Ayub looked out of the window. From the room he could see an alley, and beyond, a backyard festooned with clotheslines. In the alley, a car had broken down between two flowing gutters. Beneath it, a runway of needles, discarded by the hospital, glistened in the sunshine, the garbage ponderously overflowing, everything protected by the rusty, aggressive fragrance of the air conditioner, in whose lungs the krill of pollution stuck.
Ayub’s heart got mixed up with the freezing waves of the air conditioner. A few days later, he left Delhi and returned to his hometown, Azamgarh.
When Mansoor heard of Ayub’s departure, he was shocked. “Where did you go?” he SMSed Ayub.
“Decided to start a job as an area salesman for Eveready,” Ayub SMSed back. “KEEP THE FIGHT ALIVE.”
Area salesman? For a battery company? What about Tara?
Tara was not helpful either. “Oh, that’s what he said? I think he’s gone to visit his father, who’s ill.” She threw her hair back and laughed her rich, upper-class tinkling laugh. “He’s so eccentric.”
CHAPTER 25
Ayub started working in his father’s “organick” nursery in Azamgarh, digging up turnips and potatoes under the hot UP sun.
He’d come very far, in a sense. Starting from a lower-middle-class Muslim family in UP he’d made his way to Delhi and established himself with his wit and charm and intelligence. Like Mansoor, he’d dealt with pain—the pain of separation, of being out of one’s depth, fearing one’s mortality—but had cured himself. (Unlike Mansoor, he hadn’t had the luxury of physiotherapy.) But he saw now that freedom from pain was a kind of sentence too—your mind, free to cast about in any direction, latched on to every outcome, every path, every regret. Whereas pain was focusing and drew you into yourself. It cut off options.
Sometimes, working on his father’s farm, Ayub tightened his neck, wishing the pain would return. It didn’t. He’d made himself too sturdy through religion and exercise. But his mind began to flower outward, became crowded with mirages. Tara stood knee-deep in a field of wheat, a few meters beyond him, hunched over and ready and sly, her eyes blinking and the soft, sensual braid tossed over her shoulder. A rumble in the distance made him glance up and he thought he saw an airplane flaming overhead, but it was just a trigger of sunlight. At night, in bed, he dreamed of school bullies and friends who had let him down out of jealousy when he’d had a little success in college as a festival organizer. A mild person, he’d always gone out of his way to put others at ease, to not threaten them with his intelligence. Now he regretted it.
He kept endlessly revising the day of the rally, his conversation with Tara, the swiftness with which everything had fallen apart.
Why hadn’t he said more when she’d broken up with him? But there was a part of him that was addicted to defeat. Even as he’d received the stabbing message from Tara, that part of him had swelled with brilliance and promise and negative fulfillment.
Ayub dug holes and toiled under the sun.
“We can show you a girl,” his mother said.
His mind was coming unmoored. The field, with its hideous infinity of dirt packed into a few acres, didn’t help.
He could have boarded a train and gone back, but he had no money and no real way of making any; his work with the Muslim community had taught him how difficult it was for educated Muslims to get jobs or even housing and this paranoia infected every future he could imagine for himself in Delhi. And the more he thought about money, the more he regretted how things had turned out with Tara—not only had they got along, but she had paid him a salary. “To hear you talk,” she’d once laughed. He was irritated by this comment, but once he began to speak, his self-consciousness fell away and he looked at her with unembarrassed frankness. “So what if I love to talk! I’m good at it.”
But there was also anger in him about how well she knew him, and he would be turned on and would wish to make love to her.
Of course, this never happened. Tara always stopped him—for religious reasons—and he couldn’t refuse. Nevertheless, it frustrated him. He had a tremendous sexual drive and he sometimes thought he should have been allowed, by God, to break the rules—for the sake of revolution, for India. Instead he proposed marriage.
“You know I’m engaged, right?” she told him.
“What?”
“I’m only joking,” she said. And they held hands and she said nothing and this had been a kind of promise.
Months passed. The possibility of returning grew bleaker and bleaker. He saw that his life was over, his happiest moments were behind him, and that he had lived those moments unthinkingly, so consumed and fired by thoughts of the future he hadn’t even been aware of how happy he was.
Then one day he heard from Mansoor that Tara had left for the U.S.
That day he went to meet Zunaid.
Zunaid was a local fixer and thug, known to have ties with gangs, and Ayub came up to him in an alley late at night. In the distance, a Maruti van lay twisted in an open sewer trying to rev itself out. Two men helped push the awkward cockroach of a vehicle.