“The association of small bombs,” as the Khuranas called it privately, was a support group and forum for the grievances of victims. It was also an alternative family for Deepa and Vikas, a group of individuals with whom they could converse freely, of which they were the matriarch and the patriarch. Not only were they the oldest members, but—besides one family in which three of five people had died (a mother had taken her two children out shopping to buy birthday gifts for the other sibling; all three were killed)—they had suffered the greatest loss. Sitting up together in drawing rooms, they dispensed advice on compensation and injuries and medical bills. Gill, meanwhile, dealt with the issue of the terrorists themselves, lobbying for the terrorists to be stripped of all rights. This put him in direct opposition to Tara and Ayub’s NGO. “You people support terrorism,” he’d shouted at Ayub some years before. “All the evidence is there—we need the trial to happen faster.”
The way the association was structured—dependent, in a way, on the inflow of victims—also made the Khuranas perversely eager for new bombings. Soon after they heard about the blast in Sarojini Nagar on TV, they headed to the hospital.
It was in the hospital, amid the chaos and stinking blistered bodies and nurses pushing trolleys full of IVs and bottles and news crews thuggishly infiltrating the wards, that Deepa and Vikas met Ayub, though they had no idea who he was. He lay in a bed with a patch over his left eye and legs tightened in bandages. The blast had caused lots of lower-extremity injuries, the doctor said, talking to the Khuranas, but this particular man had been spared the worst. Instead a piece of shrapnel had bounced up and penetrated his left eye; the bomb had been packed with industrial nails and ball bearings. “Many of these people,” he said, gesturing around the room, “have wounds that look like bullet holes.”
“Better to have lower-than upper-extremity injuries,” Vikas said.
The doctor looked at Vikas as if to say, “You know a lot,” but then, pointing to Ayub, went on, “He’ll be fine. If he had been closer he would have died instantly of an internal hemorrhage, so you’re lucky.” The Khuranas had pretended they were relatives of this boy on the bed. This was their usual ploy to get access to hospitals right after a blast.
What was it about such a morbid war zone that energized Vikas? Once, on a trip to France to screen a documentary at the Aix-en-Provence film festival, Vikas had peeled off and visited a chateau in the Loire Valley. Stony and hard skinned, the chateau consisted of two towers connected by a covered bridge that ran over a river. During the Great War, his guide had told him, the battling armies shared the bridge as a common hospital. Vikas had been stunned by the idea of wounded soldiers—who may have wounded each other—lying bed-to-bed in the same ward. What horrified him was the fact that injury, its violent horizontal stasis, revealed the complete artificiality of war.
He remembered seeing Tushar and Nakul in the morgue and thinking: They belong to a different class now. The class of the dead.
He had never lost his urge for classification—this tyrant’s urge for unity and separation. He knew everyone was different, yet he wanted them to be the same. Hence his obsession with death.
Vikas had always been obsessed with death. In his youth, it had taken the form of constant anxiety and brooding, and he had always been fascinated by Deepa’s star-crossed past, the way so many of her relatives had died young. And maybe he had taken satisfaction in the ruin of his own life, the way in which death had washed over him in an equalizing wave. Maybe if he had not thought so much, worried so much about death, it would not have come for him.
And yet, death could not get him now. Everything had been taken away from him. Even his wife, to a degree, was gone; he knew (vaguely) that he didn’t have her completely. He had made himself immune to the only disease without a cure.
CHAPTER 31
Mansoor heard about the blast the day it happened, but he didn’t learn that Ayub was among the injured till he saw his face a day later on TV—Ayub, swaddled in blankets, on a rusted bed, croaking a few words into the microphone, the groove above his nose deepening; then Vikas Uncle (of all people!) taking over the proceedings with his trademark fluency and rapid-fire way of speaking. “The government has promised compensation,” he said. “But so far no one has even visited these people in the hospital. Nor has the emergency protocol changed and improved—it took two hours for an ambulance to come to Sarojini Nagar and then too it was not equipped with the right emergency machines.”
“Mama,” Mansoor said, muting the TV.
“Yes, beta,” she said from the other room.
“Something very bad just happened.”