Miraculously, as the weeks wore on, he began to get better. Establishing a routine of Iyengar yoga poses, swimming a few turgid laps in the covered Gymkhana pool, and skidding forward on the treadmill in the gym, he felt his pain beginning to dissipate, clear out, the way a clogged sinus might suddenly give up the ghost of its liquid. The months and years of struggle were suddenly canceled by three weeks of exercise and some visualization and focus.
(Later, when it was all over, when his life was coming to an end, he would think that he had probably started to recover because months of therapy had paid off; that he had been misdiagnosed during the nerve test; and that his recovery had been an act of faith and belief, the sort that can only take hold of a person when he is at his lowest.
But then, in the middle of this storm of circumstances, with his father’s fortune disappearing and the family in decline and his future uncertain and curtailed and the bomb still sitting vastly on the horizon of his past, like a furious private sun, always pulling him toward it—in the middle of this, this experiment with visualization, with accepting there might be other reasons for pain beside injury, had seemed like a paradigm shift.)
“Mine, when I started it, was gone in three months,” Ayub said one day, in the room at the back of Holy Child Nursing Home. The two men had become friendly again when Mansoor had told him his advice had helped; they had arrived early, before the others, and were sitting on the floor and talking. Ayub was wearing a white kurta with Kolhapuri slippers. He clutched one foot with his hands. He had enormous toes with bright symmetrical toenails. “I too was skeptical when I was first told about this idea. We’re slaves of science. We can’t believe there can be an answer outside doctors. We believe whatever they tell us—you have microtears in your wrists, is it? Well, there might be an easier explanation for why you don’t see them! I don’t mean to be too philosophical here, but we’re brought up within that system and are incapable of seeing what may be wrong with it. You’ve read Gandhi-ji? He said that the two worst classes of human beings were doctors and lawyers. Lawyers because they prolong fights and doctors because they cure the symptoms, not the cause. Doctors don’t eliminate disease—they perpetuate the existence of doctors. This is all there, in Hind Swaraj. But our own problem is—and I’m talking about all of us—we swallow everything Western civilization gives us. We reject even the best parts of our own culture. All these things we now call faith healing—what were they? Just forms of this, visualization, holistic techniques. But modern men like you and me wouldn’t be caught doing this so-called jhaad-phoonk. That’s something our servants do. But our servants aren’t idiots. This is a country of servants. And these people are living, right? Healthier than you would expect given the water they drink, the food they eat, the air they breathe. How?”
It was a mistake to tell him, Mansoor thought. He’s getting all excited. “The tough thing for you,” Ayub said, “will be what to do when the pain starts moving around.”
“Yes, the book told me about that.”
“Your body’s not going to give up on pain so easily. It’s been living with it for six years. And it’s been validated by the doctor. The doctor who is like a priest marrying you to your pain. Anyway, what will be interesting is not even what you’ll do when the pain moves around—you’ll handle it if you can handle this—but what you’ll do when it finally disappears.”
Mansoor felt close to Ayub. His wisdom wasn’t just for show; he wasn’t a quack—in fact, he was the only person to have truly helped Mansoor since the blast. Mansoor despaired about the years he’d lost to pain, and wished he’d healed faster. “Don’t regret things. Look at the present, and pray,” Ayub said. “That’s why I started praying. If you look backwards or forward, you stumble. But prayer keeps you focused on the eternal present.”
They started going to the mosque together again, several days a week this time, Mansoor driving over in his car, no longer ashamed of his new religiosity. In the mosque he wore a skullcap and tried to be near the front and was fervent in his devotion.