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.
TERRORISTS
MAY 1996
CHAPTER 3
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.”