The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan Read Free Book Online

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, twenty 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.
    â€œYes, hero,” Shockie said, setting his emotional lips in a smirk.
    â€œLet’s go in different directions and meet at the car. It’s parked behind,” the agent, whose name was Taukir, said.
    â€œWhy do you want to do that?” Shockie said.
    â€œYou never know about the police these days.”
    â€œNo,” 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!”
    â€œMove!” the woman shrieked at him.
    â€œYou 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 re-creating 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