“I want to be there for her,” Deepa said, eyes pouring toward some faraway spot.
Over the years Deepa had started to blame herself for the boys’ visit to the market. If she had been present, if she hadn’t been so dead set on making up the shortfall in the family income by furiously baking, if she had known to intervene when her husband, lazing around, doing nothing, had nevertheless sent them all away in an auto on an obvious suicide mission . . . if she had asserted herself. “What are you doing that’s so important that you can’t take them?” she imagined saying to Vikas. She often shouted it out loud as she walked about the house on her increasingly troubled knees, hobbling quickly.
But it didn’t matter what she said to her husband, now or then. He continued to slip further and further into his dream of self-abnegation that predated even the boys’ deaths.
For a man who had dedicated his life to seeing, he noticed very little. What he was really good at was getting people to talk, but that was within the square jail of his camera lens.
She was alone with Anusha, always had been, so one day in 2002, when Vikas said they should invite Mansoor over for tea, that Mansoor had had a relapse of his bomb injury and was back in India, she said yes—what choice did she have?
This was before the association, before the Sarojini Nagar blast. But seeing Mansoor in their drawing room—young, able-bodied, grown-up, handsome, thin, holding out his wrists, his stormy eyebrows like two thoughts disagreeing with each other—freed something in both of them. After years, they began to talk to each other again. They remembered stray things about the boys—the way Tushar, the morning of the blast, had come into the bedroom soon after Deepa and Vikas had made love, looking hurt and surprised, unsure what had happened, but putting his hands on his hips in a school-ma’amish manner, intuiting something.
They remembered the high-pitched sound, like the Dopplering whistle of a train, that Nakul made during his imaginary cricket commentary as he ran back and forth in the bedroom, awaiting Mansoor’s visit—Mansoor’s visit, which the Khurana boys were always so excited about, as if having two of them wasn’t enough. But introducing a stranger always altered things, threw you into a new mood, forced you out of yourself, your small battles and jealousies; a new person signaled play. Tushar and Nakul were always their shiny boyish best around Mansoor. They had probably taken him to the market out of love and enthusiasm.
For the first time, the Khuranas found themselves forgiving the boys themselves. They had not known till now that the boys had needed to be forgiven.
But the boys had ruined their lives. The boys, not the bomb, had been their killers.
A booming cord of light fell over their necks as they sat in the drawing room. They were together again. They hugged and held each other.
The next day Deepa told Mukesh she wanted to end the affair. He looked at her sadly, his gray eyelids like two slow sloping slugs, mollusks with their own squirming life. Then he rolled the buttons through the buttonholes of his shirt and left.
A day later, he was back.
Deepa knew she must end it but was also addicted to it—to the numb pleasure, the dark routine, the certainty of his devotion; it had given her life, a feeling of independence from the domestic sphere. She had a secret. She stalked about the house powerfully now, not doting excessively on Anusha as she had before. She was a person again. Vikas was a befuddled aspect of her life, a sick branch that barely held on. They began to discuss ways they could memorialize the boys.
Soon after 9/11 and the Parliament attack, the Khuranas had been visited by a journalist eager for their opinion about America’s response to 9/11 and how they felt about the 1996 trial, which was still lapsing through the courts. Deepa and Vikas had tried to be objective but ended up frothing. “They should kill everyone in the Taliban,” Deepa had said, sitting under two garlanded portraits of Tushar and Nakul. “Every single one.” Vikas had added, “When we see what is happening in the West, we are glad. We are glad George Bush is going after terrorists. It should be a lesson to our country. We’ve been passive people too long. But this passivity and ignorance doesn’t work before terrorism.”
Afterwards, they were shocked at themselves. They were no longer liberals.