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.
The Khuranas promised the Ahmeds that Mansoor would be out soon, but then months and years passed and nothing happened and Mansoor got used to his new life in Tihar Jail. He rose with the light and was locked down at four p.m. and spent the nights under a thin blanket on the floor of the roza ward, the Muslim ward, where, as if taunting him, everyone was highly religious, constantly putting their heads to the ground, staying there for hours in a retreat of penance, boredom, meditation. For an accused terrorist—his trial, of course, was still going on—he was allowed an unusual degree of freedom, not confined to the Anda cells, the solitary egg-shaped areas. It was as if the police knew he was no danger and so allowed him to interact with the general populace. The other prisoners, mostly poorer men, the sort he would have hired and fired in real life—it took Mansoor years to shed his classism—were impressed with him. Being a terrorist gave you a certain respect; it meant you had connections, and people asked him for help. But the real help he provided was with English, with reading legal documents, rewriting petitions, translating letters. He became known as “padhaku,” the “studious one.” His eyes got weak. He still hated religion but he saw it from a wise remove. Yes, he had become wise. He got up every morning and wrote of his boredom in a Bittoo notebook and thought of his life and came to the conclusion it couldn’t have gone any other way; he was still living out the phase that had started with the 1996 bomb; his mistake had been to think that it could go away overnight. But nothing did. You had to settle into tragedy as you settled into love or death. And he had settled. He was living at the bottom of the ocean of society. Sometimes, when the weather was good and he had come early to the hand pump where everyone washed and had traded his homemade rotis for a better place in the toilet queues and had found the one Chetan Bhagat novel in the library to read and had been able to garden and had received his thirty-rupee income for the day, he would feel almost happy.
Delhi was just beyond these burning coil-wrapped walls. He was still inside Delhi.
His mother came to see him often. She would sit across from him, separated by two layers of barbed wire, and cry and he would too.
Tragedy had given her a certain physical strength even as it eroded her mind. Her forehead seemed oddly free of lines—or that’s how it seemed through the spiky wire.
“Crying won’t solve anything,” he’d shout at her. “Don’t come here if you’re only going to irritate me with your grief.”
Of course he was only angry with himself. He would only understand this after she had gone away.
Nevertheless, he wanted to hurt her again and again. This was his purpose on earth.
For having given birth to him.
One day, after many months of silence, Vikas Uncle came to see him in the prison. Vikas Uncle had developed some kind of rash on his face—it was raw and pink. He told Mansoor, his voice lilting with emotion, that Mansoor would be out in six months, that he was doing everything he could, that he had given his epic film about terrorism a narrative that started and ended with Mansoor and that he was confident its public release would speed up the process.
In fact, Vikas had become a broken man. His visit to Mansoor had been one of the lowest points of a long-simmering nervous breakdown.
When Mansoor had been arrested, he had thought he could get him out but had in fact discovered he was as powerless as before. He was hindered at every step, and often by people he knew. Gill, for example, had said, “He’s pukka a terrorist; don’t be fooled.”
“He’s like my son.”
“He’s a Muslim,” Gill said.
“He was injured in a blast.”
“Psychologically speaking that makes the most sense. You turn into what you hate,” Gill said, caressing his beard and seeming oddly, in that moment, like Sharif Ahmed with his glorious almost-autistic surety.
Vikas never saw him again.
Vikas left the association too. He was surprised by how callous his wife was, in the end. “I have to live my life,” she said when Vikas said they ought to do more—that they ought to sell their property and support the Ahmeds in their multiple cases because they were running out of money.