Cast out from Delhi, fleeing Azamgarh, rejected from bourgeois society, severed from the terrorist group—this is how Ayub felt in his hotel room with rats running up and down the corridor and drunk men in lungis lying near the entrance and making fun of whoever passed. Why is this my fate? Or is this too a sort of test? It occurred to Ayub that he had never really been alone—he always ran from one thing to the next. To be alone meant being alone with your thoughts, your consequences, your actions—it meant letting danger wash against your feet and holding steady on the beach of time even as the waves sucked the sand from under your toes. In the sordid room, centuries away from the palatial “den,” Ayub thought of that wonderful feeling of being on a beach, with the earth sliding and emptying beneath you, the soles of your feet caked with black cement-like sand. How he had loved the openness of the ocean the one time he had been to Bombay! It had rained the day before, so the ocean was overfull and boiling, but the sun came out and the beach, with its coconut and pav and chickpea vendors, steamed, and all of Bombay was ripe and bright as it sat around the ocean in a semicircle—he felt he could look through windows kilometers away. Such a shattering vista he’d never seen—the ocean bunched up and tilting and delivering boats toward the shore. He sweated profusely. He was a vain man and he was worried about whether his spray-on deodorant was working. Tara, at his side, made tracks on the beach with her clawlike feet. She had a waddling, confident way of walking. He loved putting his head in the cleft between her neck and shoulder and taking in her flat clean smell. They did touristy things—drinking sharifa milk shakes at the Haji Ali Juice Centre and then walking at low tide, past the curled-up medieval beggars, the touts selling religious books and trinkets, to the religious dome of Haji Ali. The path was slippery, beaten by waves. The shrine, like everything else, was under construction, wrapped in the fresh skeleton of a scaffolding, while behind it, on the low black wet rocks, people sat running their hands through the seawater.
His eyes were closed and he inhaled deeply on his hotel bed. He was lost in the movie of his past.
He read the papers the next day. No news of the “Indian Mujahideen,” which is what the group was called in the press. No news of arrests—when the police made even the slightest progress, they immediately gloated to their sidekicks in the media, subpar individuals who were thrilled, like all Indians, to be instructed and beloved by institutions, people who had lost the ability to think for themselves. It was the media he hated even more than the police, when he thought about it. The police the world over are ruthless, corrupt, brutal. He had read the biographies of Malcolm X and Martin Luther King. He knew what the blacks suffered in the U.S. But even there, in that unequal country, with its million injustices papered over by money, there had been a notable organ like the New York Times bearing witness, journalists who had written about Martin Luther King. What about here? How many times had Tara and he contacted some absent-looking, dead-eyed, dead-souled, half-listening journalist at a major newspaper, one of those people who nodded and took no notes and then shook his head and said, “But what’s the story?”
What’s the story? The story is that thousands of innocent Muslims are being killed in plain sight, that innocent Muslims are being harassed in America for a crime they didn’t commit, that innocent Iraqis going about their business now wake to hear American armored vehicles razing the sonic towers of the muezzin with their sirens while gangs of disaffected young men in office clothes shoot back from the alleys, reloading their AK-47s—and here is a group that has found a nonviolent way to address the problem of our times, that’s throwing aside partisan concerns and inviting activists of all castes and colors and creeds to march alongside it, a new movement on a par with the independence struggle.
What would Gandhi do if he were alive today? Ayub wondered. Would the press even notice him or would it quickly slink on to stories of starlets spreading their legs in hotels the minute a protest came to nothing? The future of the country is in the hands of the media. But the media is blind and thinks its future is in the hands of consumers, and so it gives them what they want—sex and violence. And that’s why, to punish all of them, to show them the end result of this strategy, I’ve come to plant a bomb.
That day he received an e-mail from Tauqeer, outlining the plan. “I’m sorry we were so delayed,” it went. “But we were solving logistics for the chocolate shipment. So it was best not to contact you.” Was I under watch? Ayub wondered. Was the man selling corn outside the Ahmeds’ house paid to see when I was coming and going? Did I pass their test?