“What do you mean?”
“We’re uneducated people, activists—no one listens to what we say.” He looked around the park, tearing dry grass from the tarmac. “Now—I don’t want to single you out, Mansoor bhai—but when I told you about visualization, you were skeptical, no? Your attitude was: Why should I try this out? Even though it was so easy. Don’t feel shy—that’s the normal reaction. The environment in which you’ve been brought up is of simple cause and effect. Pain means something is wrong with the body. QED. When some fool at an NGO tells you it’s related to your mind, why should you believe him, especially when the pain is real, when it seems to crush you? No—and now I’m not talking about you; I’m talking about myself—you’re insulted. How dare someone say your pain is in your mind! You’ll see—the more you tell people, the more they’ll cling to their old systems. People like you and me, we’re exceptions. We have flexible minds. We aren’t irrationally wedded to anything. We actually want to solve our pain. But most people are married to it and will attack you for questioning it.”
“We could write a book or start a site,” Mansoor said.
“The book’s been written—it’s called the Quran.”
There is an unnatural concentration that comes with being freed of pain after years, and Mansoor felt the world was finally clear to him. The NGO wanted the country to own up to what Modi had done in Gujarat: massacre scores of Muslims in public view, with the police standing by and watching, even helping, the rioters. But Indians couldn’t see anything. They were in the grip of materialism and individualism (he remembered what his father had told him about the Khuranas, the way they had lied about the reason Tushar and Nakul and he had gone to the market; how, even at this purest moment of grief, they could not shed their materialism). What was needed, he felt, was a revolution of values in the country, a retreat from Western materialism. People needed to be shown what religion could do for them in a practical way—how it could save them from depression, pain, meaninglessness, how it could connect them to a family beyond their small selfish nuclear units.
“That’s the type of site we need to start,” Mansoor told Ayub. “Something that connects old values with new problems.” He knew he sounded idealistic, but he suppressed his self-consciousness. “I know someone who can help with videos for the site,” he told Ayub, thinking, in that circular way of his, of Vikas Uncle.
CHAPTER 21
Ayub felt close to Mansoor too. When Mansoor had opened up to him about sex, he had been surprised and touched. After that he had started considering him a close friend.
They began to go for walks together in the parks of Delhi—Lodhi Garden, the Mehrauli complex; they even drove out one day to Coronation Park. Then one evening, in the park of Khan-I-Khana, with its powerful pocked tomb and its aura of a thousand bats, Ayub told Mansoor. “Tara and I. We have something special between us.” He felt shy and fumbled with a leaf in his hand. “We’ve been together for two years, before Peace For All.”
“I knew about it,” Mansoor said, smiling broadly.
“Oh, we were trying to hide it,” Ayub said.
Mansoor had noticed the tension between Ayub and Tara. They assiduously avoided each other during meetings and looked away when the other spoke. Mansoor felt happy for Ayub. Tara was a tall, sensible, brilliant woman with a comical face like a touched-up, feminized version of the principal in Archie comics. But this made her beauty accessible. Her smile gave her away as a sincere person—not one driven to the icy, egotistical, inhumane extremes of activism. Mansoor often stared at her during meetings—she was the only Hindu girl there, and the most cheerful and confident. “You would be good together,” he said.
For a while it seemed that Mansoor, with the newfound glow of religion, could be happy for anyone. Then negativity once again took his world hostage.
CHAPTER 22
Mansoor was sitting with Tara and Ayub at a dhaba in JNU, drinking cutting tea, when it started.
After Ayub had told him about Tara, the three of them had started going out together, eating pizza and burgers and lime ice at Nirula’s, savoring tea from Tara’s and Ayub’s favorite dhabas, and discussing their dreams.