The thing was, he didn’t want to make a film about the aftermath; he was living the aftermath. No—he wanted to make a film about the moment itself, when there was a hush as the bomb shut off humans and machines in the vicinity and then viciously rearranged everything. Yes, he wanted to film the moment itself, slow it down, open it up like a flower over time, like the ultraviolent bomb dreams that filled his nights.
The dreams had been growing. At first he had seen the eye, bloody and syncopated and concocted, opening. Then the visions had become stereoscopic, his mind racing out in many directions to places like Sadar Bazaar, Faridabad, Indranagar, Rohini, Gurgaon, Sabzi Mandi—places where the news of the bomb turned into muddy rumor, as if his mind wished to establish a circumference for his grieving, come back with all the places that didn’t know about it, that certified its smallness.
And yet there was something these dreams couldn’t approach. How to be present, he wondered, for the moment itself? How to know when a bomb was about to go off? A few years ago, during a lull between documentaries and commercials, he had become interested in the functioning of futures markets, and he wondered now: Was it possible to put together a futures market for bombs? Surely there were people with information about terrorism that a market would happily sponge up. No, Khurana, don’t dream. He’d have to be more specific than that, more practical. Surely there were times of the year and markets (real markets, not the abstract entities of economics textbooks) in which blasts were concentrated. Crowds attracted bombs. So did festivals and political rallies. There were festivals almost every day in Delhi—festivals of life, death, birth, benediction, and general sorrow and repentance, staged by obscure sects of Hindus, Muslims, Jains, Christians.
At home, unlacing his shoes, dumping out the sand that collected on the soles, feeling his stubble like a proof of advancing life, he did not sit down to calculate the odds of walking into a bomb. He knew enough about mathematics to understand it would only disappoint him. “I suppose I could speak to the police and to journalists about where they think bombs might be set off,” he thought, the old documentarian instinct asserting itself.
He saw Delhi as a city vibrant and roiling with possibility, with bombs as pockets of heat, geysers that sprayed up naturally.
He started visiting these markets at rush hour with his camera. There was the one limiting rule he set for himself, so that he not bore of the project, or simply go mad from the heat: he would film only at or around the time the boys had been killed in Lajpat Nagar. If this foreshortened the odds, so be it. As for filming, the act itself, he made sure he was inconspicuous; he did not want to scare away potential terrorists with his equipment. (He did not think, in his half-cracked state, that this way of thinking was extremely odd.)
His first visit was to Lajpat Nagar. Armed with a Betacam, entering the square, he set up a tripod in the ruined park in the middle. Immediately urchins and shopkeepers came up to him, asking what he was doing—people wild-eyed with the rushed newfound suspicion of bomb victims. When he told them he was the father of two victims, they quieted down, but they were obviously not pleased. Having suffered so much, they did not want to be filmed within the broken cages of their shops, shacks with the distended lips of shutters and fragmented beams.
From the park, Vikas took in the market in cinematic gulps, saw people traipsing over rubble, over blasted loops of cloth, old shoes—signs of the bomb that hadn’t been cleared away but were being compacted into the deep archaeology of the city. He thought of Tushar and Nakul, the parts of them that had been left behind here, merging with the earth.
After a while, he began to spread out. He went to GK, South Ex, Karol Bagh, Chandini Chowk, Sadar Bazaar, INA—places even denser than Lajpat Nagar, more eager to be blown up. He became a fixture in these markets, setting up his camera in the shacks of paanwallahs and tea sellers, buying their loyalty and canceling their grumbling with payments. He was making a movie about the bazaars of India, he explained. No, he was not with the police. To put them at ease, he described his other documentaries and exaggerated acquaintanceships with Bollywood stars.
“So why are you here if you know Raveena so well, sir?” one chaiwallah asked, referring to Raveena Tandon.
“Abe, what do you think, we can all sleep with her?” Vikas said.
There was a contradiction within Vikas, an open wound: though he was fascinated by the poor, good at joshing with them, he was afraid, thanks to his bourgeois background, of being perceived as poor. Poverty equaled failure.