Free The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

letter-block printing paraphernalia in the corner of the room. As the “publisher” and “propagandist” he churned out pamphlets, posters, manifestos, and warnings against civilians and army officers to be posted on the walls of village houses and GPOs and thanas, all of them written in an overblown apocalyptic style that Abdul said gave him a headache, and that Shockie, as Malik’s guardian, always edited.
    â€œSuit yourself,” Shockie said.
    But he was sad.
    That night he stayed up thinking of his mother and imagining a series of girls he had been infatuated with in his village. Where were they now? Was that horrible ox of a weaver really fucking Faiza? (This did not stop him from picturing the act; he liked imagining the private lives of others.) Was Sahar really a mother of two, putting oil on her round stomach? And what about Asma . . . ? In this way, he began to fall asleep. But right when sleep was coming, he got up and said, “You’re lazy.”
    Malik, curled on his charpai, his back against the wall, reading, his toes visible and dirty, said, “What?”
    â€œYou should come with me. You have no idea how disrespected you are in the group. They mock you openly. When I told Abdul I wanted to bring you, he laughed and forbade me from doing it.”
    Malik said nothing.
    â€œWhen you were talking about Gandhi the other day, they were all laughing. I even tried to signal to you but you were so lost in your conversation. You need to do something. Your position in the group is insecure. If something happens to me, what will you do? That’s why I want you to come with me. That way we can be together if something happens.”
    He felt he had made such a good appeal that he was surprised by Malik’s reply. “Maybe you’re the coward.”
    Shockie said nothing.
    â€œInflicting violence is cowardly. We’ve talked about that. If we were brave we’d walk into the street and be martyred.” He pointed to the
Autobiography
. “You know what Gandhi said Jews should do when faced with the Nazis? Commit mass suicide. Think about that.”
    Shockie shook his head. “You’re cracked.”
    â€œSo what? What do you think these attacks are going to achieve? Today when you were complaining about the blast not being big enough, I was thinking: It doesn’t matter. It’s all wrong. Blasts are a way of hiding. If you want to be a hero you have to be a martyr.”
    â€œWhy don’t you propose this to Abdul?”
    â€œMaybe I will.”
    ________
    After Shockie went to sleep, Malik read by the milky tube light fixed over his bed. He read about Gandhi’s childhood, his suicide attempt with datura seeds, the shame he felt over the fact that he was having sex at the moment his father died, his weak vegetarian constitution, his struggles with pain and sexual urges—he read all this and thought, “But this is me.”
    In the morning, when he woke up, Shockie was gone.
    ________
    Shockie took a shared jeep taxi from Kathmandu to Bhairawa, on the border with India. At Bhairawa he boarded a bus to Gorakhpur, where he spent the night again in Das Palace.
    Then, after days of traveling by train—this was his real profession, wasn’t it? Traveling?—he came to Hubli.
    The Hubli Faction was a small group of Keralite Muslims who planned attacks from a safe house in a forest. They took him to a clearing and wanted to talk about Marxism, revolution, Naxalites, water politics—anything but the issue at hand, which was: arms. Finally they showed him a stash of the most derelict-looking AK-47s Shockie had ever seen and grenades covered in thick dust. Nothing. It was pointless. This wasplayacting. The country spread around them in the form of a thousand animal sounds: crickets, bats, birds. He thought about what it would mean to die, right now, here—who would remember him? His mother, maybe; possibly