Mansoor liked that the man did not press him, but it was also one of many encounters during a sullen winter and he did not make much of it. Instead, at home, Mansoor focused on coaxing his injured limbs to life, dipping his arms in alternating casseroles of hot and cold water and pulling up his sweater sleeves, his feet feeling cuffed to the marble floor. When he doused his arms in the water, his back ached; his body parts jostled and screamed for attention. When one part improved, the other took on the mantle of pain. Jaya explained that the computer, because of the intensity of attention it demanded, turned the muscles into hard microchips.
He was in the middle of this ritual when he got a call from his friend Darius.
Darius had been a schoolmate of Mansoor’s, but not someone he’d been particularly close with—whom had he been close with?—and so when Darius came on the phone, Mansoor was oddly excited.
“How are you, Mansoor?”
“Fit, yaar,” he said, turning back into the anxious-to-please second-tier-popular student he’d been in school.
They talked for a while about an elderly art teacher who had recently died of a stroke—she was a chain-smoking radical leftist who had made them paint antinuclear signs (INDIA: NO CLEAR POLICY) for half a year after the Pokhran tests—and then Darius said, “So I’m calling because you met my friend Naushad.”
It turned out that after a year at St. Stephen’s studying history, Darius had become an activist. “Anyway,” Darius went on, “he told me about his idea of getting you involved and I think it would be excellent. In fact I had told him about you at one point but I didn’t know you had come back to Delhi.”
Mansoor felt a dip in his mood. “Yaah, it’s a health issue.”
“Anyway,” Darius said in his unhearing way, “it’s a great group of people, very smart, and you’ll like Tara, who runs it. A Dipsite but she’s very eloquent. Anyway, I think these people are making quite a bit of difference. Wouldn’t hurt to come for at least one meeting.”
Mansoor didn’t want to go, but he had never really learned to say no, even after what had happened in the market with the Khurana boys, and so, on a rainy afternoon, he went over to the nursing home in Defence Colony where the group met—Tara’s mother, a doctor, ran the hospital.
The nursing home was a wide dish of a building smarting of disinfectant; the smell seemed to have struck dead the stunted palms in the front. Shivering, Mansoor climbed the stairs past the rooms with their sounds of conspiring patients and came to a bare room full of men and women sitting cross-legged in a circle. “You can sit down anywhere,” a woman said, her sharp canines visible. She was attractive, in a fair vampirish way, and must have been Tara.
Darius and Naushad got up and introduced Mansoor, who put his palms together, like a politician.
There were twenty people in all, most of them his age, some wearing checked shirts and pants, the women in modest salwar kameezes, a few heads dotted with skullcaps, gol topis, the Muslim women identifiable by their coquettish pink head scarfs.
Tara, after a brief explanation of what the group did—she said it had first formed in response to the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat earlier that year—asked Mansoor to speak. He suddenly became confused about why he was there. “I actually don’t know that much about the blast. I was quite small when it happened.”
“But you were hurt, right?”
“I was injured. And that’s why I’ve come back, for treatment. The bigger issue was that my two friends died.” The room hushed; Mansoor hadn’t mentioned this to Naushad—nor, apparently, had Darius, who, like many people Mansoor knew, had forgotten the aching detail of the two dead boys. The bomb survived through the living, not the dead. “Tushar and Nakul Khurana,” Mansoor said, savoring the Hindu names in this secular atmosphere. “I’d gone with them, and when the blast happened, near the framing shop, they died instantly. I had to run back all the way to my house in South Ex.” Sensing that people were impressed, he went on. “I was in a lot of pain—even my fillings in my teeth had fallen out—and I also felt a lot of guilt, even though I think they died instantly. I was twelve. I’m not sure what I could have done.”
“Poor boys,” one woman said, shaking her head.