How had he become like this? Where had her husband—the sweet man she’d known the first few years—gone? She began despairing that this was his true self, that she’d been fooled those first few years. Such bitterness could not be minted overnight; it had to be implanted at a young age. Maybe he wasn’t so different from the bad-tempered, cynical people in the complex that he despised—but whereas those people pinned their cynicism on the decline of the family’s reputation, he pinned it on the decline of his career. It was all the same, in the end; it produced the same results. It occurred to her that she could have been married to any one of the shrieking, sniggering fools on the family campus. That she was like Draupadi, wedded to the family, not to a person. “You used to be different,” she had said at the end of that conversation about selling the lands, trying to keep herself from cracking.
“No,” he’d said. “I was just on a break from being myself.”
Then, one day, in October, five months after the boys’ deaths, they went to Tihar Jail to meet a man named Malik Aziz. Malik, it was said, was the ideologue of the JKIF, the man behind its violent philosophy. A bookish student of chemistry at the University of Kashmir, he had turned out to be a dangerous, charismatic figure in the student protest movements, egging his fellow students on from stone throwing to kidnapping a vice chancellor of the university to assassinations and finally terrorism. “According to RAW, he’s one of the most dangerous terrorists in the country,” the police escort whispered as he walked beside Deepa through the winding inner roads of Tihar, small paths canyoned on either side with high dirty yellow plaster walls, the walls overlaid with snaps of shattered glass and barbed wire.
A lot—too much—of family was present. Jagdish, who had organized the meeting, was in his small specs and crinkled face, looking short and wide in a safari suit as he walked with his hands behind his back. Mukesh: sticking out his chest, smoothing his mustache, constantly asking the police escort questions, as if to flatter him and overpower him at once. And Vikas, of course: slinking behind the two men and Deepa, acting even more distraught than he probably was, showing his displeasure about these men’s presence by not standing next to his wife. “Come in the front, yaar,” Mukesh said, grabbing him by the shoulder.
“No, no. I’ll keep watch of the back,” Vikas said, as if there was a chance they’d be attacked by escaping prisoners in these narrow Benares-back-lane-like channels.
“Why are they coming with us?” he had asked Deepa a few days before, when she told him that the meeting in the jail was confirmed.
“They organized it, yaa.” The South Indian yaa. These old tics were returning.
“They didn’t even know the boys. In all these years, tell me one time they took interest in them. All Jagdish would do is go up to them and make faces and say, ‘Who is Kumbhkaran and who is Duryodhan?’ And Mukesh—he’ll act like a chaudhary and take over the whole thing, as if his kids have died.” He flushed, as usual, at this phrase. He’d become a man whose kids had died. This was his chief distinction. It occurred to him now that people are defined much more by their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer. I’ve been immune to all this, he thought.
His parents had not died early—nor had they died late. He was the third of four siblings; his parents were thirty-five and thirty-three when they’d had him. They’d both died in their early seventies. People lived for much longer now but he had not grieved too much for them—they’d led unhappy lives and they were especially unhappy in each other’s presence. Mama’s stroke of genius, he thought, was to die first. Her poor husband—angry, stingy, abusive, like all the men in this family—had been unmoored.