Years passed. In 2001, at the age of seventeen, Mansoor left Delhi for the US, excited to pursue a degree in computer science, which had become his main passion after years of confinement in his home. He was more intimate with his 486—and then his Pentium with Intel Inside—than with any person in Delhi. After all, to see other people meant you had to leave your house, and this made them accessories to danger.
He had also become a decent programmer and web designer, building a tennis website, Sampras Mania, with a friend, which, though it plagiarized its stats and player summaries from ATP and ESPN, presented them in a (he thought) more orderly fashion.
He won second-place trophies in class eleven in the computer quizzes at ACCESS and MODEM, where he was, he noted, the only Muslim in attendance, the Azim Premji of the gathering, if you will.
The fact of the bombing, the exceptionalism of his last name in Hindu Punjabi society—these things filled him with an odd pride.
He became aware of the oppression of Muslims as the BJP tenaciously clung to power all through the late nineties. His mother never stopped being alarmed. “They’re still angry about something that happened fifty years ago,” she’d say, thinking of partition, and returning again and again to the images of party workers swarming the domes of the Babri Masjid, gashing the onionskin of cement with hammers. Mansoor concurred. He believed, like his father, that the imprisoned men might be innocent. “Is there anything we can do as informed citizens?” he asked, parroting the vocabulary of his earnest civics textbooks.
“In this country they prefer deformed citizens to informed citizens,” his father said drily. “And how will the Khuranas feel?”
“They also want justice.”
“Who knows what they want?”
The families, in the years since Anusha’s birth, had grown apart. The Khuranas had stopped calling the Ahmeds for social gatherings—which they still organized—and often didn’t return Afsheen’s monthly, inquiring, concerned calls.
“Ulta chor kotwal ko daante,” Sharif said, bungling the context of the homily. This is case of the thief scolding the watchman. “They should be thankful to us and to Mansoor. If he hadn’t been there, they wouldn’t have known what happened.”
Since the first few visits to the market, the Khuranas had recovered scraps of cloth they were sure came from the boys’ shirts. They’d found the exact spot where the boys had died from Mansoor’s memories.
“You can’t get inside people’s minds,” Afsheen said. “But their situation also isn’t good.”
She had her own theory: their marriage was in trouble. She had heard it from a common friend. But she did not think it right to gossip about this with her husband.
When Mansoor was set to leave for the U.S., though, the Khuranas came over with Anusha and everyone was together again. An anxious serenity pervaded the air.
“Have a wonderful time abroad,” Deepa Auntie said, rubbing her nose, as she did when she wanted to convey emotion, and presenting Mansoor with a fragrant envelope of rupees, rupees, which, of course, would be useless the minute he stepped on the plane.
“Thank you, auntie.”
“You must visit the museum where they keep Eadweard Muybridge’s first film.” Vikas Uncle was full of advice about the U.S., though it wasn’t clear he’d ever been there.
Anusha ran over and gave Mansoor a hug at the waist and then went back to deftly polluting a notebook on the ground with the unnatural jumping colors of sketch pens.
She was four now, the daughter of the bomb.
Mansoor arrived in August on a farmlike campus in Santa Clara that was wide open and safe and he settled into his dorm, getting to know Eddy and Chris, his roommates, one a Hispanic football player from San Antonio, the other an Armenian-American tennis player from Los Angeles, each creature alien to the other in build and form (Eddy massive, Chris tall, Mansoor slight but hairy), the alienness canceling into a common brotherly bonding.
“Dude!” “Dude!” “Dude!” they said, addressing each other, and Mansoor had never been happier. He developed a routine of working hard on his C++ assignments by day and then loitering in the cool California air by night as freshmen stormed the campus, singing their dorm chants.
He was like a person who, thinking his vision perfect, puts on glasses for the first time to discover he has been going blind.
Then one day he was brushing his teeth in his dorm sink when he heard a commotion—a rare sound for this time of the morning. Wiping his mouth, he went down to the main lounge, a wide rectangular room broken by driving asbestos-smeared pillars. Boys and girls were draped on the sofa in their athletic wear—shorts, sweatshirts, Tshirts—watching TV. They had smiles on their faces, which Mansoor quickly realized were the tight expressions that came before tears.
Planes had crashed into the World Trade Center.
“Shit,” Mansoor said, though he couldn’t really feel anything.