Ayub and Tara had been planning the rally for months, even before Mansoor had joined the NGO. To see it on the horizon excited them. Then, in March, it happened.
Ayub and Tara came to the roads near the India International Centre worked up and expectant—having not slept the previous night, having stayed up reading selections from Gandhi’s Autobiography, Ambedkar’s essays, the speeches of MLK and Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. “It’s so touching, the sense of empowerment Islam gave to all these colonial people, to slaves. America’s attempt to crush Islam is an attempt to destroy the self-esteem of the rising, conquered people,” Ayub had said. Tara had nodded her head in agreement.
Then, in the late morning, right before the rally began, Ayub faxed the police about the protest from the market near the site of the event; this was a loophole activists exploited. You were supposed to inform the police about any rally you held, but there was no statute on exactly when you told them, as long as it was before and in writing.
Doing it in person was too dangerous since the police would ask you to lead them to the rally.
Yet, when Ayub joined the crowd on the road—hundreds of men and women chanting and holding up signs—he found the police already there, battalions pouring forth from Gypsies and coming up to the protesters, asking them questions and gently herding them onto the sidewalk. “You can’t do that,” Ayub said. “It’s a nonviolent protest.”
“You shut up, you terrorist,” a policeman—younger than Ayub, livid with youth—said.
Ayub was wearing his skullcap.
Ayub made to attack him but a couple of older policemen, blasé in their interaction with the disaffected, pushed him aside.
“Arrest me,” Ayub said, holding out his wrists.
“You’re not worth an arrest,” a policeman with gray hair said, stepping out to shout at a pimply activist who started running at the bark from the policeman.
Then something terrible happened on that spring day. The crowd dispersed.
The next day when Tara and Ayub opened the paper, there wasn’t even a mention of the protest.
Tara and Ayub debated what had happened with the members of the NGO—all of them, including Mansoor, had attended the disappointing protest—and fell privately into despair. Ayub began to believe that nonviolence didn’t work. He’d had this feeling for a long time but had said nothing to Tara about it. In the NGO room, where they often met to kiss before meetings—they had still never made love—he scolded her. “I knew it wouldn’t work.”
“I didn’t personally tell people not to come,” she said bitterly.
“But we should have known.”
“You prepared for it too!”
Ayub went on ranting for a while—frothing, gesticulating, blaming Tara for her na?veté, for her earnestness—till he finally stopped. “I’m sorry.” He lived like this—in these explosions of passion. He was a passionate person.
Nevertheless, his loss of faith in nonviolence cut deep. He believed nonviolence suffered the fundamental problem of having no traffic with the media. The media reveled in sex and violence—how could nonviolence, with its graying temples and wise posture, match up?
Ayub tried to come up with alternatives—nonviolent spectacles, theater, protests—but all these needed participants and an audience.
He was not prepared when, a week later, Tara broke things off with him.
CHAPTER 24
Tara had become tired of Ayub, of his brilliance, his neediness, his delusions of grandeur; she felt she deserved more. In December of the previous year, in anticipation of an eventual breakup, she had secretly applied to Brandeis for a master’s in social work. When she was admitted soon after the failure of the rally, she confronted Ayub and told him she wanted to break up.
Ayub, when he heard what she had to say, stood up from the bed in the NGO room, his eyes livid. “How dare you, you bitch!” he frothed, full of his normal uncontrolled anger.
“It’s my life!” Tara said.
“How dare you!” He thought she was doing this because the rally had failed.
They calmed down after a while and made up, sitting on the bed together, cajoling each other, feverishly discussing whether Ayub could find a way to go to the U.S. too.
But then, suddenly, Tara said, “I don’t like your smell.”
Ayub looked on in cool shock. Tara’s fairness, then, on the bed, was frightening to Ayub—like porcelain, speaking of centuries of superb breeding, of Aryan excitement.
“Brandeis, applying, going abroad—these are all excuses to get away from you,” Tara said. “I like you, admire you, but—something isn’t right. I don’t like the smell of your breath,” she repeated, as if shocked with the truth of this, formulating it for herself.