The Association of Small Bombs (15 page)

“W
hy do we have such bad luck?” Afsheen cried at home.

“It's that lawyer's fault,” Mansoor said. “It's his job to read the documents, to check them before signing. People in this country are incompetent.”

“I told your father not to deal with such people, but he insisted.”

Mansoor knew this wasn't the case, but said nothing.

“Don't worry,” she said, catching herself. “We'll get out of this.”

________

“How do they think they can get away with this?” Mansoor asked his father later that day.

“People get away with a lot more in this country,” Sharif said. Again, he had the sense—the sense he'd had on the day of the blast, back in 1996—that this was punishment for staying on in an obviously hostile country. Many of his relatives had fled to Pakistan after the 1969 Gujarat riots; only he, bullheaded, had stayed on.

That evening, steeling himself, Sharif came up to Mansoor's bedroom. Mansoor was sitting on the side of his bed, bent over, reading
Deterring Democracy
, by Noam Chomsky. When Mansoor had first arrived in Delhi, Sharif remembered, his muscles had been so tender that he couldn't even lift a book, and Sharif had gone with him to a chemist in INA to purchase a reading stand—the sort apparently used by musicians—which held up books.

“Yaah, Papa?” Mansoor asked.

Sharif's heart plunged. “Beta, Mummy and I think it would be best if you stayed in Delhi longer. There's the financial issue and also it's good if you get some rest. There's no rush for college. We'd like you to be here with us. And Mahinder Uncle said he can get you an IT traineeship when you're ready to type.” The words came out in a rehearsed flood.

Mansoor had known they were in trouble, but this much? That they'd suspend their son's education abroad? “Of course, Papa,” he said, his voice reedy. “I was also going to say that. And I'm enjoying the NGO work. One semester here or there doesn't matter.”

“Are you sure?”

“Yaah.”

Father and son considered each other across a void of total comprehension. Mansoor thought he was about to see his father cry.

“Good,” Sharif said, slapping his thigh. “It'll be nice to have you around.”

After he left, Mansoor lay down on his bed and tried to not to cry himself.

W
hy he should feel so bad, when he hadn't even loved his life in the U.S.—where he'd made as few friends as he'd made in school—confounded him. But he was torn about what he wanted. He didn't want to be in India
or
the U.S. He wanted to be in a place free of pain and tragedy.

The discussions about the property went on at home; the tragedy became one of suspension; and Mansoor, after a gap of a few days, returned to the Peace For All meetings.

But now, sitting among the group members on the floor with their lazily folded legs (as if they were sitting up in a bed, drinking hot tea) and listening to their earnest debates about the civil code, he was disoriented, distracted, felt he didn't have anything to do with this world or these people, that he'd stumbled into it by accident, during a period of boredom, and now that the period of boredom had been declared his life, he must return to serious things like programming.

“I'll be staying on longer,” he told Tara and Ayub one day. “My health still hasn't improved and the doctor has said I should rest another month.” This is the story the family had decided to share with strangers; they wanted to keep their suffering, their shame, private. “So I'll be able to help in the next few months.” Though he felt and wanted the opposite: but the crucial thing, for Mansoor, was to get the announcement that he wasn't going back out of the way.

“I thought you were getting better,” Ayub said.

“So it's continuing repetitive stress injury?” Tara asked, not blinking her eyes much beneath her steel-rimmed John Lennon–style glasses, glasses that were so clear that they seemed like dividers separating one world from the next, the world of wealth and good skin (she had radiant skin) from the world of activism. As the daughter of a doctor, she was fluent in the language of sickness.

“Yaah, I believe,” Mansoor said. “Carpal tunnel, repetitive stress, whatever you want to call it.”

It was only later, when the other members had come and gone and the meeting was over, that Ayub said, “Will you take a walk with me?”

“Of course.” Mansoor lifted the Bittoo notebook he'd kept on the floor next to him. He hadn't even opened it once today and it was somehow glued to the floor and he had to pry it up. “Arre.” He laughed.

Ayub, tall and hunched, bringing his palms together, laughed too, politely, eyes popping with delight a bit too late.

The brick complex near the hospital contained the Department of Tourism and also several shops—Flavors Restaurant, a toy shop, a kebab place; the normal assortment you find in a community center. Navigating the cool corridors, damp from mopping, alive with a potent lemony smell (one that must have been coming from a shop rather than the floor, since that was not the kind of mopping these places got) the air cold and making them shiver, Ayub asked, “So how long have you had these muscle problems?”

“Six years. Since the blast.” He was hypnotized by the sound of Ayub's slippers thwacking the ground: that urban music.

“That's a long time,” Ayub said. “What kind of treatment did you get?”

Mansoor told him: the physiotherapy, the exercises, the ultrasonic machine, the biosensitization, the alternating baths, the splints, the weights, the Volini gel, the words coming out like verses of some elegant, enigmatic poem.

“But what do the doctors say now?”

“That it's been a relapse. Basically, I was healing but I developed microtears in my wrists from typing too much.” He was so fluent in this language too.

“I hope you don't mind my saying,” Ayub said. “It shouldn't be there after so many years.”

Mansoor looked at him.

“You see, I've been watching you since you came in,” Ayub said. “You remind me of myself. You're sensitive to the pain of others but not so much to your own pain, isn't it? But here's the issue. Any pain that lasts this long—well, it can't. Pain is supposed to heal. When an injury doesn't go away at our age, it's psychological, no matter the cause.” Standing tall in a striped blue Fabindia shirt—the stripes powerful and downward, red and green—wearing a gray woolen waistcoat over it, clapping his palms together, Ayub looked like both a politician and an abashed lover who has waited too long to make his declaration.

Ayub scooped back his combed hair. For the first time Mansoor saw that, at the age of twenty-seven, Ayub was balding already. The hair was carefully arranged, in powerful forward strands, to cover up the terra firma of the pate.

“I'm not saying your pain isn't real or the injury isn't real. I'm simply saying that the pain remains
after
the injury has healed.” Ayub clapped his palms together again, as if it helped maintain his balance, as it were the steering wheel or joystick of the conversation. “When I was your age and I moved to Delhi, I had a bad scooter accident. I was riding pillion and my friend's scooter skidded—there was a motorcycle coming toward us in the wrong lane; it was Holi and the driver's eyes were red and he had clearly drunk bhang, because he was smiling as
he
skidded—and we went sliding on the road, like this”—he made a gesture with his palms that you may make to mimic the flight of a jet—“and I rolled off and only narrowly avoided being run over by a Tempo. We were young, so we laughed it off, but then I started developing horrible back pains.” His eyes went dark as he remembered. “It was so bad, yaar. It used to keep me up at night. I couldn't walk, talk, read—anything. And I tried everything: Reiki, yoga,
yunani, ayurveda, homeopathy. You think of it and I tried it.” He paused. “It was only after some years when I realized that my pain was psychological and that I was holding on to it because I was addicted to it that it went away. It was only when I started praying and not thinking of myself that it went away. When I gave myself to Allah.” Ayub had rich, long lashes that throbbed oddly when he was excited. He was a bit like a bulb that hasn't quite learned to hoard all its electricity into light and so emits it through twitches—in Ayub's case, of the hands, eyes, feet; Ayub was always sitting on the floor of the NGO, on the white terrazzo broken into squares by black lines, rotating his feet like they were radars processing the conversation—only to suddenly burst into cogent argument.

Mansoor now considered Ayub, his advice, his well-meaning invitation to stroll in the market, his height, his stoop, his provincial sureness about whatever quackish solution he'd discovered, the power he must feel giving advice to people much richer than himself, the joy he must get out of pitying Mansoor, his expectant look, and said, “It could be true.” He blinked deeply himself.

Now Ayub became excited. “In fact, the way I solved it was by reading Dr. Mari's book
The Religion of Pain
. He brings up the issue also and suggests you do visualization and don't focus on your body. Between that and prayer, five times a day, I healed. You will too. I'll bring you the book and we can go to the mosque together.”

“Thank you,” Mansoor said.

Instead, that day, enraged in a way he could not understand, he vowed not to return to the meetings at all.

“P
apa, I want to do the IT traineeship,” Mansoor said the next evening.

His father was sitting on the bed, his buttocks slumped forward under him and his stomach jutting up and out. A pack of cards with an elegant red paisley design on their backs—the same design Mansoor had noticed in the jaali work of the mosque near the university in Jamia—was spread next to him in an arrangement of solitaire. Sharif, his spectacles low on his nose, kept a couple of cards on his stomach for consideration. The floppy pipes of his white pajamas revealed thin white hairy ankles. “If you feel like it is the right thing, sure.”

“Yaah, I'm feeling a lot better and it's good if I start and get work experience,” Mansoor started, but then stopped. His father, dipping a card into one of the simultaneous stubby rivers of the solitaire piles, wasn't listening.

________

“The only issue is—are your wrists OK?” Afsheen said, carrying a bowl of fatty chicken bits swiftly back and forth in the kitchen. Her bun was done up perfectly and her forehead looked unlined and she was wearing one of her elegant purple-gray caftans. Tragedy had made her erect and confident.

“They're fine, Mama,” Mansoor said, in the artificial unintelligible rush of the kitchen. “I don't want to talk about them. And please don't use them as an excuse for . . . our problems.”

“Yaar, Razia, I told you to put the onions here,” Afsheen said to the maid.

“Ji, madam,” Razia said.

“Where will you do it?” Afsheen asked Mansoor.

“Mahinder Uncle's friend is an executive at Xansa,” Mansoor said, his back to a counter—the back suddenly aching, crossed by a vertical sting of pain and the horizontal hardness of the slab of counter.

“I see. You think you can sit in an office all day?”

“Yes, Mama,” Mansoor said. “As long as I take breaks.”

“We should get permission from the doctor first.”

________

So Mansoor went over with the driver to the clinic in Safdarjung.

He had been avoiding this the past few months. The nerve conduction test was the only objective measure of how you were doing and healing; by hooking you up to sensors and sending currents through your nerves, the doctors could determine how badly damaged they were. Mansoor had had such a test before in the U.S. He'd been frightened by the name, by its electric inelegance, but was relieved by how minor the shocks were, the way they felt like subcutaneous pinches.

The doctor wasn't the stately sardar he usually dealt with but rather a lumpy Bengali man with gapped teeth and large moles under his eyes, wearing a lab coat, with a fixed smile.

“Hello, hello,” he said when Mansoor entered the small consultation chamber with its laminated surfaces and shelves piled with prizes from medical associations.

When Mansoor told him why he was there, he got up from his seat and removed a device from behind a glass case that looked like an old typewriter, complete with the gray fuzzy plastic shell.

Mansoor, sitting on a steel stool, tensed up. What if this Soviet-looking device was defective and hurt his nerves? What if the electricity went in the middle of the test?

“Put your wrists forward,” the doctor said and then tied the wires around his wrists like rakhis. Before Mansoor could speak, the current, warm and
beery, started. He relaxed. It wasn't as bad as he'd thought. His system wouldn't be permanently rewired.

“What do you do?” the doctor asked after a while.

“I'm a student.” It was odd for Mansoor to be talking to this man without his mother's mediation. “BTech,” he continued. “I'm studying computers.”

“Well, Mansoor-ji, you better find another profession.”

Mansoor looked at him with the calm that comes to people when they receive the news they have been dreading—the calm of disbelief; also perverse, awful relief.

“Your nerves are badly damaged,” the doctor continued. “You'll never be able to type. You should find a profession that doesn't require typing. Luckily, for your generation, there are many options. You could become a teacher or a professor.”

Somehow Mansoor endured this lecture. Do something else? But there was nothing else for people of his generation to do! They were hooked to machines. Everywhere one turned one encountered screens, keyboards, wires. And once again Mansoor experienced the bitterness he'd felt when the physiotherapist in the U.S. had told him he was suffering the consequences not just of the bomb but of years of mishandling his computer—why hadn't anyone told him? Why was he allowed to throw his injured body at these boxes of signals? Even in the U.S., on his pristine Californian campus, there had been no instructions about how to protect his wrists from repetitive stress injuries—the keyboards in the computer cluster were far from ergonomic—and in any case most people had laptops and spent their days and nights hunched over them, writing papers, playing movies, sending e-mails, and downloading porn on the high-speed networks. And now, after I've destroyed everything, they tell me? That's the meaning of having survived the bomb. I didn't survive at all. I just spent longer dying, rendered crippled and obsolete like that old 486 on which I acquired my first repetitive injuries.

He walked out of the office with his hands in his pockets and the world wild and broken around him—dust in the air; haze against the eye; telephone and electric wires stretching around the colony like a noose; the rust
visible on the chain-link fence of Deer Park, across the street; the rank odor of the gutter in his nose; the freshly tarred road like a living, breathing thing, a rising piece of bread, rolled flat by the cars' tires.

When he told his mother the news, she grimaced at first in a show of strength, and then burst into tears. “Why is this happening to us?” she said. “Two thousand three. It's a terrible year. We must get a second opinion.”

“No,” he said. He was done with doctors.