Then, one day, Mansoor found himself back at Lajpat Nagar. He was dazed to be back. He hadn’t been to the market in years, had avoided it in that unself-aware way in which it is possible to sidestep any part of a city—that’s what cities are, devices to sidestep things—and now here he was, standing in the crush of tin and tarpaulin, everything smaller than he remembered it, also more modern: How many years had passed! He came across the framing shop, a small cube of glass, and could remember exactly where he’d been standing when the bomb went off, the earth-shattering stillness that followed, partly because he’d gone deaf and partly because everyone was in shock. He scanned the ground outside the shop instinctively for scars, cyclonic ditches left by the explosion. But there was no sign of the bomb in the market. Like all other tragedies, it had been covered up; the market had gone into a huddle of concrete and commerce around the blast, paving over the scars like a jungle coming back over a burnt field. Even the fence of the park had been repaired, painted an unrusting golden yellow. The only thing that had really changed about the market, apart from the natural modern face-lifts to the shops, was that cars—those chariots of misery and fire—had been banished from the square. Which was why, even as the square seemed smaller to Mansoor, it felt less dangerous. Men in white shirts and women in colorful clothes streamed past, but there was no physical threat from smashing marauding vehicles. A cow with rock-black eyes munched something in a corner, its horns rubbed down to nubs.
This was where it had started. The whole saga of his youth. Of course there was no saying another bomb couldn’t go off here—the official-looking security doorway at the entrance of the square was unmanned and people passed around it (the only people who went through were scrawny kids in shorts with nerdy haircuts, delighted, in the way of all kids, to pass through a cramped narrow space, so that life itself had the aspect of a game), and the crowds were as rude, random, and relaxed as before, everyone keeping track only of the space around him or her, no one carrying in his head the larger idea of the market or staying alert to the possibility that this whole theater of commerce might be ripped apart at any moment.
Mansoor’s heart tightened and his pulse raced. What are the odds that another bomb will go off on the one day I venture back into the market after years? he thought. Almost zero—but stranger things have happened. And who’s to say I’m not, in God’s mind, some horrible gate completing the circuit? He looked at the whirling willful crowds. Hold your nerve, he told himself. Believe in God. His eyes fastened on a mustachioed man with fair skin and a kara standing on the steps of his shop, his forehead smeared with an oily tilak. The man considered him without a clear expression—he was possibly looking through Mansoor. He was the proprietor of the chemist shop. On the day of the bombing, Mansoor imagined, the shop had been smashed to bits, the ceiling caving in, the medicines ground to a dust that rose and stood steady over the debris, the chemist with his wide nostrils inhaling the toxic mix of antibiotics—and here the chemist was now, standing on the steps, his face and body intact, but his eyes lost, as if the bomb were replaying somewhere in the back of his head or as if the inhaled chemicals had undone him for good. But there was another story there, Mansoor realized, over and under the destruction and any fear and suspicion the chemist may have felt as he looked out at the crowds from the stairs. The chemist had gone to work every day. The day after the bomb he would have been back at his rubbled shop, swathed in bandages, directing mazdoors and policemen or whoever was sent to help the shocked shopkeepers; he would have pointed to where his money was kept and where he thought they might find uncrushed medicines and the body of the shop boy who’d gone missing.
And after this, after the ordeal was behind him and the compensation (if any) had been spent and the shop was returned to a workable state—the shelves back on the walls even as the walls were grainy with black concrete, unpainted, the place looking unfinished—after this, he would have returned to his business and his spot behind the counter and peered out at the inferno of the market from his glass door. Unlike Mansoor, he had no way to escape the market or the bombing; he had to confront it day after day. He had to go to bed every night knowing his world had been destroyed and wake up knowing he must feel the opposite and go on.
How did he process this? How did he start day after day in the middle of the war zone that had almost claimed him? Did he flinch when he saw a young man drive up, when he saw a skullcap, or anyone young and dressed in heroish clothes standing by himself doing nothing? Yet he went on. He did not have the luxury of depression and injury that Mansoor had. And maybe by being in this same spot year after year he had cured himself the way Mansoor had cured himself of the pain that started up when he put his hands to a keyboard. Maybe the chemist’s eyes, vacant and distracted, were just the eyes of an ordinary shopkeeper taking a break from the commerce inside, his head still storming with sums and figures.
Mansoor thanked God and steadied himself and went home.
“The problem is no one listens,” said Ayub as they sat together in Lodhi Garden, enjoying the last days before summer started, burning the roadsides with yellow laburnums.