The May heat was horrifying, violating the privacy of all things while also forcing you into yourself. Shockie closed his eyes against the ferocious prehistoric explosions of the sun. As he looked for a PCO from which to call headquarters and abort the mission—he had tied up his minor wound with a hankie—he cursed under his breath. They fucking want freedom but this fucking cheapness will never go away.
When Shockie had headed out for the mission from Kathmandu, he had been reassured that he would not need to steal a car—he had fumbled this crime before, and besides, he disliked all aspects of the job that made him feel like a common criminal.
Packets of gutka dangled in front of a shop like strings on a bride’s veil. Within the shop, the shopkeeper fished out items from the shelves with a pole. Shockie was about to ask the man if he knew where he could find a PCO when his eyes fell on another Maruti 800, parked on the side of the road—an ugly little blue thing with maroon fittings, tinted windows, and colorful plastic floral designs taped to the top of the windscreen.
The street was dense with scooters and bicyclists.
In a matter of seconds, Shockie bounded up to the car, hugged himself against the onslaught of vehicles and people, and then, in a swift motion that would have shocked anyone watching this avuncular fair fellow from a distance, put his hands on the petrol cap, stuck a blade under the metal, heaved with all his might, and ripped it off.
Every muscle in his left hand—his stronger hand, after that debacle in Jaipur—was afire. Carrying the petrol cap in his hand, making heavy strides in the traffic, he walked to Taukir’s house.
Back at the house, Meraj and Taukir were playing cards on a sofa in sulky silence, light filtering dustily through the old Punjabi-style grilles of the house. The sofa had been put together by joining two metal trunks and covering it with a dhurrie.
“While you were sitting, I’ve done the job,” Shockie said, coming in. He handed them the petrol cap.
“Was the car close by?” Meraj asked, turning it over.
Taukir looked away.
“Give me some water and go get a key made,” Shockie instructed them.
While Taukir and Meraj had the key made at a shop (this was a flaw in the 800’s design; the key used to open the petrol cap could also be used to start the car), Shockie feasted at a local dhaba and admired the women at the tables with their gluttonous husbands.
He wanted to ram his penis into their wives. He imagined pinning the dhaba owner’s wife on a table and ripping off her kurta. Soon after, he went up to her and asked for another paratha. “Just one?” she said. She wore a nose ring and was obviously recently married.
“Yes, madam,” he said, with the exceeding politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.
Meraj and Taukir returned with a new key.
But in the morning, when the three men walked down the alleys to the spot where Shockie had found the blue Maruti, it was gone.
“Bhainchod,” Shockie said. “I thought it belonged to that shopkeeper. It must be in the lane behind this one.”
But after looking for a few hours, searching the neighborhood in an auto, they had still found nothing.
So now, their mental scores settled, they did what they would have normally done—went to Nizamuddin, a rich neighborhood; found a shabby car orphaned outside a fancy house; stole the petrol cap; had the key made (at a different shop) and returned the next day and drove it away.
In an alley near Taukir’s house, they removed the license plates from the stolen car, packed wires in the bonnet, and put the LPG cylinder in the back. Like a person sprinkling petals on a bed, Shockie grimly filled the dicky with nails and ball bearings and scrap. He rued the lack of ammonium nitrate—it would have been good to visit the agro fair and buy a sack. Fertilizer was more explosive than natural gas.
This part of the operation was the most dangerous—scarier than running amok in Delhi with the police possibly at your back. Bomb makers, like most people, are undone not by others but by themselves. Shockie knew countless stories of bomb makers who had lost eyes, limbs, hands, dicks to premature explosions; knew operatives who’d succeeded in blackening and burning their faces so that the skin peeled off for months and ran down their backs in rivulets and they looked like hideous ghouls, unable to do the anonymous work of revolution without exciting the pitying, curious stares of onlookers—the same looks you hoped to elicit for the craters you left behind.