Karan Mahajan's ambitious second novel The Association of Small Bombs, out tomorrow, has been getting rave reviews all over the place. The New York Times called it "smart, devastating, unpredictable," and the Wall Street Journal deemed it "brilliant, troubling." (VICE describes it as "darkly incisive.") In this excerpt from the book, a young bomb maker named Shockie receives the order to carry out a bombing in New Delhi. And so begins his journey from a shabby, unadorned flat in Nepal, where he's been living in exile, to the crowded Indian marketplace where his bloody mission will be completed.
Photo by Molly Winters. Courtesy of Penguin Random House
Shockie
Soon after Shaukat "Shockie" Guru received the
order to carry out the blast, he went to his alley and washed his face under
the open tap outside the building. Then he entered his room and sat on the bed,
brooding. The room was small, foggy with dust, ripe with the
smell of chemical reagents (there had been construction recently in the alley),
poorly painted. The sole decoration was a poster of a slick-bellied Urmila
Matondkar from
Rangeela. Two charpais lay separated by a moat of
terrazzo. The mattress under him was thin. He felt the coir through the clotted
cotton.
After a while, he went back into the alley, where
afternoon was announcing itself in the form of clothes hung out to dry between
buildings and the particular yawning honking that comes from cars when the sun
is high overhead, dwarfing human activity, and he went to the public call office and called
home. It was his ritual to call home before setting out on a mission. His
mother thought he was a student in Kathmandu—at least she made him believe she
thought that—and he wanted to give her an opportunity to save him. She is the
only one who has the right to decide whether I live or die, he often thought
when he smelled milk boiling in the shops—yes, that was the smell he associated
with his mother and with Kathmandu. It gave Kathmandu a sweet, plasticky
flavor. Of all natural substances, milk has the most artificial smell.
Shockie was the leading bomb maker of the Jammu and
Kashmir Islamic Force, which operated out of exile in Nepal. An
avuncular-looking man of 26, he had catlike green eyes, wet lips, and curly
hair already balding on the vast egg of his head. His arms were fat rods under
his kurta. In the past four years, he had killed dozens of Indians in revenge
for the military oppression in Kashmir, expanding the JKIF's "theater of
violence," as the newspapers called it.
Now he pushed the receiver close to his ear in the
PCO booth. Deep in a crater of silence on the other side of the Himalayas, the
phone rang. The phone was a drill seeking out life. "You're sick," he imagined
saying to his mother. "Should I come?"
His mother had been a presswali her entire life,
and she had developed a tumor in her stomach after years of exposure to the hot
coals in the heavy, radiant, red-jawed iron, an iron that was shaped like a
medieval torture device, something you might want to trap a head in. No one had
been able to cure her. And yet she always refused his offer. This time, the
phone wasn't even picked up (it wasn't her phone—it belonged to Shockie's
cousin, Javed, who lived a few minutes from his mother in Anantnag, in
Kashmir). Sweat distorted the air before Shockie's eyes in the suffocating
cabin of the PCO, with its thrum of phone voices. Back in his room, he asked
his friend and roommate, Malik, "Should I not go?"
Malik—a slow, deliberate, hassled man at the best
of times, the sort who seems to be exhaling deeply against the troubles of the
world—said, "You're making excuses." He was sitting curled up on his charpai.
"I fear that she's back to work again. My brother
is ruthless and callous. He never did anything growing up, and he's used to
being taken care of, and she likes taking care of people." He spat. "Do you
think this is a wise mission?"
"Not wiser or unwiser than anything else."
"This is the first time Javed hasn't picked up,"
Shockie said, unzipping his fake Adidas cricket kit bag.
Every respectable revolutionary needs a few changes of clothes, and Shockie, on his knees in his shabby room, folded two shirts and a pair of black pants into the kit bag.
A journey to Delhi to plant a bomb did not require
much, at least in the way of equipment. Most of the stuff you needed you bought
there. That way no one could trace you to your source. You destroy a city with
the material it conveniently provides. But every respectable revolutionary
needs a few changes of clothes, and Shockie, on his knees in his shabby room,
folded two shirts and a pair of black pants into the kit bag. On the journey,
he knew, he would have to dress in pajamas and a kurta—brown rags. He was
supposed to be a farmer attending an agro-conference near Azamgarh, in Uttar
Pradesh.
These agro-conferences were among the most fascinating
things about India. They happened several times a year, in far-flung parts of
the country. Tinkerers and crackpots showed up, hawking inventions to solve
irrigation problems and plowing "inefficiencies." A good number claimed to have
invented perpetual motion machines (Shockie remembered a machine shaped like a
calf with a swinging leg). The farmers, dismissed by urban Indians as bumpkins,
roamed in gangs, examining the machines, discussing the finer points with the
inventors. They were the audience for these raucous fairs held under tents in
eroded Indian fields. The farmers were uniformly suspicious. They were taken in
by nothing. Shockie—who had attended a fair to buy pipes for a large new bomb
the group was building, as well as to purchase gunny sacks of ammonium nitrate
and other fertilizer—was impressed. When he heard another one was happening in
UP, he decided to disguise himself as a farmer in tribute. After stuffing a few
old farmers' newspapers in his kit bag, Shockie patted his hair into place, as
if it needed to be coaxed into traveling with him.
The next day, with Meraj, another agent, he left by
bus for the Indo-Nepal border at Sunauli.
Meraj and he were both in tattered kurtas. The bus,
rattling over bad roads, usually took eight hours to Sunauli. Today it took
almost ten. The landscape, a wild scrawl of reddish terraces and gushing
private rivers, came right up to the bus, nearly shattering it. The dug-up road
heralded the air with red dust. Plants with plastic bags over their heads crossed
their leaves in surrender. A baby in the back screamed the entire way. Shockie
and Meraj shifted on their shared seat, trying to apply enough pressure to keep
Nepalis from sitting next to them.
When Meraj, an absent-looking fellow with a
disarmingly stupid face you could consider capable of nothing dangerous, picked
dandruff off his hair and sniffed his fingers, Shockie said, "Don't do that."
"OK," he said, smiling nervously. But he had
obviously not understood Shockie's command and soon smelled his fingers again.
"That," Shockie said.
"We're farmers. We told you," Shockie said quietly. "But you're of the terrorist religion, no?" the policeman said. "I've lived among you bastards, and you're all Pakistanis."
At the border in Sunauli, a town reveling in its
own filth, the policeman in the Indian immigration hut gazed at them for far
too long. Shockie and Meraj remained impassive, but when they were halfway out,
the policeman suddenly shouted after them. "You're meat eaters?"
"We're farmers," Shockie said quietly. "We told you."
"But you're of the terrorist religion, no?" the
policeman said. A dandy, his mustache was trimmed to the same depth as his
eyebrows. "I've lived among you bastards, and you're all Pakistanis. Now go."
Shockie and Meraj walked quickly to the Indian
side, disappearing into a crowd of truck drivers. When they came across a small
dhaba selling sandwiches wrapped in plastic, with a grassy patch in the back, they
collapsed on the ground, breathing heavily. Meraj counted out money for ketchup
sandwiches, but kept fumbling the notes.
Suddenly, Shockie burst out, "How much did they
give you?"
"Two thousand," Meraj said.
"Two thousand." Shockie shook his head.
"You think it's enough?"
Meraj kept smiling—but it was a vacant, expectant
smile. "It's not bad."
"Nonsense," Shockie said. "Do you know how much Abdul
makes at the shop alone?" Abdul was the leader of the group, a 30-year-old who
ran a carpet shop and also taught in the local school.
"Fifty thousand,"
Shockie said.
"Where, yaar?"
"I've seen it with my own eyes. And that's on top
of the dana we're getting from Karachi." Dana was counterfeit money. The Jammu
and Kashmir Islamic Force prided itself on being composed entirely of native
Indian Kashmiris, but received funding from NGOs run by the ISI, Pakistan's
intelligence agency.
"But why share it with us?" Shockie said. "We're little
people. We're only making chocolate."
"Making chocolate," the code for bomb-making.
"You know how in restaurants they have a mundu who helps the cook? That's the
amount of respect we get. We're
servants." He snapped a Kit Kat they'd
bought from the dhaba. "Listen to how it snaps. What a delicate sound. It
sounds like
money. They probably spent more for this one chocolate, in
setting up the factory, than they give
us for one chocolate." He put a
piece in his mouth.
Meraj watched.
Shockie said, "These small
chocolates will achieve nothing."
Meraj shook his head absently.
"You're
listening?" Shockie said. "Fuck it. It's useless talking to you."
This was not
the best attitude to have, since they were soon on a five-hour bus to
Gorakhpur, in India. A diesel-perfumed monster, its seats appeared ready to
come loose from their moorings on the metal floor. Shockie looked out angrily
at the landscape as Meraj drenched his shoulder with drool. How had this arid,
dusty, ruthless part of the world become his life? Fighting for Kashmiri
independence, he hadn't seen Kashmir in two years; he was an exile, and in
those two years, he feared (with the unreasonable worry of all exiles) that
Kashmir would have changed. What if it had become like
this after all
the warfare? What if the green had been exhausted and the placid mirror of Dal
Lake had been smashed, revealing layers of dead bodies and desert that lay on
the lake bed?
When he'd been growing up in the late 80s and early
90s, he was convinced that the bottom of the lake was choked with bodies, that
each taut stem of lotus or water hyacinth tugged at the neck of a drowned
person like a noose. Sometimes his friends and he boarded a shikara and went
trawling, running their hands through the water, jumping back if they touched
something, or if they saw a small drop of red floating by.
When Shockie looked out of the window again, it was
evening. It occurred to him through his sleep that maybe even Uttar Pradesh had
once been as pretty as Kashmir—only to be despoiled by wars and invasions.
Gorakhpur is one of the armpits of the universe.
The best thing that can be said about it is that it is better than Azamgarh,
which, along with Moradabad, competes in an imaginary inverse beauty pageant for the title
of the world's ugliest town.
Shockie and Meraj disembarked and checked in at their usual hotel—a half-finished concrete building that had once been a godown
and was crowned with rooms in a gallery on the first floor and now called Das
Palace. (Though
they called it Udaas Palace—Sad Palace.)
The room was even more awful than the ones they
were assigned in Kathmandu. Mosquitoes swarmed through the gaps in the
doorframe—the door did not fit properly. Meraj, alert after his nap on the
bus, smeared his body with Odomos. "There's Japanese encephalitis here," he
said, offering the tube to Shockie and savoring the name of the disease: He had
once been a compounder.
Shockie accepted moodily. Alexander the Great had
died from a mosquito bite, from malaria, he knew.
In the morning, when they had drunk tea served by
the hunchback, the only apparent employee of the hotel, they went to visit the
Jain.
The Jain sat on a cushion in an impeccable house,
impeccable only on the inside, of course: Outside was a heap of roiling,
shifting garbage, a heap that seemed a living thing with rats burrowing through
it—swimming, really, floating in an unreal paradise of gnawables with pigs
pushing aside layers of plastic and rotten trembling fruit with their snouts.
But the Jain's house, built like a Gujarati kothi,
was oblivious to all this. The Jain was a boulder of a man with smooth
coal-colored skin and a bald head offset by two equal tufts of hair. His nose
was a beautiful chorus of tiny pores. He had large dark hands, whitish on the
inside. He sat on his knees on a cushion in a white kurta, the rock of his
paunch balanced before him.
"I had orchiopexy, you see—you know what that is?"
he started. "When one of your testes doesn't descend." He must have been 29, 30.
No one in this world was very old. "For years, I had lots of pain, and though I
was strong, I couldn't run without losing my breath and getting a sharp pain in
my torso. I used to always wonder why." The servant set down three earthen cups
of tea; the Jain accepted his cup daintily in his large hands. "Now that I've
had surgery I have all this energy. I can run five kilometers without
stopping."
Where does the poor fellow run in this dump?
Shockie wondered. But ideas of health, Western ideas, were spreading
everywhere. Shockie himself was obsessed with exercise, with hanging from a rod
in his doorway.
"Anyway," the Jain said, putting his large hands on
his thighs, thighs the size of cricket bats, "I overdid it, so I have been
advised to rest. Hence this cushion under me."
A fan turned overhead, raising a delicious current
from the layers of sleeping air. It was dark in the drawing room, a welcome
respite from the May heat of Gorakhpur.
The servant brought a VIP suitcase with a numbered
lock, and the Jain twisted it open on his lap. "Count it," he said.
Meraj and Shockie each took a bundle in their hands
and petaled the notes. Shockie was sleepy and slightly delirious; the room had
a fan but not much air, and the smell of fresh money made him high. He kept
losing count only to realize he'd been thinking of nothing, or rather, thinking
of himself thinking.
When they had finally accounted for all the money,
they dumped it into their kit bag and went off.
"You see what I was saying?" Shockie said, as they
waited on the railway platform for the train to Delhi. "What we get is just a
tip."
The money was not for them. It was to be dropped
off with an agent in Delhi, part of a hawala money-laundering operation that
sustained the group.
"But this is also for chocolate," Meraj said,
speaking with the dazed clarity that comes to people in extreme heat.
"Just like that, it's for chocolate? If they have
so many funds, why do you think they still bother to send us on such a long
journey? Use your brain for once, Meru."
The train from Gorakhpur to Delhi could take
anywhere from 15 to 30 hours, depending on the mood of the driver, the state of
the tracks, accidents, and random occurrences. Meraj and Shockie settled into a
third-class non-A/C sleeper compartment. Shockie was in a tired, despairing mood.
He always got this way before action. It was like an advance mourning for his
life. The vibrating bunks, stacked three to a wall; the mournful synthetic
covers of the bunks, torn in places and looking smashed, with the webbed look
of smashed things; the racing wheels underneath, like ladders of vertebrae
being whipped; the sense of abject stinking wetness surrounding a train's
journey through the universe—all these things filled Shockie with futility. The
bogey was a jail cell ferrying him to a destiny he did not desire, his jaw on
edge like the stiff end of his mother's iron.
Bougainvillea bloomed insanely here and there in
the landscape.
Meraj kept waking up and falling asleep on the bunk
across (they both had top bunks), and Shockie considered him with pity,
surprise, even tenderness: People were closest to animals when they were
sleeping and fighting for wakefulness. Or dying and fighting for life. What is
Meraj dreaming about? he wondered. Probably the same thing as me—his own death—only
through the obfuscating membrane of sleep. Meraj had been pulled out of a
chemist's and beaten and tortured by the Jammu and Kashmir police a few years
before.
At desolate stations in the depths of the
subcontinent, Shockie got out and smoked, observing the blight of mildew on the
walls, kicking away the twisted, disabled beggars who crowded around his feet
cawing about their Hindu gods.
At the Old Delhi Railway Station, 20 hours after
they had set out from Gorakhpur, an agent met them. The agent was a tall,
hippy, pimply, nervous fellow in tight black new jeans. Shockie disliked him
immediately. He had the slick, proprietary attitude that small men from big
cities sometimes bring toward big men from small cities. He lorded everything
over them. He didn't help them with their cricket kit bags. He asked them if
they had ever been to Delhi before.
"Yes, hero," Shockie said, setting his emotional
lips in a smirk.
"Let's go in different directions and meet at the
car. It's parked behind," the agent, whose name was Taukir, said.
"Why do you want to do that?" Shockie said.
"You never know about the police these days."
"No," Shockie said. "What's safer is that we go
together."
The key to not being caught, Shockie knew, was to behave
confidently.
They walked through the annihilating crowds to the car. From the
high steel roofs of the station, birds raced down, avoiding a jungle gym of
rafters and rods. People pressed and pushed as the trains hurtled through their
routes of shit and piss, plastic and rubber burning weirdly in the background,
spicing the air. The station was so bloated with people that the loss of a few
would hardly be tragic or even important.
When a Sikh auntie leading a coolie into a maroon
train jostled Shockie, Shockie shouted, "Hey!"
"Move!" the woman shrieked at him.
"You move, you
witch."
And with that, she was gone, swallowed up by the dark maw of the train.
Invigorated, he lit a cigarette, broadening his shoulders as he brought the
light to the Gold Flake hanging from his lips. He had always enjoyed the
rudeness of Delhi.
A few minutes later, in Taukir's Maruti 800,
Shockie gripped the plastic handrest above the window and looked out.
Delhi—baked in exquisite concrete shapes—rose, cracked, spread out. It made no
sense—the endlessness, the expanse. In Kashmir, no matter how confusing a town
was, you could always shrink it down to size by looking at it from a hill.
Delhi—flat, burning, mixed-up, smashed together from pieces of tin and
tarpaulin, spreading on the arid plains of the north—offered no respite from
itself. Delhi never ended. The houses along the road were like that too: jammed
together, the balconies cramped with cycles, boxes, brooms, pots, clotheslines,
buckets, the city minutely recreating itself down to the smallest cell. From
one balcony, a boy with a runny nose waved to another. A woman with big haunches
sat astride a stool next to a parked scooter; she was peeling onions into a
steel plate and laughing. Before municipal walls painted with pictures of
weapon-toting gods—meant to keep men from urinating—men urinated. Delhi. Fuck.
I love it too.
Taukir lived with two spinsterish sisters and a
mother whose eyes were dreamy with cataracts. The ladies served a hot lunch of
watery daal and tinda and ghia, but Shockie was so excited he could barely eat.
"No, no, bas," he said, whenever the younger of the sisters, not unattractive,
gave him a phulka. The man and his house seemed very modern, with many cheap
clocks adorning the walls; you had a sense that whatever money the family had
earned had been spent on clothes.
"When can we go to buy the materials for the
chocolate?" Shockie asked Taukir.
Shockie wasn't sure how much the sisters knew; he
felt proud and confident nevertheless, puffed up like the phulka he set about
tearing on his steel plate.
Taukir provided several ideas for where they could
go.
"Chawri Bazaar is better than all those," Shockie said.
After wiping his
mouth with a towel, he signaled to Meraj, and they went out to buy materials.
A
car bomb is made by putting together a 9V battery, an LPG cylinder, a clock, a
transformer, a mining detonator, and four meters of wire—red and yellow, to
distinguish circuits. The cylinder is then put in the dicky, while the wiring
and the timer are packed in the bonnet.
When bomb makers met one another, they inevitably looked at one another's hands.
The clock was easy to buy—they got it from a shop
in Chandni Chowk, the Red Fort a merciless mirage in the distance. The 9V
battery they acquired from an electrician's shop in Jangpura, where an old
Punjabi man sat among sooty tables taking paternal pride in every piece of
equipment. Shockie understood the fellow. He himself took a certain sensual,
even feminine, pleasure in shopping for materials for a bomb; he might have
been a man out to buy wedding fixtures for his beloved sister. But he had to
keep his instinct for haggling and jolliness to a minimum. You had to make as
little an impression as possible, and it was crucial to get material of the
highest possible quality for the lowest possible price. You did not want your
bomb to go
phut when the day came—something that happened all the time,
even to the best bomb makers. It had certainly happened to Shockie. One of his
bombs had fizzled and let out a small burp of fire. This was in a market in
Jaipur. He ran away before being caught, but two of his fingers were burned and
had to be chopped off at the ends. He lost some feeling in his hand too, but it
was for the best. It marked him as serious. When bomb makers met one another,
they inevitably looked at one another's hands.
Taukir came along with them on these excursions,
looking alternately keen-eyed and lanky and then despondent and distracted, one
arm looped behind his back and clutching the other hand in that lackadaisical,
half-stand-at-ease, half-chastised posture that is the hallmark of bored people
at rest.
They shopped in a conspicuous group of three
because the Indian police often prosecuted terrorists on circumstantial
evidence, trying to damn them with statements like, "Why was he shopping alone
with a shawl pulled over his face?" Thus, the revolutionaries reasoned, if you
had three people carrying out a task meant for one, you defeated the police's
logic with your illogic.
After two days of shopping in different parts of
Delhi and arranging the materials on the floor of a room in Taukir's house—a
room that obviously belonged to the sisters and mother, who had been sent away
to the village the day after Shockie and Meraj arrived—Shockie said, "Now,
let's see the car. It's still parked outside?"
Taukir let out a noncommittal sound.
"You've parked it somewhere else?" Shockie
repeated, getting up from his chair and smoothing his curly hair, an unnatural
motion for a man who liked the puffs and curls of his plumage.
"Ji, sir, that's my car," Taukir said, finding his
voice.
"And where's the car for us?" Shockie said.
"Well, we have to steal
it."
"I see," Shockie said. "Let me go steal it now."
Before Taukir could
react, Shockie was up and heading outside the house. He came across Taukir's
800, the one in which they'd been driven from the station. Like every other
vehicle in Delhi, it was a dented and dirt-spattered specimen, ruined as an old
tooth.
As if conducting an examination, Shockie put his
fist through the front window. The window came away, the crystalline fracture
smeared with blood from his hairy arm.
"No!" Taukir screamed, coming outside. "What are
you doing, sir?"
But Shockie said nothing, simply walking away,
drops of blood falling on the earth.
The May heat was horrifying, violating the privacy
of all things while also forcing you into yourself. Shockie closed his eyes
against the ferocious prehistoric explosions of the sun. As he looked for a PCO
from which to call headquarters and abort the mission—he had tied up his minor
wound with a hankie—he cursed under his breath.
They fucking want freedom, but this fucking cheapness will never go away
.
When Shockie had headed out for the mission from
Kathmandu, he had been reassured that he would
not need to steal a
car—he had fumbled this crime before, and besides, he disliked all aspects of
the job that made him feel like a common criminal.
Packets of gutka dangled in front of a shop like
strings on a bride's veil. Within the shop, the shopkeeper fished out items
from the shelves with a pole. Shockie was about to ask the man if he knew where
he could find a PCO when his eyes fell on another Maruti 800, parked on the
side of the road—an ugly little blue thing with maroon fittings, tinted
windows, and colorful plastic floral designs taped to the top of the
windscreen.
The street was dense with scooters and bicyclists.
In a matter of seconds, Shockie bounded up to the
car, hugged himself against the onslaught of vehicles and people, and then, in
a swift motion that would have shocked anyone watching this avuncular fair
fellow from a distance, put his hands on the petrol cap, stuck a blade under
the metal, heaved with all his might, and ripped it off.
Every muscle in his left hand—his stronger hand,
after that debacle in Jaipur—was afire. Carrying the petrol cap in his hand,
making heavy strides in the traffic, he walked to Taukir's house.
Back at the house, Meraj and Taukir were playing
cards on a sofa in sulky silence, light filtering dustily through the old
Punjabi-style grilles of the house. The sofa had been put together by joining
two metal trunks and covering it with a dhurrie.
"While you were sitting, I've done the job,"
Shockie said, coming in. He handed them the petrol cap.
"Was the car close by?" Meraj asked, turning it
over.
Taukir looked away.
"Give me some water, and go get a key made," Shockie
instructed them.
While Taukir and Meraj had the key made at a shop
(this was a flaw in the 800's design; the key used to open the petrol cap could
also be used to start the car), Shockie feasted at a local dhaba and admired
the women at the tables with their gluttonous husbands.
He wanted to ram his penis into their wives. He
imagined pinning the dhaba owner's wife on a table and ripping off her kurta.
Soon after, he went up to her and asked for another paratha. "Just one?" she
said. She wore a nose ring and was obviously recently married.
"Yes, madam," he said, with the exceeding
politeness of a man who has just imagined raping you.
Meraj and Taukir returned with a new key.
But in
the morning, when the three men walked down the alleys to the spot where
Shockie had found the blue Maruti, it was gone. "Bhainchod," Shockie said. "I
thought it belonged to that shopkeeper. It must be in the lane behind this one."
But after
looking for a few hours, searching the neighborhood in an auto, they had still
found nothing.
So now, their mental scores settled, they did what they would
have normally done—went to Nizamuddin, a rich neighborhood; found a shabby car
orphaned outside a fancy house; stole the petrol cap; had the key made (at a
different shop), and returned the next day and drove it away.
In an alley near Taukir's house, they removed the
license plates from the stolen car, packed wires in the bonnet, and put the LPG
cylinder in the back. Like a person sprinkling petals on a bed, Shockie grimly
filled the dicky with nails and ball bearings and scrap. He rued the lack of
ammonium nitrate—it would have been good to visit the agro fair and buy a sack.
Fertilizer was more explosive than natural gas.
This part of the operation was the most
dangerous—scarier than running amok in Delhi with the police possibly at your
back. Bomb makers, like most people, are undone not by others but by
themselves. Shockie knew countless stories of bomb makers who had lost eyes,
limbs, hands, dicks to premature explosions; knew operatives who'd succeeded in
blackening and burning their faces so that the skin peeled off for months and
ran down their backs in rivulets, and they looked like hideous ghouls, unable to
do the anonymous work of revolution without exciting the pitying, curious
stares of onlookers—the same looks you hoped to elicit for the craters you left
behind.
If anyone asked them, they were to say they had come to buy clothes and gifts for their sister's wedding.
Even the greats were not immune to this curse of
bomb makers, Shockie knew. Take Ramzi Yousef. He flew to New York in 1993
without a visa, snuck into the country after being let go from an immigration
prison in Queens (it was overcrowded), and then, after setting off practice
fertilizer bombs in the New Jersey countryside, hired a man at a local mosque
to drive a rented van packed with explosives into the basement of the World
Trade Center.
The night the bomb went off, buckling but not
capsizing the first tower, injuring thousands but killing only three, Yousef
flew first class on Pakistan International Airlines over the plumes of his
explosion. All good. But then he got to Pakistan and tried to assassinate
Benazir Bhutto and ended up in the hospital with burns (the pipe bomb he'd been
preparing exploded in his face as he tried to clean the lead azide in the
pipe). The police suspected him, and he had to run away. A year or two later, he
found himself in Manila. His plan was now to assassinate the pope, who was
visiting, and Bill Clinton, who was coming to one-up the pope. His comrades and
he had robes and crosses with which to Christianize themselves. On a plane from
Manila to Tokyo, testing out a new device, he attached a tiny explosive
fashioned from a Casio Databank watch under his seat. When he got off at
Seoul's airport, the stopover, a Japanese businessman took his place. In
midair, en route from Seoul to Tokyo, the seat exploded, painting the inner
ribs of the aircraft with the guts of the businessman. The plane, weaving
wildly through the air like a gutless firework rocket, did not crash.
So now, back in his Manila flat, Yousef—invincible,
a genius of terror, perhaps the greatest terrorist who ever lived—cooked a
virulent soup of chemicals on the stove. Or no. He was cooking to get rid of
the evidence. But as the chemicals vanished, huge clouds of smoke appeared, and
his comrades and he fled the apartment in fright, leaving behind chemistry books,
canisters of fertilizer, passports, wires, Rough Rider condoms.
Yousef escaped to Pakistan but was arrested later
in a hotel in Islamabad as he puffed his hair with gel and stuck explosives up
the ass of a doll.
A genius of terror. Shockie's heart pounded. He
wanted to be like Yousef, the Kashmiri Yousef, but even Yousef, who had shocked
America— who had almost toppled a building that seemed to snick heaven like a
finger, who had tried to blow up jetliners over the Pacific and kill the pope—even Yousef was fallible.
Shockie prayed as he attached the wires in the
corroded belly of the car. Like so many rich people's cars, it was poorly
maintained.
He blew the dust from the machinery with his mouth
and inhaled the rich petroleum blackness. He made the other two men stand with
him as he risked his face.
The bomb did not explode during assembly. But
afterward he was tired; he had a headache and his arms hurt—more so than when
he had violently tugged the scab of the petrol cap from the rump of the
Maruti—and he stayed up all night on the bed of the spinsters, his head
throbbing and the city mocking him with its million nocturnal honks, wondering:
What will it be for? Am I ruining it by not sleeping? Will my nerves be too
shot to pull off the blast?
They drove the car to the market the next evening.
They were all bathed, and they had all gone to the mosque and prayed—even
Shockie, who found prayer distasteful and feminine. They were in good clothes
and disguised with thick spectacles and false mustaches (Meraj wore dark
glasses, for contrast). If anyone asked them, they were to say they had come to
buy clothes and gifts for their sister's wedding. They'd even brought pictures
of a woman in a fake marriage album (not one of Taukir's sisters but a random
pinup girl ripped from the walls of a seedy photography studio) to show how
they were trying to buy wedding bangles that matched her dupatta.
Shockie, in the middle of the night, unable to
sleep, had masturbated to this woman, completing the fantasy that had begun
with the dhaba owner's bride.
The market was packed—just as he had hoped. It was
a Sunday. Driving carefully through the obstacle course of pedestrians and
cyclists and thelas, they entered the central square of Lajpat Nagar Market—if
you could call it a square. Encroachment had softened the sides and the corners
of the market; there were buildings and shacks on all sides, and a park in the
middle with a rusted fence and rubbish collecting on the brown mound where
grass had once grown. Shockie was pleased with this choice of venue. He'd
visited Lajpat Nagar on his previous trip to Delhi and had decided, with his
friend Malik, that it would make an excellent target.
They parked the car in front of Shingar Dupatte, a
women's clothing shop.
Afire with nervous tics, they came out of the car.
Shockie smoothed his hair, Meraj put on his dark glasses, and Taukir dusted off
his tight black jeans.
Quite suddenly, a man appeared before them. "You can't
park here," he said.
"Sir?" said Shockie.
"My son has to park his car here."
The man was the owner of Shingar Dupatte—a short bald fellow with a mustache
and a granitic head that appeared to hold every shade of brown.
"And who's your son—the king of Delhi?" Taukir
asked.
"Come on, it's OK," Shockie said.
At first he was appalled that Taukir
would risk searing himself into the man's memory with an argument, but later he
was grateful: Taukir had behaved as any rude Delhiite would, and besides, they
were disguised.
Now, getting back into the car and reversing it,
Shockie said, "Next time be quiet." This was already the worst mission he'd
ever been on, he decided; his mind swarmed with images of the police, of
torture, of life coming to a sudden end in Delhi. The only way out was to park
close enough to Shingar Dupatte so that the nosy, rude proprietor—and his
son—were killed. "You guys get out now, and I'll park. That guy is going to come
after us again and ask us to move."
They did as he instructed, and Shockie maneuvered
the car in front of a framing shop.
Within the shop, he caught sight of oil paintings
of mountains—things yellowy and oozy with paint; a golden Ganesh; a Christ on a
cross; a Rajasthani village woman. It was like a flashback a man might have as
he dies, all the odd significant objects swirling into view over the heads of
humming, commercially active humans.
He parked, jumped out, and walked away. He pressed
a small jerry-rigged antenna in his hand and activated the timer, set to go off
in five minutes. The proprietor of the framing shop looked at him, but Shockie
smiled and waved back—as if he were a regular customer—and the man, seated
fatly behind a counter, one of those counters that have a money drawer, looked
confused and then smiled and waved back.
Shockie walked away from the central square. "Don't
look; keep moving," he told the other men as he came across them in an alley.
After a while they made it to the main road.
But the market—the market was noisy in its normal
way. There was no disruption, no blast, nothing. "Shit," Shockie said. "But
let's wait."
They threaded their way through the dark alleys,
sweating, bad-breathed, anxious, melting in the heat. "It must be the cylinder,"
Shockie said finally, realizing the bomb had not gone off. "Let me go back and
get it," he said. "Something must have gone wrong." He was ashamed. The eyes of
his comrades were on him. Failure was failure—explanations solved nothing. His
bravado had been for naught.
"We'll come," Meraj said.
"You should have helped when it was needed,"
Shockie said. "Now what's the point?"
"What if it goes off when you get in?" asked
Taukir.
"Then do me a favor and say I martyred myself purposely."
The car was still there when he went back. For
effect, he entered the framing shop. "How are you?" he said, bringing together
his palms for the proprietor.
"Good, good. Business is fine—what else can one
want?"
The proprietor was fair and doggish, with worry
lines contorting his forehead. He had a serious look on his face, as if being
surrounded by so many frames had made him conscious of being framed himself, of
being watched.
Shockie went back to the car. As he turned the
ignition, there were tears in his eyes. Instinctively preparing himself, he put
a palm over his dick.
So this was how it would end. Pulling the gears, he
backed out of the spot.
"I know what went wrong," Shockie said, when they
were back in Taukir's house.
"What?" said Taukir, now feeling much closer to
Shockie.
Shockie pointed to the yellow wires that he'd
clipped from the contraption in the bonnet, picking them up in a loop the way
one may pick up a punished animal by the ears. They had frayed in the heat.
"Let's just go tomorrow and try again," Meraj said
irritably. He just wished the mission to be over.
"We can't," Taukir said. "The market is closed on
Mondays. But Tuesday is a big day because it's the day after it's closed."
"We better send a message back to base," Meraj said
sleepily. "The election is in four days." The bomb in Delhi was meant to be a
signal to the central government about the elections they were organizing in
Kashmir.
"Tell them that it was a wiring problem," Shockie
replied. "They'll understand."
But Shockie was chastened. They were all chastened
and disappointed with one another. Like men who have failed together, they
wanted nothing more than to never see one another again.
On Tuesday, Shockie went alone to the market. But
there was no pleasure in it. It was all anticlimax. And he could see the faces
of the framing shop owner and the owner of Shingar Dupatte, how they would
react when the bomb went off; and he felt sad, the way one always did when one
knew the victims even a little.
Excerpted from THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS by Karan Mahajan (Viking, March 2016).