“I don’t want to kill innocents,” Ayub said. “I’m happy to kill people in the BJP, RSS, even the police.”
“We talked about this,” Tauqeer said. “Casualties can’t be avoided. If anything, it’s preferable. If you are worried about innocents, think about it this way—the fewer that die, the lonelier the victims are. It’s better for the event to be big, to affect many. People say 9/11 was the worst terror attack of all time—was it? I think the small bombs that we hear about all the time, that go off in unknown markets, killing five or six, are worse. They concentrate the pain on the lives of a few. Better to kill generously rather than stingily.”
The way he said it, without irony, was frightening. But there was also something idealistic about his flat exhortation—puffing his inhaler, he presented the image of a man who had thought things through and resigned himself to all of them. He had the unaffected, unshowy confidence of a young man who has dedicated himself to a difficult way of life. As a master terrorist, he no longer saw the strangeness of what he did or how he talked about killing.
Ayub became despairing. After spending a few days in Azamgarh, pretending to normalcy, visiting his parents for the last time after all, he headed to Delhi—the second time in six months he was making a journey to kill. He passed the tired stations with their tired paint and oozing pumps and acres of newsprint sold in stands, passed the charging boards, where men of all sizes and shapes plugged in their mobiles and sank onto their haunches, passed it all and felt: It’s up to God now. If God chooses to be absent from this hellish place, I understand. That’s the tragedy of Tauqeer, Rafiq, even me—we’re all fighting for a place long vacated by God, fighting to save hell.
What if I’ve died a long time ago and come here? he wondered. What if the defining characteristic of hell is that you’re locked in an endless, blind battle to reform it? He touched the dirty windows of the train compartment, pawing the yellow, urine-colored tinting to see if this was real. Yes, all tangible.
And what did that mean? Inside him, in a broth of blood and water, organs bumped softly, organically into one another, like fish in an aquarium. The train swayed. Who was to say there was anything more to you than this? A computer, a system of organs bumping blindly within a sloshing pool, the attached head only doing the slavish bidding of the body, like a periscope emerging from the depths and mistaking itself for a living thing. Ayub closed his eyes and tried to hear his own heartbeat. But it was lost too deep in there and the train mercilessly drowned whatever was left.
Refusing Mansoor’s offer to pick him up from Old Delhi Railway Station, he took an auto to South Ex. In the past he’d taken buses, but he had decided to treat himself. Dozing between the open sides of the auto, he took in the industrial drama of the city. Factories, gathered and arranged into smokestacks, sent frantic plumes into the air. The power plants by the dried riverbeds were frightening to think about—the monsoon water tugging at the roots of the wires. Ayub remembered how, in Azamgarh, his friends put the two ends of a broken transmission line into a pond to shock the fish to the surface. The slick, oily shaking creatures that emerged were like the long, cut-off, vanished fingers of people. . . . Back in Delhi, trains charged by in their armor of municipal soot, bestowing their warmth and whistles on the city. A shuttered flour mill made of dull unaging brick, gorgeously stenciled in some ancient serif, went by, curved and flattened by the arc of a flyover.
Azamgarh had had a flour mill once, the main source of employment, but it had closed down the year Ayub was born.
A guard at the gate of the fancy house in South Ex let him in. The house wasn’t big; it was palatial. He didn’t feel so bad anymore, putting these people through trouble.
After Ayub had formally met Mr. and Mrs. Ahmed, crossing his arms and bowing to them in a manner that made Mansoor embarrassed, the two friends ate lunch.