When Shockie got back to the base in Nayabazar—he had separated from Taukir and Meraj, who had gone elsewhere, into hiding—he was surprised to find himself embraced as a hero. “You killed two hundred,” Masood said. “God bless you.”
“It was more like fifty,” Shockie said, immediately disgusted by his own lie. He tended to believe the Indian papers on this subject. They had no incentive to play down the horrors.
“Our reports say a hundred at a minimum,” Masood said.
Shockie did not say anything further.
It was only when he went out for a walk later with his friend Malik that he burst out, “I’m thinking of defecting.”
“Tell me why,” Malik said, exhaling deeply.
Once Shockie started, he couldn’t stop. He felt the leadership of the group was corrupt and in denial, prone to inflating figures to get more funding; that they were siphoning money to build big houses for themselves and sending their children abroad but not providing even the minimum for blasts in Delhi—why else had only thirteen died?—that they were ideologically weak, not realizing that one big blast achieved much more, in terms of influencing policy, than hundreds of small ones; that one of the militant leader’s sons was studying in England—granted, Ramzi Yousef had also studied in Swansea, Wales, but then he was from a rich Kuwaiti-Baluchi family. . . .
But mostly Shockie felt there was no innovation when it came to bombs.
“You just have a habit of complaining,” Malik said.
“That’s not true.”
“It’s true, yaar. Even if the blast had been huge, you would have complained. Now, what do you want? That the whole country fall to its knees? This isn’t America, bhai. There the people are rich and they wait excitedly for tragedy. You set off a small pataka and they cry.” Malik hadn’t been to the U.S., but he was a big reader, and this fluent authority brought tears of satisfaction to his eyes. “Whereas a city like Delhi—what can you do?”
“We could try Parliament, like I told Abdul.”
“Leave the Parliament. There’s too much security.”
“What about Teen Murti or IIC? FICCI. World Trade Center. Oberoi.”
“You are not getting my point,” Malik said, shaking his head. “Delhi is a Muslim city, with a Muslim history and Muslim monuments. If you want to shake people, you have to attack Muslim targets. It makes our decision to attack harder. And when you look at the new construction, it’s all Punjabi and awful. No one cares if it falls.” Happy with this irony, he smiled broadly.
“Whatever it is, there should have been more damage,” Shockie said. “I looked at it after I left. I shouldn’t have done that—it was dangerous—but the bomb only made a phut sound and I thought better to look than waste a month of work. Nothing happened, yaar. A few buildings fell. A few people were burning.” He looked at his friend, trying to gauge his response to this violent reenactment. “My personal philosophy is, if we’re fighting a war, we should try to kill people, not injure them. You’ve seen what injury does.” Malik had a limp from being severely beaten by the military years ago. It was a turning point for their friendship and their involvement with the conflict. Shockie had knifed a soldier on Malik’s behalf. From that time on they had been inseparable, tied to each other even if they didn’t quite want to be. Their relationship, really, was a kind of marriage, held in place by a massive history. “How is your foot?” Shockie asked.
“Fine, fine,” Malik said. “Pain is all in the mind.” Talking about his foot put him in a bad mood and he changed the subject. “Were you able to go to Sagar?”
Sagar was their favorite restaurant in Delhi.
“Not this time.”
Now they walked in happy silence, Shockie contemplating Malik’s injury and their joint past, Malik contemplating the road, the hills, the twisting smoke fires. He was a bright person with a wonderful eye for detail; the limp had slowed him down, but it had also slowed the world around him. He missed nothing and he remembered everything; when he closed his eyes he could re-create a landscape down to the smallest leaf.
This was how he calmed himself through moments of pain. He painted too—it was a good way to make use of his photographic memory.
The two men arrived at a valley packed with boulders of many sizes and a clear mountain stream and they stripped down to their underwear and swam. Malik felt the water against his penis, which had been burned and electrocuted during the torture. Sometimes he felt swimming in natural streams, with their rich purse of minerals, might solve his problems. Shockie, broad and muscled, made unnecessary strokes in the water next to him.
After they were done, they rested on flat rocks and let their bodies roast in the sun. They held hands like lovers, though there was nothing sexual about this.
How could it be that only four days ago I was in Delhi planting a bomb? Shockie wondered. And now I’m here? The birds overhead were fervent in their high-pitched complaints. A surge of brightness passed over him. He hugged Malik and briefly fell asleep.