The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan Page B

want.”
    ________
    Funny, Deepa thought—how this kind of tragedy unites and energizes a family. I’ve not just asked these old men for favors; I’ve reinvigorated their lives with purpose.
    A few days before the blast, Tushar had come into the kitchen in the morning to watch her at work. An earnest boy, he loved the hectic action of the kitchen. “And how much frosting do you have to make for the order, Mama?” he asked.
    â€œTwo or three kilos since it’s a bulk order,” she said. “And we’ll let it cool in the afternoon. Hopefully we’ll have electricity so it won’t turn green from mold. You want to mix it?”
    He did. With the whisk tight in his hand, he churned the butter and the sugar. He was not as effeminate as his father made him out to be. It was a matter of context. In the context of the kitchen he was an expert. As he mixed the frosting, Deepa hugged his small frame from behind.
    Later that evening Nakul played “Edelweiss” for her on the small guitar they had bought him. “Edel Vyes, Edel Vais, every morning you greet me,” he sang.
    Now, back home from visiting Mukesh, Deepa reflected on the tragic oddness of her own life, how she’d grown up in a tiny family in Bangalore,the only daughter of a reclusive man who ran a famous bookstore and could talk about nothing but sixties rock ’n’ roll (he had not been a recluse before his wife died, though she could barely remember that); how she’d been a shy and frightened but persevering creature, doing well in school and ending up in Delhi and working for Arthur Andersen, the CA firm, thanks to a family connection—Delhi, that odd world, so much more spacious and rude than Bangalore; Delhi, a place where no one was firmly rooted and there was a sense that if a better city presented itself just fifty kilometers away, the opportunistic inhabitants would immediately quit the city, caring not a jot for the earth that had nurtured them. And, of course, out of all these Delhiites, these savage North Indians, she’d picked Vikas. Or Vikas had picked her. She’d liked him because, in the middle of the rude crush, he had the disarming gentleness of a South Indian—he was a Punjabi but he could have been sprung from St. Joseph’s. Calm, sympathetic, patient, he was a good listener, marked with none of the prejudices she imagined North Indians carried toward South Indian Christians (and she wasn’t wrong about these prejudices: years later, when she became a de facto Punjabi as well, she learned that most North Indians thought all Christian women were maids); and their courtship had an easy, light quality; they’d melted like two shy creatures into one another.
    Tears came to her eyes remembering those early days—days of infatuation. After that everything had gone to ruin. Vikas slipped into a depression about his career as a documentary filmmaker from which he never recovered—angry first at his family for not understanding why he wished to be an artist rather than a CA (“There’s only one artist in the whole bloody family and they can’t even handle that!”) and then at himself for having chosen such a nugatory, ascetic path at a time when India was booming with money and rupees fell from the trees like soft petals, enriching even the fools of his family, whose property values shot up. How many times had she told him to quit? To go back to being a CA? To do something else? To sell his inherited lands in Patiala? But he refused. Descending into bitterness, surrounded by the braying, pointing, mocking audience of hisfamily, he had become attached to his own pain. He did not want to make changes because that would mean losing his precious exchequer of bitterness.
    And then there were the kids. He had, in his bitter, depressive way, been opposed to having any, but she had pushed him and pressured him, sending subtle messages through family