, slapping Mansoor’s cheek in a friendly but unsettling manner, “you’ve only got a fracture and some stitches in your hand—things that all boys of your age get. Soldier’s wounds.” Then he slapped him again and prescribed a few months of physiotherapy. Mansoor was allowed to take home all the shrapnel that had been pulled out of his arm—twenty pellets—in a plastic bag.
“Should we take him to VIMHANS?” Afsheen asked afterwards, referring to the mental health institute on Ring Road.
“Tell me what happened, how it felt,” Sharif said to the boy.
“You can’t just ask like that!” Afsheen said. “There’s a proper process for these things.”
But the boy was happy as he was, at home. “Please, Mama, I don’t want to go anywhere,” he begged.
“See, Afsheen, what’s the rush?” Sharif said.
In any case, the Ahmeds found themselves very busy with the cremation and funeral rites of the Khurana boys. Blessed with good fortune, they experienced a strong obligation to be present for their unlucky friends and they went and sat in the Khuranas’ flat every day, ignoring the abuses hurled at Muslims by Vikas’s relatives—relatives who were either not aware they were Muslim, or wished to harangue them in a sidelong manner.
“Only another mother can understand what you’re going through,” Afsheen cried in Hindi, sitting on her knees by Deepa in the Khuranas’ drawing room. “Mansoor keeps saying his life should also be taken away if Tushar’s and Nakul’s were, and I have to tell him, No, beta, no, don’t have these thoughts.”
Deepa barely registered Afsheen’s presence. “They were such good friends, all of them. Best friends.” She sniffled again, covering her sharp nose with her bony hands, and then said, “I’m so sorry. I’m crying too much.”
“Cry. It’s OK to cry.”
Sharif spent time with an ashen, shocked-looking Vikas. “The terrorists were Kashmiri fellows,” he said, in the measured and serious way of someone unused to emotions, someone obviously puffed up by the opportunity to proffer advice. “It’ll be easy to find these people. They’re not professionals. The important thing is that you take care of Deepa. She needs you. I’ll ask Mansoor if he saw anything suspicious at the market.”
Mansoor was the one who provided the Khurana family with an eyewitness account of the boys’ deaths, putting an end to morbid speculation about their final moments. But he’d been unable to explain to his parents why he’d walked away. “Why didn’t you phone us, beta?” Afsheen said.
“I thought the lines would be cut,” he lied.
“But promise me, if there’s ever, ever such an emergency again, you will phone. Each market these days has hundreds of PCOs.”
But Mansoor—disoriented, overwhelmed Mansoor—wasn’t listening. He was thinking instead of the shattering, deafening moment the bomb exploded, the pain he’d felt in his extremities, the way Tushar and Nakul had snapped into sleep, going from on to off. What could he have done? Though he had no experience with mortality, though he had not gone over to their corpses to examine them, he had known they were dead, and had known there was nothing he could do. How to explain this? How to tell his parents the obvious thing—that walking had been his way of grieving, of indicting the entire city with his eyes?
His parents protected him from the Khuranas and the cremation and the chautha—he was a victim too, after all; his right wrist and arm, fractured, were in a cast—but one day, he was nevertheless taken to meet the Khuranas in their flat. Vikas, grief stricken but affectionate, hugged Mansoor with downcast eyes, smelling his hair deeply, wanting a full version of events. Deepa, dressed in an obscenely yellow kameez, sat on the sofa chair next to him, dazed, a hand on her head, the embodiment of a crushing headache. Afsheen kept throwing worried glances her way. “Deepa, will you have anything to drink?” she asked, even though this was Deepa’s house and the servant could be heard operating the mixie in the kitchen.
Mansoor told them about the auto ride, the walk in the market, the explosion. “But did they die instantly?” Vikas asked.
“They weren’t moving, uncle.”
“But you know for a hundred percent sure?” Vikas said, muddling his words. “We’re trying to make a case against the hospital and the police. When the bomb exploded, people phoned the fire department from the market, and they kept saying, we’re coming, we’re coming. But they didn’t come. They phoned AIIMS for an ambulance and they also didn’t come. They actually put people in the back of a police van and drove them to the hospital. They piled them on top of each other—”
“Answer uncle’s question, beta,” Afsheen encouraged him, realizing Vikas was getting lost in the horror of these imagined events.
“They were no more, uncle,” Mansoor said.
Vikas looked at Mansoor and in that glance it was clear to Mansoor that Vikas blamed him, that this question was not about the hospital or the fire department or the police but about why he had left them to die and walked away.
Why? He didn’t understand either. He saw the landscape, the dripping city with its thousands of watery, refracted lights; saw the dust on the yellow necks of the traffic lights; saw the torrid concrete undersides of the flyovers—saw it all and felt afraid, as if the city had recognized his guilt on the way home and would find a way to destroy him.
“Had they gone to pick up a watch or a TV?” Sharif asked Mansoor when they drove home in their Esteem.
“You don’t listen properly,” Afsheen scolded Sharif.
“TV, Papa,” said Mansoor.
“That’s what I thought. Because today I heard some relatives saying they had gone to pick up Vikas’s watch,” Sharif said. “That’s all. I was just checking.”
Having chased down the leads, having talked to the boy, having come to see there was no one else to blame, Vikas succumbed to shame. He felt his entire life had been a failure and that it was this failure, particularly the failure to make money, that had brought him to this point: if they’d had a driver, how could this have happened? He kept apologizing to his wife. “I told you I should have gone back to being a CA,” he said, referring to the career as a chartered accountant he had given up thirteen years before to make documentaries. “I’ll do anything for you.”
But Deepa wanted only one thing: revenge. Having passed rapidly through the stages of grief, she had emerged at a clearing of rage and felt the only reasonable thing was to watch the boys’ killers die a violent death. “Do you think they’ve actually arrested the right people?” she asked Vikas.
As usual, the police had made a few arrests right after the blast.
“God only knows, Deepa—I’m so sorry.”
When would this pain end? Vikas wondered. He’d experienced nothing like this—had never known a pain that could slip into every fold of the body—and he could only imagine what his delicate wife was going through. She was not a healthy person to begin with—her lung had collapsed some years before, and cancer ran amok in her family—and he worried that this uprightness, this forced bright rage, was a prelude to serious illness.
The family continued to surround them. But now the advice grew more specific. Bunty Masi suggested they see a guru she visited in GK. “Talk about a great spirit. He touches your hand once and half your problems disappear. Remember how bad Mansha’s leukoderma was? Absolutely gone.” Pratap Tau said grief made people holy and they should consider having another child during this period. “Adoption is also a possibility,” a do-gooder added (the house was full of do-gooders). Rajat offered to buy his brother and sister-in-law an all-expenses-paid tour to Switzerland. “May-June is the best time to go,” he said, smiling awkwardly. “There are very nice waterfalls.”
These people bewildered Vikas. But then again, they had never suffered such a loss, had never really known his kids. To them, every child born into the family was the same, a continuation of genetic material. He remembered why he had cut himself off from these people in the first place.
Deepa grew more and more adamant that they press the police to find the killers. Then, one day, to everyone’s surprise, it happened: the police said they had arrested the terrorists.
SOON AFTER SHAUKAT “Shockie” Guru received the order to carry out the blast, he went to his alley and washed his face under the open tap outside the building. Then he entered his room and sat on the bed, brooding. The room was small, foggy with dust, ripe with the smell of chemical reagents (there had been construction recently in the alley), poorly painted. The sole decoration was a poster of a slick-bellied Urmila Matondkar from Rangeela. Two charpais lay separated by a moat of terrazzo. The mattress under him was thin. He felt the coir through the clotted cotton.
After a while, he went back into the alley, where afternoon was announcing itself in the form of clothes hung out to dry between buildings and the particular yawning honking that comes from cars when the sun is high overhead, dwarfing human activity, and he went to the PCO and called home. It was his ritual to call home before setting out on a mission. His mother thought he was a student in Kathmandu—at least she made him believe she thought that—and he wanted to give her an opportunity to save him. She is the only one who has the right to decide whether I live or die, he often thought when he smelled milk boiling in the shops—yes, that was the smell he associated with his mother and with Kathmandu. It gave Kathmandu a sweet, plasticky flavor. Of all natural substances, milk has the most artificial smell.
Shockie was the leading bomb maker of the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force, which operated out of exile in Nepal. An avuncular-looking man of twenty-six, he had catlike green eyes, wet lips, and curly hair already balding on the vast egg of his head. His arms were fat rods under his kurta. In the past four years he had killed dozens of Indians in revenge for the military oppression in Kashmir, expanding the JKIF’s “theater of violence,” as the newspapers called it.
Now he pushed the receiver close to his ear in the PCO booth. Deep in a crater of silence on the other side of the Himalayas, the phone rang. The phone was a drill seeking out life. “You’re sick,” he imagined saying to his mother. “Should I come?”
His mother had been a presswali her entire life, and had developed a tumor in her stomach after years of exposure to the hot coals in the heavy, radiant, red-jawed iron, an iron that was shaped like a medieval torture device, something you might want to trap a head in. No one had been able to cure her. And yet she always refused his offer. This time, the phone wasn’t even picked up (it wasn’t her phone—it belonged to Shockie’s cousin, Javed, who lived a few minutes from his mother in Anantnag, in Kashmir). Sweat distorted the air before Shockie’s eyes in the suffocating cabin of the PCO, with its thrum of phone voices. Back in his room, he asked his friend and roommate, Malik, “Should I not go?”
Malik—a slow, deliberate, hassled man at the best of times, the sort who seems to be exhaling deeply against the troubles of the world—said, “You’re making excuses.” He was sitting curled up on his charpai.
“I fear that she’s back to work again. My brother is ruthless and callous. He never did anything growing up and he’s used to being taken care of, and she likes taking care of people.” He spat. “Do you think this is a wise mission?”
“Not wiser or unwiser than anything else.”
“This is the first time Javed hasn’t picked up,” Shockie said, unzipping his fake Adidas cricket kit bag.