Tara wanted to start a communal harmony institute, one in which common values would be shared and discussed. “There’s a big scope for that,” she said. “You can see people have a hunger to discuss these issues when you go to schools. But there isn’t any outlet for them.”
Ayub wanted to get into politics. “People like me need to take some initiative,” he said. “That’s why I left engineering. My whole family was in shock. Every day they send me messages through relatives trying to see that I’m not on drugs. They can’t fathom why someone like me would do something of this sort.” He grinned and pressed his hand for a second onto Tara’s palm, which was open limply on the table, as if this were an old joke between them. Tara, who was slumped forward on the table—she slumped when she was happy and at ease with people—smiled at him, a tiny candle of a smile, one that created intimacy in the crowded dhaba with its students debating Marxism and whatnot.
“So what do you want to do, Mansoor? Be an engineer?” Tara asked, looking across at him after that private moment.
“Me? Be an activist, I suppose,” he said. But he was gulping now, for reasons he couldn’t understand.
He noticed that Tara was pressing her other hand against Ayub’s under the dhaba table.
That’s when it started. It was as instantaneous as pain. It was jealousy.
He didn’t know why or how it took hold—but there it was, lurking powerfully. This relationship, Mansoor thought, it’s just Ayub’s way out of poverty, out of being lower-class. That’s why he’s in this NGO—to attach himself to this rich, idealistic girl.
As for Tara, she likes having power over these desperate Muslim men.
But Mansoor was thinking of himself. As the three of them had ventured out together, he had become more and more attracted to Tara. His blood jumped in her presence. Her perfume, her mysterious unfashionable waft of coconut, even her sweat—all this turned him on. All the old sexual obsessions returned. But he had no way to exorcize these thoughts now—wasn’t allowed to masturbate. At home, in his room, not masturbating took up all his time; it was almost as all-consuming as watching porn and masturbating.
He wanted to talk to Ayub about this struggle against sexual impulses but felt guilty that he was struggling over his girlfriend.
As the weeks went on, Mansoor’s struggle became solitary. Thoughts and images about sex, about undressed women, shot like arrows of flesh through his brain. Stop, he shouted, at home, down on the marble floor, praying. When he visualized the happy round of cricket with Tushar and Nakul in the park, a naked Elizabeth Hurley stalked onto the pitch, interrupting the game.
Please, God, Mansoor prayed. Are you testing me?
Then one day he lost control and masturbated and was filled with disgust and cursed himself: May your wrists go black!
But in this way, slowly, he fell into a trap of masturbation and self-hate.
So when he met Ayub and Tara a few days after the encounter at JNU—they were at Flavors now—and they told him excitedly that they were organizing one of the largest mass protests in Delhi’s history to interrupt Narendra Modi’s visit to the city, that they had corralled activists from all over the city, Mansoor could only nod grimly. He was a miserable, poisonous person, he felt, unworthy of God.
“We want to bring the city to a standstill,” Tara was saying. “If necessary, we want people to court arrest. You know what Gandhi said the Jews of Europe should do when faced with Hitler?”
“No,” Mansoor said, though he’d heard her say this a million times.
“Commit mass suicide,” Tara said, savoring the words with the intensity of someone who has obviously not considered it seriously. “Throw themselves from cliffs. Think of it. If the Jews were able to muster that kind of courage, the Holocaust would have never happened. We want to get to that level of nonviolence.”
“But doesn’t suicide count as violence?” Ayub asked rhetorically.
“You’re right. It does. But you’re allowed that kind of contradiction when you’re up against a completely unrepentant force.”
“I see,” Mansoor said, interrupting this public lovemaking of activists. “And what about the 1996 blast accused?” There had been a lull on that front. Mansoor and Ayub and Tara had written editorials together about the accused and mailed them to the Times of India, the Hindustan Times, and the Pioneer but had not heard back; the editors at these papers, it seemed, were not interested in the unique slant of a victim asking for a terrorist’s release.
“We’ll work on that after the rally,” Tara said in her direct, no-nonsense way.
“Everything OK with you, boss?” Ayub asked him when Tara had gone to the toilet.
“Of course,” he said, though he meant the opposite.
When Mansoor looked at himself in the mirror at home, he saw a dark, small, pathetic person, an ugly person, a person who shouldn’t have lived. He saw that these feelings had nothing to do with the bomb. This was who he was.
AYUB AZMI’S RESPONSE TO TERROR
MARCH 2003–OCTOBER 2003
CHAPTER 23