“People get away with a lot more in this country,” Sharif said. Again, he had the sense—the sense he’d had on the day of the blast, back in 1996—that this was punishment for staying on in an obviously hostile country. Many of his relatives had fled to Pakistan after the 1969 Gujarat riots; only he, bullheaded, had stayed on.
That evening, steeling himself, Sharif came up to Mansoor’s bedroom. Mansoor was sitting on the side of his bed, bent over, reading Deterring Democracy, by Noam Chomsky. When Mansoor had first arrived in Delhi, Sharif remembered, his muscles had been so tender that he couldn’t even lift a book, and Sharif had gone with him to a chemist in INA to purchase a reading stand—the sort apparently used by musicians—which held up books.
“Yaah, Papa?” Mansoor asked.
Sharif’s heart plunged. “Beta, Mummy and I think it would be best if you stayed in Delhi longer. There’s the financial issue and also it’s good if you get some rest. There’s no rush for college. We’d like you to be here with us. And Mahinder Uncle said he can get you an IT traineeship when you’re ready to type.” The words came out in a rehearsed flood.
Mansoor had known they were in trouble, but this much? That they’d suspend their son’s education abroad? “Of course, Papa,” he said, his voice reedy. “I was also going to say that. And I’m enjoying the NGO work. One semester here or there doesn’t matter.”
“Are you sure?”
“Yaah.”
Father and son considered each other across a void of total comprehension. Mansoor thought he was about to see his father cry.
“Good,” Sharif said, slapping his thigh. “It’ll be nice to have you around.”
After he left, Mansoor lay down on his bed and tried to not to cry himself.
CHAPTER 17
Why he should feel so bad, when he hadn’t even loved his life in the U.S.—where he’d made as few friends as he’d made in school—confounded him. But he was torn about what he wanted. He didn’t want to be in India or the U.S. He wanted to be in a place free of pain and tragedy.
The discussions about the property went on at home; the tragedy became one of suspension; and Mansoor, after a gap of a few days, returned to the Peace For All meetings.
But now, sitting among the group members on the floor with their lazily folded legs (as if they were sitting up in a bed, drinking hot tea) and listening to their earnest debates about the civil code, he was disoriented, distracted, felt he didn’t have anything to do with this world or these people, that he’d stumbled into it by accident, during a period of boredom, and now that the period of boredom had been declared his life, he must return to serious things like programming.
“I’ll be staying on longer,” he told Tara and Ayub one day. “My health still hasn’t improved and the doctor has said I should rest another month.” This is the story the family had decided to share with strangers; they wanted to keep their suffering, their shame, private. “So I’ll be able to help in the next few months.” Though he felt and wanted the opposite: but the crucial thing, for Mansoor, was to get the announcement that he wasn’t going back out of the way.
“I thought you were getting better,” Ayub said.
“So it’s continuing repetitive stress injury?” Tara asked, not blinking her eyes much beneath her steel-rimmed John Lennon–style glasses, glasses that were so clear that they seemed like dividers separating one world from the next, the world of wealth and good skin (she had radiant skin) from the world of activism. As the daughter of a doctor, she was fluent in the language of sickness.
“Yaah, I believe,” Mansoor said. “Carpal tunnel, repetitive stress, whatever you want to call it.”
It was only later, when the other members had come and gone and the meeting was over, that Ayub said, “Will you take a walk with me?”
“Of course.” Mansoor lifted the Bittoo notebook he’d kept on the floor next to him. He hadn’t even opened it once today and it was somehow glued to the floor and he had to pry it up. “Arre.” He laughed.
Ayub, tall and hunched, bringing his palms together, laughed too, politely, eyes popping with delight a bit too late.
The brick complex near the hospital contained the Department of Tourism and also several shops—Flavors Restaurant, a toy shop, a kebab place; the normal assortment you find in a community center. Navigating the cool corridors, damp from mopping, alive with a potent lemony smell (one that must have been coming from a shop rather than the floor, since that was not the kind of mopping these places got) the air cold and making them shiver, Ayub asked, “So how long have you had these muscle problems?”
“Six years. Since the blast.” He was hypnotized by the sound of Ayub’s slippers thwacking the ground: that urban music.
“That’s a long time,” Ayub said. “What kind of treatment did you get?”
Mansoor told him: the physiotherapy, the exercises, the ultrasonic machine, the biosensitization, the alternating baths, the splints, the weights, the Volini gel, the words coming out like verses of some elegant, enigmatic poem.
“But what do the doctors say now?”