After they had retired to their room to sulk, she said to Vikas, “You spoil them too much. You make all these documentaries about social issues—can’t you teach these idiots something?” She was literally spitting. Oh, how he loved it when Deepa, who was so kind and patient, got angry! How harmless her beautiful anger was!
That day, after she had busied herself in the kitchen, Vikas drove his brats to Lajpat Nagar to explain how footpath dwellers, about whom he was planning a documentary, had such difficult lives. But as soon as he got to the crowded market, with its glut of humans, heat, concrete, moving metal cars, elbows, he realized that there was something very strange about pointing out poor people in their natural habitat to children—like they were zoo animals. He had felt it when he had done his initial research, but it was somehow more pronounced now that he had two eager schoolboys with slick gelled pompadours and black shoes and shorts with him (as punishment they’d had to bathe and dress up). Worse, when they approached one of the many tiny smelly canals in Lajpat Nagar, it was clear that the footpath dwellers were not going to put up a good show. Sitting deep in their tepees of blue crinkly tarpaulin, the men were smoking bidis and playing cards. A cobbler beat a shoe to death. The potbellied children were naked and dancing. Poverty wasn’t so miserable in the winter. And Vikas realized with horror that poor people look nothing like the rich, or even the middle-class: they are a different species. To ask a child to feel sympathy for the poor is harder than getting him to feel sympathy for a chicken or a goat—at least you can see a goat being slaughtered. There is real revulsion in death. Whereas the poor keep living: dumb, insensate, nasty. They live among old newspapers, Saffola cans, Nirma bottles, Kohinoor rice sacks—brands you recognize so fiercely that you don’t see them at all, that are as familiar as any other local building material: mica, quartz, sandstone. Why do the poor refuse to give an accurate picture of their suffering? Why aren’t they frowning, or at least moaning? Vikas was almost upset at how much they were misrepresenting themselves. Then he felt bad for wanting them to be wretched—wasn’t his job to humanize them? He also felt bad that he knew no statistics that he could rattle off to stupefy the boys.
They were looking at him, waiting. Finally, he took them to a shop in the Central Market, where they examined cricket bats together. The bats were as large as they were and smelled of linseed oil. Still, the boys looked grateful and were quiet, like two convicts on bail, and they were even quieter when Vikas paid for the bat. Outside, they made pretend cricket strokes with it. “He’s hit a six out of the park and now Jonty’s coming in to field . . . ,” Nakul whispered, commentating under his breath. Vikas rested his back against the crumbling wall of the tiny park at the center of the market and looked at the name of the shop: Honey-Money Top Sports. What a crazy name! he thought. What a crazy world!
Later, this shop too would burn in the bombing.
Back in the present, Vikas’s visions continued.
Why me? he wondered, sitting on his toilet and grabbing fistfuls of his hair. Was I Hitler in my past life? Did I massacre a million people and forget? Was I Stalin, General Dyer, Cortes, or Ashoka before his conversion? He looked into the mirror and saw his unshaved mouth and upper lip and felt deeply crazy, cracked. His mind was drawn repeatedly to the texture of the bomb—metal, nails, heat, fire, plastic, mud: Didn’t that all correspond somehow with the texture of his life? The gooey plasticky smell of his shower curtain? The dirty gray terrazzo of the floor? The strange oil refinery of the Fiat’s engine, into which he so often had to dunk his head just to get the thing to start? The orange magenta heat into which he so often ventured with his tripod? The poorer you are, the closer you are to machines in all their nakedness and grit. The suave decoration of consumer electronics falls away. Vikas felt he understood the bomb. It was part of his world.
One day, in a great confusion, not knowing where his wife was, he found himself walking around Connaught Place. It was October and everyone’s face was red and inflamed with sickness. The office workers wiped their mouths with hankies or the backs of their hands—the end of lunch. He walked about in the dust and his black pants were painted white from the bottom up. Vikas had been many times to Connaught Place—his old Arthur Andersen office had been in the market—but in all those years, he had never bothered to look up, to lift his head above the ground floor, with its old, circular, white-plaster colonial British construction and cool corridors and robust colonnades. Looking up now, he saw a big, broad, deep-blue, hot, arid metal sign that read through the hard glitter of sunlight: STATE BANK OF INDIA. The words were repeated underneath in Hindi. There were numbers on the board—the pin code, a phone. An insignia that might have been a peacock.