“It still sounds dangerous. We should tell my family friend.”
“If you tell them, it’ll only cause more drama. Believe me, the best situation is for me to go.” At that moment, stuffing the money into pajama pockets, Ayub smiled. In that smile Mansoor suddenly knew that Ayub had done it, that he’d planted the bomb.
Mansoor was thrown out of himself. His emotions and facial gestures got scrambled. He smiled and blinked and frowned and twitched; he didn’t seem to have control over his hands, which felt around his face as if for the first time, as if touching the face of a lover in the dark and discovering it is your enemy, or worse: a cold corpse, the corpse of a loved one. His stomach muscles cramped. The food he’d eaten earlier that day troubled the top of his throat.
Ayub stood up jauntily and put a friendly hand on Mansoor’s shoulder. “You’ll be OK.”
“Yes.” Mansoor smiled.
“Good. You go from the stairs,” Ayub said. “I’ll take the lift.” They walked out into the corridor in opposite directions.
But going down the stairwell, that pouring cuboid of negative space, the undersides of the zags of staircase above furiously black with beards of dust, Mansoor became worried. Everything swirled in the stairwell; a bat flew up, circling, wafting through the unmarked stories. Mansoor sweated, his heart beating weirdly.
When he came to the lobby he half-expected to see his father and Ayub chatting. But neither was there. His father, it turned out, was already in the car, getting lathered with the aftershave of air-conditioning; he had left Mansoor missed calls to join him in the car.
So Mansoor walked across the lot to the pale blue Honda City and got in.
His father was sitting in the back, scratching his stubble like a happy animal, playing “Yeh Shaam Mastani” on the stereo—his favorite song, partly because it was the only one he knew how to play on guitar; late in life, Sharif had developed a fixation that he ought to learn one musical instrument.
As the car started, Sharif unconsciously put his thick hand on his son’s—the hands were plastic and large, puffy, covered in ridges, fair. His fingers were so much fatter than Mansoor’s. He seems to be made of a different material from me, Mansoor thought.
But they did not talk the whole way home.
At home Mansoor was disoriented, unable to speak at dinner, which was illuminated by the faint light of the generator—the electricity had gone. “Poor boy, you’re tired,” his mother said. Mansoor, smiling sweetly and dumbly, neither agreed nor disagreed.
It was only in his room that night, in that palace of air-conditioning, that he began to shiver. The shivers were uncontrollable. His ribs hurt. His teeth clattered and sang and slid against each other, testy with enamel. His body was out of control. He got up and sat on the desk but his palm vibrated on the table like a mobile. “No,” he said out loud.
He thought of Ayub and wondered where he was now. But it was no concern of his. He was just Ayub’s friend. He had only come to see Ayub in the hospital. It was Ayub’s free choice to go wherever he wanted. This relaxed Mansoor. Then the shivering began again.
“Are we going to go today to see him?” his mother asked in the morning.
She was clearly enjoying this routine of spending time with her son.
“Let me call his room in the hospital and find out if he’s awake.”
“He’ll of course be awake. They wake you at six in the hospitals and they keep you up the whole day with checkups and plates of food. That’s what we’re being charged four thousand per day for.” Her generosity did not preclude harping.
Clutching his Nokia, Mansoor called the hospital. After an interminable wait, the receptionist came back to him and said, “He’s not there.”
“Oh?”
“He’s gone. There’s no one in that room. Has he checked out? We have a queue of patients.” He was surprised by her lack of concern.
“He’s left the hospital,” Mansoor told his mother.
She crinkled her expressive moon-shaped forehead in surprise. “Very strange.”
“He’s like that. I knew he would behave this way if you got him a room. He’s too self-respecting. It’s how he left after we offered him a job.”
“I only hope he gets better,” his mother said. “And his poor parents are coming also.”
Mansoor prayed that nothing had happened, that Ayub had not been caught, that all of this fell behind them.
Then, the unraveling began—but in the strangest way.
CHAPTER 32
For years, the Delhi police, as well as Khurana and Gill—first individually, then collaboratively—had been tracking Shockie. Three years after the 1996 blast, Malik had actually broken down and fingered Shockie, though he had returned quickly to a contrite silence.