Strangely, though, as he drove, his mind was not on his boys but on their friend Mansoor Ahmed, who was the same age as the older one, Tushar. Vikas would never be able to live it down if something happened to Mansoor, if he died on his watch—Mansoor, who had been born to the Ahmeds after seven years of infertility and whom they protected with all their parental paranoia, only letting him go out to visit the Khuranas, whom they counted among their best (and only Hindu) friends. Vikas, for this reason, had a strong bond with the boy—stronger, at times, than the one he shared with his own sons; he relished Mansoor’s intelligence and sensitivity, found him more receptive to the arts and to listening, and always used him as a cudgel with which to shame his sons (Vikas had always been self-hating when it came to family). When Mansoor came over, he tried to give him a taste of the freedom he was denied by his parents. Sending him with the boys, instead of dropping him off personally, had been his idea.
Monga was right, though—traffic was horrible, and almost out of petrol, the car swung uneasily through the rush hour streets, its needle shaking near E. “Shit, shit, shit,” Vikas muttered, the panic in his heart displaced by the unperturbed pace of traffic.
The boys had left together in an auto, flagging one down from Mathura Road even as the chaperoning servant kept telling them, “Move back! Your mother’s going to scold you!”
“I’ll scold you,” said Tushar, brimming with the manic energy that consumed him at dusk, the city with its ferocious horns and traffic and tired efflorescence not exactly helping matters.
But when the boys got into the auto, squeezing their small brown legs together, they were quiet and serious as they expected auto riders to be. They watched the traffic from the open sides of the vehicle, and occasionally pointed out fancy cars to each other. “Oye, the new model of the Rover Montego’s come out?” Nakul, the younger one, asked.
“They make them in Oxford,” Tushar said.
“Where are we going, can you please tell me?” the alcohol-scented auto driver asked.
“Let’s go to Lajpat Nagar first,” Tushar said. “That’s OK, no?” he said, turning to Mansoor.
Mansoor grinned. He knew he was supposed to be dropped home first, but he liked being bossed around by rebellious people so he could break the rules and be let off the hook.
At twelve, Mansoor had an amazing, ingratiating grin, and a mouthful of crooked teeth that would never be fixed.
A few minutes later, the boys strolled around Lajpat Nagar together, Tushar teasing Mansoor and slapping his back and Nakul carrying himself proudly, combing his hair and fine-tuning it with his fingers like a radio. “And that’s the framing shop where we got that Founder’s Day photo framed,” Nakul said. “We bought Sorry and backgammon from the shop behind it.”
“They sell classy English willow bats there,” Tushar chimed in, though he was a terrible cricketer.
Mansoor, unused to being out on his own, took in the sights and sounds. The crowds consisted of a particular kind of Delhiite Mansoor recognized immediately. This sort of Delhiite was slightly malnourished, wore shiny polyester clothes, grew a black mustache, had a fondness for stud earrings, kept his pants hitched too high, let his fingers roam his nose, used slightly loose, lackadaisical hand gestures, and had a cynical dumb face that could never seem grave (the women looked the same, but with lighter mustaches and cheap floral saris).
“Where are we going?” Mansoor was asking when an explosion ripped his sentence in two and stuffed half of it back in his mouth.
Later, everyone reported seeing a gushing white star, and there was a long silence before the screams started, as if, even in pain, people watched each other first to see how to act.
When Mansoor woke up, the market was burning. People lay in positions of repose. Mothers were folded bloodily over daughters; office-going men were limp on their backs with briefcases burning beside them; and shopkeepers crawled on their elbows while cars burst into flames inches from their faces. Through a woman’s ripped kurta Mansoor spied his first breast. His own wrist was oozing blood but the sensation was far from him, like something hidden in another corner of the market.
People began climbing over the corpses with the guilty looks of burglars, their hair frazzled and wild and faces half-black. Mansoor, lifting himself up too, saw Tushar lying on the ground and staring up at the sky, his lips wet and open, his curly hair full of sand, or another whitish substance blasted off a wall. Nakul was next to him with his arm over his face like a worker dozing in the sun.
“Tushar! Nakul!” He was unable to hear himself. But when he crawled over to shake them, a sharp pain erupted in his hand and he looked up to see a torn leather shoe pressing down on it and then a disfigured man disappearing over him and the bodies.
“Uncle!” Mansoor screamed. But the man was gone and others—gory, bleeding—kept coming.
Then a hand gripped Mansoor’s shoulder. “Get up, son,” the disembodied voice said—a kindly voice, the voice of the earth, full of pity and groaning patience. But an old instinct about not talking to strangers took hold and Mansoor ran from the burning square.
By now Afsheen Ahmed had become very anxious about her son’s absence and had called Deepa Khurana.
“He’s still not reached?” Deepa said, cramming the phone between her ear and shoulder and gazing out the windows, her hands covered in cake mix. “They must have got stuck in a jam on Ring Road—there’s lots of construction happening near Ashram. And the boys were supposed to go to Lajpat Nagar after dropping Mansoor. It could be that they went there first. They’re all such independent boys already.”
When Afsheen heard this, she turned cold. “Deepa, there’s been a blast there.”
“Rush hour is still going on,” Deepa said. “They should be reaching just now.”