He used his time praying to do what prayer must have been meant for in the first place, before it became ritual: visualization. Pressing his fingers behind his ears, he’d see himself playing cricket one winter day with Tushar and Nakul, smashing the ball. He could picture, in that hothouse of intoning bodies, the leaves on the trees, crisp and crumbling, above and beneath his feet, crunching; a discarded cricket glove, white and dirty and stiff around the thumbs, lying on the dusty earth; Nakul’s flexible, rubbery body curled over to bat, the bat kicking impatiently at the crease, looking sometimes like the leg of a tied horse and other times like the stuck tine of a clock—those were the happiest days of his life.
In visualization—used by athletes as well as the injured—you were first supposed to conjure and concentrate on a moment of surpassing happiness, a scene to which you could bring scents, sounds, colors. When Mansoor had started at home, he’d been surprised by how few happy moments he could pull out from the quiver of his memory. Had he never been happy? Then, one day, at the mosque, he’d hit upon this image of Tushar and Nakul and him and the other colony boys playing cricket and he’d been floored by the details, and kneeling on the ground in the mosque, the fabric of hundreds of worshippers crinkling and rustling around him, he had been overwhelmed. How long he’d suppressed that image! That image of life before the bomb, when one’s main concern was how not to be accidentally neutered by the hard cricket ball and how to avoid being brained when the ball spiraled down toward you from the air and you stood underneath with your small, smooth, rich-boy palms to catch it. Sometimes he got so lost in the memory that he forgot the most important part of the visualization exercise: picturing oneself doing the task one feared, in his case typing. Sometimes he just roamed the placid heat-struck diorama of the cricket field of his memory, interacting with Tushar—excitable, nervous Tushar—who loved Mansoor for unknown reasons, and sly Nakul with his excessively opposable thumbs, a boy who, like so many athletes, seemed happy to be led, thought of himself as a highly respected grunt capable of performing only one specialized task (speed bowling).
How strange to have these thoughts in the mosque, in that place where no experience was supposed to be private, where each person was consumed by the same God, the same words . . . though of course that wasn’t true: for most people, as Mansoor had noticed, going to the mosque was rote, like changing the oil in the scooter, or paying the school fees, another task to be checked off the list. Sometimes, coming up after the twelve minutes of prayer, he felt he was the only person who’d had an ecstatic experience with God on the clammy floor.
His hands were much better now and his fear of typing gradually went away. In fact, whenever he felt fear, or pain—the manifestation of fear—he kept going.
The Internet, which had been closed to him for so long, now was thrown open again and he dashed off e-mails to friends and read Yahoo! News and Rolling Stone as he had in the past.
It was when he almost visited a porn website that he began to recall what had caused this trauma in the first place.
When he’d moved to the U.S., he’d been fully healed. The pain in his right arm and wrist were in the past; the bomb itself was in the past. But the bomb, churning the materials of the city, eking a war zone out of a regular market, had ruined Delhi for him. He spent his childhood doing homework and pecking brutally at the keyboard. He had no desire to leave the house, to risk another encounter with a bomb, and when he did try to leave, to visit friends, to hang out with them at PVR and Priya (where the boys often got into A movies by showing the bemused lads in the ticket booths the hair on their legs as proof of age), his parents encouraged him to stay home. “Watch a movie here,” they said. “Invite your friends. Lamhe has such a good selection of LDs.” So he never left.
When he went to the U.S. and found himself suddenly alive, free of fear, he’d been enraged about all the time he’d wasted; angry at his parents in conspiring with the bomb to keep him indoors.
Encountering freedom for the first time, he threw himself into everything: he drank, smoked, partied, smoked up, even kissed a girl in the corner of a room during a party. He was amazed at how quickly the inhibitions he’d rehearsed over a lifetime—the belief, for example, that one shouldn’t have sex before marriage—fell away. He was like a snake overdue for shedding its skin. And with every inhibition he shed, he was angrier at his parents—parents who had first exposed him to the bomb instead of protecting him and had then punished him by keeping him indoors, where he learned and experienced nothing (in this new atmosphere of freedom, he forgot that much of his imprisonment was self-imposed, brought on by fear and panic attacks—he had been afraid of Delhi the way he later became afraid of typing, thinking that, just as Delhi might rip off his face in a sudden upwelling of fire, the machine might cripple him for life). He briefly stopped communicating with his parents. He led what he would later call a “dissipated life.” It was after a weekend of drinking that his wrists gave way.