Mansoor’s mind was aswirl. He was on the verge of something great, of something new, and his entire worldview had been blotted out. He saw now that his selfishness stretched all the way back to the bomb: how holding on to fear, not facing up to the panic attacks, was a form of selfishness, of thinking your fate was in your hands, when in fact it was all up to the Almighty. If his family had believed in God, they would have continued as they had before the blast. Instead, they’d been visited by a string of holy men—gaunt, bent men with silver stubble and bronze lockets and bright eyes and patrician faces who asked him to bend beside them as they offered prayers, who greedily drank the cold coffee and mirchi toast his mother offered. . . . Yes, the family had been eager to thank God, but not to trust Him. The bomb had induced in the family a kind of hypochondria. They saw the bomb everywhere they went. It was not God they worshipped, but the bomb.
As these revelations crowded him on his bed, Mansoor felt a tug of regret in his chest.
He paved over this feeling by attacking books on religion eagerly (the same eagerness with which he’d devoured The Fountainhead on the steps of the plaza at his university) and saw within them a template for how to live, the point of obscure customs like keeping women modest and veiled—it was not to oppress women, he saw, but to reduce the sum of lust in society. Ever since he’d come back to Delhi from California, he’d thought of sex less, because he saw less flesh on the street. Thus, if there were no lascivious hoardings and cutouts of lingerie models in Delhi Times and on FTV, one would think of sex even less.
As he made these observations, he felt the centuries between him and Mohammed collapsing and had the distinct sense that the words and wisdom passed down through the Quran and the Hadiths and al-Tabari were meant for someone of his disposition and body type. As for God himself, He was a universal blank, a lack of ego, a way of accepting and admitting that you were a small person, that your problems were small, that you should care about things bigger than yourself.
Going deeper into learning about Islam, Mansoor could see how a crisis of values was afoot not only in the Western world but in India, which had become a lapdog of the West, eager to imbibe its worst ideas while ditching its best ones. This crisis was most evident on TV, with its profusion of sex (probably where his own sex obsession had started, he thought); in the rapid construction of malls; in the increased incidence of divorce and suicide and rape and depression; most of all, in the profusion of health problems and clinics catering to them.
I’ve embodied these problems, he thought. I came from a background without God. I had nothing to keep me from imbibing, without discrimination, everything that gave me pleasure. I fell for the false prophet Ayn Rand. But then I got lucky. At my lowest, when I could find no way to go on, I met Ayub and found God.