Free The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan Page A

Malik—but anyone else? No.
    He felt lightheaded in the clearing, in the dry dusk air of the forest, with birds leaping about in the space between trees. A wood fire was going and the members of the Hubli Faction, who got their cues from Rambo, were dressed in black and smoking around this fire.
    The next day Shockie took a train back to the Indo-Nepal border. He was in a contrite mood. “I must apologize to Malik,” he thought. He never got the chance.
    ________
    Instead, four days after Shockie left for Hubli, Malik was swept up from his lodgings and arrested.
    Malik was brushing his teeth by the open tap when the police came. The four men handcuffed his thin wrists before he could put pants over his underwear.
    â€œWhat have I done?” he asked.
    The police would tell him nothing.
    Still, once he was placed in the lockup, he began to relax.
    Kashmiris were always being hassled in Nepal for bribes, one oppressed race expressing its particular brotherly cruelty toward another; and besides, the investigator who came to ask him about his recent whereabouts was amiable, distracted.
    It was only when Malik caught sight of two bearded Sikh Indian policemen in the crowd of blue Nepali uniforms that he became worried.
    The Sikhs were stout and talking fast and Malik put all his fingers in his mouth.
    Then the station suddenly emptied and a Nepali policeman keyed open the lockup. “Am I free?” Malik asked.
    â€œIn a sense. Very much. Come with me.”
    Instead, Malik was led to a windowless police van parked outside in the dirt and shoved into the back. He found himself in a metallic cavern, theoutside world visible only through small stripes in the metal, the paint on the inside of the van scratched by desperate inmates.
    When the Sikhs got into the front and started the ignition, Malik knew he was being taken to India as a suspect for the bombing.
    ________
    Crouched uncomfortably on the floor of the van, handcuffed, his back against the metallic crown of a tire, Malik watched Nepal disappearing from view, photographing it mentally for what he expected would be years of imprisonment. He had read that the only way to endure solitary confinement—if that was your sentence—was to retreat into your own memories, to open and reread the books stocked in the library of your mind.
    He began to cry.
    Later, through the openings in the van, through the small grille, Malik saw a clear stream of water—a thread, really; a reel of light and fluid on the earth—and was reminded of his outing with Shockie to the pond two days before. It would be his happiest memory for many years.

CHAPTER 5
    M alik was placed in police custody in Delhi on a Sunday. He was tortured for ten days straight.
    A month later, he was produced in a Sessions Court in Delhi and united with a group of arrested Kashmiris he didn’t recognize. The men stood like scolded schoolboys before the judge, each with a personal police escort at his side. Malik had feared, after all the torture, that he might find himself facing another co-revolutionary who had broken down and come clean. But this wasn’t the case.
    Gaunt, underslept, hungry, dressed in good clothes (for the sake of appearances), Malik peered out at unfriendly faces in the crowd.
    Where’s Shockie bhai? he wondered again, as the bald, lipless judge, a man in his sixties, exchanged a few words with a lawyer. Arrested? On the run? Around the room no one looked familiar. But Malik would not have put it past his more impulsive friend to disguise himself and walk into an Indian courtroom and spray the crowd with bullets.
    But what if Shockie
was
the informant? Shockie, in his whining, complaining, dissatisfied way, had talked a lot about defection, though this had been just that: talk, a way to fill the existential space between explosions.
    A fat, bespectacled, avuncular, wheezing policeman in slippers (Why were all the policemen in slippers? As if they had just