Soon after Mansoor’s visit, they approached K. R. Gill.
Gill, a sardar in his forties, was a former Youth Congress leader who had survived three separate car bombings by Khalistan separatists in the 1990s and now headed an association of terror victims. This group, which supposedly had fifty members, lobbied for terrorists to be hanged. Gill, who had a personal investment in the cause, was a towering, swaying figure full of undistinguished rage. He tilted about on artificial legs—both legs had been blown off in separate bombs—which he dismantled and brandished at the slightest provocation from a journalist or judge. He gave medals to victims and shamed politicians. He was theatrical, morbid, explosive, full of hot tears. He threatened suicide in court. The Khuranas had come across him when he made a vehement appeal before a Sessions judge for Malik to be hanged.
They had been frightened by him then, but now they reached out with an idea.
Gill, who had been looking to energize the drooping association, was happy to induct such well-spoken victims into his group. Vikas and Deepa began working with the victims of small bombings. “The deadliness of an attack should not be measured by its size,” Vikas told a news channel who interviewed him about the association. “In my estimation the small attacks are more deadly, because a few have to carry the burden of the majority. Then, as these victims’ grievances get forgotten, as the blasts themselves are forgotten, the victims of these small bombs turn against the government instead of the terrorists. Is that a situation we want? No. That’s why, along with Mr. Gill, we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands.”
The Khuranas now went to hospitals right after attacks. Vikas talked to victims and their families in the hospital, listening sympathetically, nodding on cue, his long neck bent down in respect and his large hands tenderly mashing the dense, comforting, youthful patches in his hair. Deepa, more unsentimental and direct, was better at knowing how to boss the nurses around, at noticing what exactly the doctors were overlooking as the patients lay bloodied and bandaged and dazed in the hospital. “Please bring him water,” she might shout at a nurse, taking the bridge of her nose between her fingers and stroking off the dust and sweat. Or, “For how many days has this sheet not been changed?”
Together, aged, having experienced so much, they cut warm, comforting, watchful figures in the hospitals. Often, they were observing not the victims but each other. How had they come from marriage to the death of their boys—to this? And yet, it gave them enormous solace to know that their suffering had not been for naught, that they had been able to eke a larger meaning out of it; they felt the closeness couples sometimes experience when they become rich after years of poverty, a mutual appreciation and gratefulness and wonder and an awareness of the depths of the other person—an awareness that is stronger than any affection or love.
These kinds of couples are at their best when they are silent together, letting the world do the talking; when the world ignores them, taking them wonderfully for granted, so that they are no longer an anomaly. This kind of love is shot through with the fire of long-vanquished sadness. Deepa and Vikas did not hold hands as they stood by the beds of victims, listening to the complaints of mothers, the women distraught beneath the head cover of their dupattas. But they may as well have been.
“Let me know if you need help with the association,” Mukesh said one day when he was sitting with Deepa, having tea. Many of their trysts amounted to nothing more than this; the illicitness of the meetings themselves was thrilling, with Deepa finding an excuse to send the servant on an errand to a distant market. “I’m sure I could get Naidu-ji to come.”
“No need,” she said.
It was the last time she saw him.
But not everything returned to normal. Anusha became neglected. Whereas she’d once been a bright, soliloquizing, self-contained child, hopping and leaping about the place in her looped black shoes, shaking her hips to Bollywood tunes that were frozen from the 1990s, when the boys were growing up (Deepa had kept all their tapes—Hum Aapke Hain Koun, DDLJ, etc.), she now found she had no audience. A knowledge of loss entered her face as her parents came and went, busy with work and the association. She began to grow up.
Later, when she was older, she would tell her friends that she understood how such people, outwardly sensitive, could neglect their children to the point that they would go to a market and blow themselves up.
CHAPTER 30