The next hearing kept getting postponed. The government would set a date only to cancel it at the last minute and propose another in a month. Deepa began to slip. “Maybe they’re not even guilty,” she said one day, wiping her forehead in the kitchen. Behind her blazed the dismal kingdom of the countertops, the cracked surface strewn with cut-up ingredients, fossilized dhania, and powder. “I was reading in the Hindu,” she said, “that one of the boys they picked up was sixteen and he had come from Kashmir for the summer holidays, to stay with his brother, who sells papier-maché things at Dilli Haat.”
The Khuranas were cut-and-dried secularists and liberals. They took the left-wing position on everything. They read the Hindu, the Asian Age, and the Hindustan Times; subscribed to Outlook rather than the saffronized India Today; were among the special coterie of urbanites who counted the crusading P. Sainath as their favorite journalist; were partisans of DD-2’s The News Tonight under NDTV, which they felt had been better in its hour-long avatar as The World This Week; were opposed to globalization and the monstrous coming of McDonald’s and KFC (why do you need McDonald’s if there’s a Wimpy? Vikas wondered); were against the BJP, which had sprung to power for thirteen days right before the boys had died, the government lasting only long enough to encompass the blast. And of course, they had a few token Muslim friends, like the Ahmeds, of whom they were inordinately proud— whom they had cultivated partly (though not entirely) to give ballast to their secular credentials. Therefore, had they been on the other side of the blast, or rather not on any side, but outside its murderous circumference, they too would have doubted the speedy arrest of the terrorists, the conflicting but confident storylines offered by the police, the heartless manner in which the suspects had been held for a month before being produced for trial.
Of course, being victims, they’d had to suppress all that.
“What are they saying?” Vikas asked, buying time. In fact, he didn’t care whether the terrorists were guilty or innocent. The four men standing in the court were like the obligatory impurities in a paperweight: They were just there. A thing to hold down time. One more new room for the Khuranas to pass through. And how did it matter if they were guilty or innocent, if his kids had already died? How could the suffering of these suspects, even if it was greatly exacerbated by being wrongly jailed, approach his own? On the way out of the court, he had seen a woman with reddish hair crying, her head bent low, hands gripping the sides of the plastic chair, two crooked front teeth visible at the top of the cave of her glistening, depthless, open mouth—he had seen this woman and his heart had tightened and he had assumed she was a nameless mother of the nameless dead in the blast. Now he wondered if she was the mother of one of the young terrorists and his heart leapt again—not for the terrorists, but for her, for how alone she must have been in that courtroom, surrounded by people who hated her and her son.
Deepa, in the drawing room, propped her head against him and cried.
Afterwards, she said, “I made a mistake. There’s nothing we can do. We can never catch the people who did this. They’re a thousand kilometers away.”
“Deepu, darling, you can’t believe just one newspaper report.”
“But it’s the Hindu.”
“It’s put together by people like me,” he said. “Look at me. Of course it lies.” As he said this, he cast his eye around the drawing room. What a decrepit room it was. A sideboard stood next to the dining table, full of generic award plates you see in doctors’ offices—prizes from meaningless film associations, trophies won by the boys on sports day, medals from galas at the Friends Club. Closer, past the cheap, laminated fake wood surface of the dining table, wood the color of dark ale, eagerly foaming up any white impurity or dirt, lay the centerpiece of the shabby sofas pushed against the windows, windows that faced the adjacent building and were alive with dust, birds, chirping, the horrible guttural fever of sunlight. A maroon, moth-eaten, uneven carpet covered the floor. Somewhere, out of view, hiding behind a book on the sideboard, a clock ticked. Deepa was on her knees before Vikas now, crying. He had an erection—not from desire, but from a kind of excess vividness, the noises of the complex (the birds, the projecting hawkers, the grumbling servants, the hammering of new construction in the neighbor’s plot), building symphonically around the central instrument of the crying woman: he wanted to fuck the house, to fuck every little particle he could see.
The house changed shape and color with passing clouds, like a woman angrily putting on and taking off clothes in a changing room. “Don’t cry,” he told his wife, inhaling the smell of cakes from her hair, and then he cried too.