The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

Author:Karan Mahajan
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2016-02-19T16:05:56+00:00

CHAPTER 14

Mansoor became active in the group, going over to the room in Defence Colony two or three times a week for meetings, telling his parents that the NGO worked for “communal harmony.”

His mother was happy that her son had found a source of distraction while he healed. His father, meanwhile, energized by Mansoor’s presence, took him around to look at houses. “It’s time to buy a new flat,” he told Mansoor. “We need a bigger place and anyway South Ex is so noisy and polluted now.” He had become fixated on this project, even though most of the flats they saw were out of their price range or in colonies like Neeti Bagh where the sellers would never deal with Muslims.

Mansoor was in pain still but felt oddly content. He was healing and would return to the U.S. for his spring semester, which began in January. It was November now.

Peace For All had serious intentions but was also a friendly group. The twenty-odd members knew each other well and were jokey and friendly and relaxed before and after meetings. There was Shahid, a tall man with enormous hands, plastered balding hair, and a goofy grin with gapped teeth, a second-year mass com student from Jamia. Jacob, the only Christian in the group, thin and nervous and colored with pimples, studied chemistry at St. Stephen’s. Zeenat was working toward a diploma in computers from NIIT. Tariq had graduated from a forest management institute in Maharashtra but obviously hated forests—you could see it in the way he cursed whenever a mosquito buzzed near him. They were seekers. They had witnessed what Narendra Modi, the chief minister of Gujarat, had done in his state in March, how he and his administration had stood by, in localities like Naroda Patiya, Meghaninagar, and Bapunagar, as violent Hindu mobs, armed with swords, petrol bombs, tridents, and water pistols to spray fuel, had set upon Muslims, burning them alive, tearing infants from mothers and fetuses from wombs, raping women, killing a thousand. And they had realized that the Indian government wouldn’t protect them, that in fact it had an incentive to demonize and exterminate them. The members of Peace For All were not radicals. They were eminently reasonable people, students engrossed in careers, people who wanted to be Indians but had discovered themselves instead to be Muslims and had started to embrace their identities. In their alienation, their desire to be included in the mainstream, Mansoor recognized himself.

“Do you think they’ll let Muslims get away with that?” Zeenat might say, for example, when someone suggested a nonviolent protest.

“The police are the most corrupt. Just yesterday they stopped me and wanted to know where I was driving to at night.”

“Your idea of doing communal harmony workshops is very idealistic, but we need something more extreme to awaken people.”

Everyone had a story of being personally pegged for a Muslim too.

“Why do they always tell us to go back to Pakistan? You’re a Hindu—go to Nepal! And why shouldn’t

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