“This is the first time Javed hasn’t picked up,” Shockie said, unzipping his fake Adidas cricket kit bag.
A journey to Delhi to plant a bomb did not require much, at least in the way of equipment. Most of the stuff you needed you bought there. That way no one could trace you to your source. You destroy a city with the material it conveniently provides. But every respectable revolutionary needs a few changes of clothes, and Shockie, on his knees in his shabby room, folded two shirts and a pair of black pants into the kit bag. On the journey, he knew, he would have to dress in pajamas and a kurta—brown rags. He was supposed to be a farmer attending an agro-conference near Azamgarh, in Uttar Pradesh.
These agro-conferences were among the most fascinating things about India. They happened several times a year, in far-flung parts of the country. Tinkerers and crackpots showed up, hawking inventions to solve irrigation problems and plowing “inefficiencies”; a good number claimed to have invented perpetual motion machines (Shockie remembered a machine shaped like a calf with a swinging leg). The farmers, dismissed by urban Indians as bumpkins, roamed in gangs, examining the machines, discussing the finer points with the inventors. They were the audience for these raucous fairs held under tents in eroded Indian fields. The farmers were uniformly suspicious. They were taken in by nothing. Shockie—who had attended a fair to buy pipes for a large new bomb the group was building, as well as to purchase gunny sacks of ammonium nitrate and other fertilizer—was impressed. When he heard another one was happening in UP, he decided to disguise himself as a farmer in tribute. After stuffing a few old farmers’ newspapers in his kit bag, Shockie patted his hair into place, as if it needed to be coaxed into traveling with him.
The next day, with Meraj, another agent, he left by bus for the Indo-Nepal border at Sunauli.
Meraj and he were both in tattered kurtas. The bus, rattling over bad roads, usually took eight hours to Sunauli. Today it took almost ten. The landscape, a wild scrawl of reddish terraces and gushing private rivers, came right up to the bus, nearly shattering it. The dug-up road heralded the air with red dust. Plants with plastic bags over their heads crossed their leaves in surrender. A baby in the back screamed the entire way. Shockie and Meraj shifted on their shared seat, trying to apply enough pressure to keep Nepalis from sitting next to them.
When Meraj, an absent-looking fellow with a disarmingly stupid face you could consider capable of nothing dangerous, picked dandruff off his hair and sniffed his fingers, Shockie said, “Don’t do that.”
“OK,” he said, smiling nervously. But he had obviously not understood Shockie’s command and soon smelled his fingers again.
“That,” Shockie said.
At the border in Sunauli, a town reveling in its own filth, the policeman in the Indian immigration hut gazed at them for far too long. Shockie and Meraj remained impassive, but when they were halfway out, the policeman suddenly shouted after them. “You’re meat eaters?”
“We’re farmers. We told you,” Shockie said quietly.
“But you’re of the terrorist religion, no?” the policeman said. A dandy, his mustache was trimmed to the same depth as his eyebrows. “I’ve lived among you bastards and you’re all Pakistanis. Now go.”
Shockie and Meraj walked quickly to the Indian side, disappearing into a crowd of truck drivers. When they came across a small dhaba selling sandwiches wrapped in plastic, with a grassy patch in the back, they collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily. Meraj counted out money for ketchup sandwiches, but kept fumbling the notes.
Suddenly, Shockie burst out, “How much did they give you?”
“Two thousand,” Meraj said.
“Two thousand.” Shockie shook his head. “You think it’s enough?”
Meraj kept smiling—but it was a vacant, expectant smile. “It’s not bad.”
“Nonsense,” Shockie said. “Do you know how much Abdul makes at the shop alone?” Abdul was the leader of the group, a thirty-year-old who ran a carpet shop and also taught in the local school. “Fifty thousand,” Shockie said.
“Where, yaar?”
“I’ve seen it with my own eyes. And that’s on top of the dana we’re getting from Karachi.” Dana was counterfeit money. The Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force prided itself on being composed entirely of native Indian Kashmiris, but received funding from NGOs run by the ISI, Pakistan’s intelligence agency. “But why share it with us?” Shockie said. “We’re little people. We’re only making chocolate.” “Making chocolate,” the code for bomb making. “You know how in restaurants they have a mundu who helps the cook? That’s the amount of respect we get. We’re servants.” He snapped a Kit Kat they’d bought from the dhaba. “Listen to how it snaps. What a delicate sound. It sounds like money. They probably spent more for this one chocolate, in setting up the factory, than they give us for one chocolate.” He put a piece in his mouth.
Meraj watched.