“They’re fine, Mama,” Mansoor said, in the artificial unintelligible rush of the kitchen. “I don’t want to talk about them. And please don’t use them as an excuse for . . . our problems.”
“Yaar, Razia, I told you to put the onions here,” Afsheen said to the maid.
“Ji, madam,” Razia said.
“Where will you do it?” Afsheen asked Mansoor.
“Mahinder Uncle’s friend is an executive at Xansa,” Mansoor said, his back to a counter—the back suddenly aching, crossed by a vertical sting of pain and the horizontal hardness of the slab of counter.
“I see. You think you can sit in an office all day?”
“Yes, Mama,” Mansoor said. “As long as I take breaks.”
“We should get permission from the doctor first.”
So Mansoor went over with the driver to the clinic in Safdarjung.
He had been avoiding this the past few months. The nerve conduction test was the only objective measure of how you were doing and healing; by hooking you up to sensors and sending currents through your nerves, the doctors could determine how badly damaged they were. Mansoor had had such a test before in the U.S. He’d been frightened by the name, by its electric inelegance, but was relieved by how minor the shocks were, the way they felt like subcutaneous pinches.
The doctor wasn’t the stately sardar he usually dealt with but rather a lumpy Bengali man with gapped teeth and large moles under his eyes, wearing a lab coat, with a fixed smile.
“Hello, hello,” he said when Mansoor entered the small consultation chamber with its laminated surfaces and shelves piled with prizes from medical associations.
When Mansoor told him why he was there, he got up from his seat and removed a device from behind a glass case that looked like an old typewriter, complete with the gray fuzzy plastic shell.
Mansoor, sitting on a steel stool, tensed up. What if this Soviet-looking device was defective and hurt his nerves? What if the electricity went in the middle of the test?
“Put your wrists forward,” the doctor said and then tied the wires around his wrists like rakhis. Before Mansoor could speak, the current, warm and beery, started. He relaxed. It wasn’t as bad as he’d thought. His system wouldn’t be permanently rewired.
“What do you do?” the doctor asked after a while.
“I’m a student.” It was odd for Mansoor to be talking to this man without his mother’s mediation. “BTech,” he continued. “I’m studying computers.”
“Well, Mansoor-ji, you better find another profession.”
Mansoor looked at him with the calm that comes to people when they receive the news they have been dreading—the calm of disbelief; also perverse, awful relief.
“Your nerves are badly damaged,” the doctor continued. “You’ll never be able to type. You should find a profession that doesn’t require typing. Luckily, for your generation, there are many options. You could become a teacher or a professor.”
Somehow Mansoor endured this lecture. Do something else? But there was nothing else for people of his generation to do! They were hooked to machines. Everywhere one turned one encountered screens, keyboards, wires. And once again Mansoor experienced the bitterness he’d felt when the physiotherapist in the U.S. had told him he was suffering the consequences not just of the bomb but of years of mishandling his computer—why hadn’t anyone told him? Why was he allowed to throw his injured body at these boxes of signals? Even in the U.S., on his pristine Californian campus, there had been no instructions about how to protect his wrists from repetitive stress injuries—the keyboards in the computer cluster were far from ergonomic—and in any case most people had laptops and spent their days and nights hunched over them, writing papers, playing movies, sending e-mails, and downloading porn on the high-speed networks. And now, after I’ve destroyed everything, they tell me? That’s the meaning of having survived the bomb. I didn’t survive at all. I just spent longer dying, rendered crippled and obsolete like that old 486 on which I acquired my first repetitive injuries.
He walked out of the office with his hands in his pockets and the world wild and broken around him—dust in the air; haze against the eye; telephone and electric wires stretching around the colony like a noose; the rust visible on the chain-link fence of Deer Park, across the street; the rank odor of the gutter in his nose; the freshly tarred road like a living, breathing thing, a rising piece of bread, rolled flat by the cars’ tires.
When he told his mother the news, she grimaced at first in a show of strength, and then burst into tears. “Why is this happening to us?” she said. “Two thousand three. It’s a terrible year. We must get a second opinion.”
“No,” he said. He was done with doctors.
CHAPTER 19