“But I can contribute much more as a writer here.” Malik was the publisher and propagandist in the group and very proud of it.
Poor innocent Malik! Shockie thought. What could he contribute? He was only tolerated because Shockie was his protector and benefactor and Shockie was the top bomb maker in the group. And yet Shockie loved him. Being in the group meant eschewing relationships with women and this was the closest Shockie could come to re-creating the tenderness one felt toward a woman. They were roommates and Shockie often asked what Malik was reading. Gandhi, he might say. Or Tolstoy. Or Pushkin. What does he make of himself? Shockie wondered. Does he really have no idea how pathetic he is? But Malik appeared innocent about his own oddness. Perhaps the injury to his leg and penis had made him a little blind, had given him the aspect of a holy fool, as if that were the only way to deal with the horror that had been inflicted upon him—Shockie had seen this with other cripples, too: a strange light, maybe the light of death, bleeding around the edges of their dull corneas.
After his meeting with Abdul, Shockie went to his room. When he came in, Malik was praying on a mat laid out between the two charpais. He was a religious person—religion, Shockie thought, that crutch of the weak.
When he was done praying, Malik sat at the edge of the bed, and Shockie told him about the meeting with Abdul. Malik listened with his hands tight around a copy of Gandhi’s Autobiography, nodding at odd moments.
“You’re listening?” Shockie asked. Why were people never listening to him?
“Yes, yes.”
“Do you want to come?”
“What will I do, bhai? You know how these people treat me.”
“This is an opportunity to change that,” Shockie said. “You’ll get a little practice. Otherwise our missions are too dangerous for a first-timer. But you don’t have to. You can keep letting these people call you a coward.”
“It’s not that I’m afraid,” Malik said. “I think I can be more useful here.” He tipped his head toward a cyclostyle machine and some letter-block printing paraphernalia in the corner of the room. As the “publisher” and “propagandist” he churned out pamphlets, posters, manifestos, and warnings against civilians and army officers to be posted on the walls of village houses and GPOs and thanas, all of them written in an overblown apocalyptic style that Abdul said gave him a headache, and that Shockie, as Malik’s guardian, always edited.
“Suit yourself,” Shockie said.
But he was sad.
That night he stayed up thinking of his mother and imagining a series of girls he had been infatuated with in his village. Where were they now? Was that horrible ox of a weaver really fucking Faiza? (This did not stop him from picturing the act; he liked imagining the private lives of others.) Was Sahar really a mother of two, putting oil on her round stomach? And what about Asma . . . ? In this way, he began to fall asleep. But right when sleep was coming, he got up and said, “You’re lazy.”
Malik, curled on his charpai, his back against the wall, reading, his toes visible and dirty, said, “What?”
“You should come with me. You have no idea how disrespected you are in the group. They mock you openly. When I told Abdul I wanted to bring you, he laughed and forbade me from doing it.”
Malik said nothing.
“When you were talking about Gandhi the other day, they were all laughing. I even tried to signal to you but you were so lost in your conversation. You need to do something. Your position in the group is insecure. If something happens to me, what will you do? That’s why I want you to come with me. That way we can be together if something happens.”
He felt he had made such a good appeal that he was surprised by Malik’s reply. “Maybe you’re the coward.”
Shockie said nothing.
“Inflicting violence is cowardly. We’ve talked about that. If we were brave we’d walk into the street and be martyred.” He pointed to the Autobiography. “You know what Gandhi said Jews should do when faced with the Nazis? Commit mass suicide. Think about that.”
Shockie shook his head. “You’re cracked.”
“So what? What do you think these attacks are going to achieve? Today when you were complaining about the blast not being big enough, I was thinking: It doesn’t matter. It’s all wrong. Blasts are a way of hiding. If you want to be a hero you have to be a martyr.”
“Why don’t you propose this to Abdul?”
“Maybe I will.”
After Shockie went to sleep, Malik read by the milky tube light fixed over his bed. He read about Gandhi’s childhood, his suicide attempt with datura seeds, the shame he felt over the fact that he was having sex at the moment his father died, his weak vegetarian constitution, his struggles with pain and sexual urges—he read all this and thought, “But this is me.”
In the morning, when he woke up, Shockie was gone.