“You’re wrong,” his mother had said, when he’d said this to her before leaving. “They want to see people who remember the boys.”
“Their classmates remember them too.” The Khurana boys and he had been in different schools. This was one reason they were friends. Mansoor, when he saw them, was free from the baggage of reputation that attached itself to him in school, where he was taunted for being a Muslim, dubbed “mullah” and “Paki” and “mosquito.”
“But you should go,” his mother had said. “Do your duty. Don’t worry about the outcome. When you lose someone, you think of them all the time anyway. You’ll change nothing. You’ll make them feel less alone, less crazy.”
Mansoor remembered this now and yet felt uncomfortable. “Auntie, I should go home—Mummy likes eating dinner early,” he said in the dusty drawing room, the walls shaking from renovation and construction happening elsewhere. Mansoor knew the sounds so well from years of living in Delhi that he could picture the machines—large cement mixers and pile drivers. Delhi has no bird-watchers, only machine-listeners.
“No, no, stay a little while more,” she said. Now he’d made her feel guilty about crying. Fuck.
Pulling back her graying hair, she brought out a photo album with a dizzying fluorescent green and maroon cover. “Here are pictures of you and the boys at the Sports Day in Maharani Bagh,” she said, opening to a plastic page with two photos jammed at sad angles inside it. But her eyes were blurry; she left the pictures open too long; she was lost.
When Mansoor was leaving, Vikas Uncle said, “I want to give you something.” They went to the bathroom together. This was Vikas Uncle’s studio, a space that had been converted after the boys’ deaths—what was the use, after all, of two toilets? Above, water bled gauntly through the pipes, and notebooks lay in an abject circle on the floor around the toilet column. The bathing area was a chaos of equipment—black pieces of angled metal, tripods, cameras in their plastic hoods. From this pile Vikas Uncle fished out a bulky Minolta camera with a silver focus. “I’d kept it for the boys,” he said. “But I want you to have it.”
“No, uncle. Where will I use it?”
“Take it,” he said. “I know digital is in fashion these days, but the quality you can get from this is unparalleled. I’ve photographed some very beautiful ladies with this camera, when I was doing shoots for Cosmo.”
Mansoor had seen Vikas Uncle’s movies before and had never cared for them. They were serious, stiff, shot in black-and-white, the characters speaking crisp English. Nothing good happened to anyone. People lived enclosed middle-class lives, taunting each other with petty memories, and women and men argued incessantly. “They’re so joyless,” he had told his mother, wondering at how tragic Vikas Uncle’s sensibility had been even before the blast—it was as if he were sitting at a ceremonial fire, fanning a tragedy toward himself.
“But they are very acclaimed,” his mother had said reverently.
“They gave you another thing?” his mother said when he came home. “They shouldn’t have. Anyway, their finances aren’t so good. Deepa was saying that these days, because there’s a new distribution system, it’s very difficult to get financing for art films.”
“I’m so old now,” Mansoor said, which was neither here nor there.
“Let me keep it,” she said, taking the camera from him.
He knew what would happen—it would disappear, like all the things Vikas Uncle had given him over the years. His mother had immense empathy for the Khuranas, but like so many people, she was superstitious about death, cautious about not letting it sneak into her house.
CHAPTER 13
Now, for the first time as an adult, Mansoor became curious about the Lajpat Nagar case. Then one day, on the way back from physio, having read in the newspaper that a hearing was scheduled in Patiala House, he directed the driver to take him to the court.