“Deepa.”
“We can’t live like paupers. We’ve suffered enough already. And what about Anusha?”
Anusha—Vikas turned to her and saw that he . . . felt nothing. She was a corridor down which he never should have gone.
He felt the blast had made Deepa selfish in a way he had never expected. She wanted only to live in a nice home and to take care of Anusha and to take trips with her. She wanted no traffic with the larger world. Whereas tragedy had only opened Vikas’s eyes.
They tried for a while to reconcile but in a fit of rage she told him about Mukesh. That was the last provocation for Vikas. Rushing down the stairs, shouting at Mukesh in his construction office, causing a scene on the property, he soon left Maharani Bagh for good.
He moved into a small flat in Sukhdev Vihar. There, alienated from everyone, he worked day and night on the documentary. But he also starved himself, subsisting only on bananas.
It would have amused him as he died, a year after he moved out—from a potassium overdose—to have discovered he’d suffered a fate of semi-starvation similar to Ayub’s.
His body was found in the flat by the sweeper and for a while people thought he had been murdered and there was a lot of talk about Deepa and Mukesh being involved. But then that too was forgotten. Deepa and Mukesh had long since stopped seeing each other.
Deepa returned to Bangalore with her daughter.
The Ahmeds lived lives of quiet, drowning desolation in those years when their son was in prison. They had lost the property case, of course—the minute the arrests hit the papers, the Sahnis had swooped in and the judge had turned against them—and having been bankrupted, had moved out to a tiny place in Batla House, not far from where Mansoor had visited the women in the “VC fund” years ago.
Living together, having lost all their friends, they became quite religious, praying and spending time doing charitable work with the Zakat Foundation.
Then one day, driving to an orphanage, Sharif felt the steering wheel of the car turning and banking away from him, as if the road were an ocean that could grasp and torque your rudder. He pushed the brake pedal. Nothing. He took the car to the mechanic. But the car kept disobeying him. Around the same time, Afsheen discovered that all the buttons on her kameezes were vanishing, even though the clothes were under lock and key in a Godrej.
It was when she found a lemon filled with blood behind a photograph of Mansoor that she became convinced someone was trying to drive them out of the property with black magic. Sharif and she began seeing a black magic expert who would help counter this force.
They knew superstition was against religion, but what choice did they have? And so they became wrapped up in this new religion of terror, till twelve years after his arrest, Mansoor was finally released for lack of evidence.
By this point much had changed. Shockie had been executed—controversially—and Malik had been hanged too. But the Ahmeds could never take joy in these kinds of executions. They wanted only to see their son.
Hobbled and old, they drove to the jail—the car now obeying them—on a gray day livid with dust. When they got to the entrance of the prison, the loo wind was slapping curtains of sand toward them and they couldn’t quite see Mansoor’s face as he came up to them with a plastic bag full of his things. But they all stood within the two flare-ups of particles, embracing.
At home, Afsheen fed her son his favorite mix of bhindi, gobhi, and khichdi and asked him a thousand questions. Sharif was dumb and silent. Mansoor was dazed to be home—in this new place, with all the old photographs and leftover Oriental curios galaxied around him. All these years he had been imagining returning to the old house in South Ex—it had taken his parents years to admit they had moved.
“And remember Sultan, Farhan Uncle’s golden Labrador? He wanted to give us the puppy,” his mother was going on, as if he’d been living with them all these years. “Do you want to go out?” she asked finally.
“No,” Mansoor said. “I want to stay here with you.”
He never went out again.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS