(FICTION) 

He reminded me so much of one or two that blog on Sulekha. Strident, shrill, defiant, angry – emotional and forthright. A crusader of sorts, espousing the Hindu thought and the concept of Akhand Bharat. Always ready with an argument. He’s very dear and close to me, an intelligent articulate and amiable personality – this friend of mine from school days.

Pakistan? That’s a rogue-terrorist state sir, they are all jehadis – their madrasas preach hatred. Why, not just in Pakistan, they’re here too, in this land of the Ganga, the Deobandi school of radical Islam that spawns graduates that spew venom – on us Hindus, in India.

Not all of them, I counter. A minority in the minority maybe, but not everyone Muslim hates us. Why, we in India have more Muslims than Pakistan has. One, in nine. How can you generalize? We are the second largest Muslim nation in the world!

Oh, you secularists will never understand. That ‘one in nine’ lays land mines that trips India. They want separate laws, separate identity and now they want reservation, huh? Someday you will realize where our motherland is heading to. Bah! His dialogues (monologues really!) he always ended by yelling out Jai Hind or Vande matheram. A character really. With a red smear proud on his forehead - he lived and slept Hindutva.

To him, every name that was Muslim is anathema. Me, as I mentioned, has a healthy respect for all. After all even after we were under Muslim mughals for hundreds of  years, nine out of ten of us continue to remain Hindus. And what about the Christians who ruled over us for the same period? Just four in a hundred, that’s what four hundred years of Vatican and Anglican influence got in India. That’s proof enough of how resilient Hinduism is.

But he’d disagree. He always did.

We’d meet up and chat every evening after work, exchanging ripostes jousts, repartees, even insults. The arguments would never end. No one wins. Each of us, holds his ground. Sitting over scalding teas at wayside restaurants, usually at the railway station itself after we hopped off from the punctual local trains – he wasn’t too keen on sipping stuff from Irani hotels – though in my view, in Mumbai, they were the best spots for cha – his BP shot up even at the suggestion – Why make a Mussalman rich? Why? So that he can sponsor jehad against Bharath? Why not here? He leads me to a tea stall on walls of which hangs a Sai Baba pic.

It was futile. We went nowhere. But, he was a kind man and loyal friend. He’d carry paper cuttings of riots and communal conflagrations, And make a list of all Hindus killed in riots and bombings in the last one year: once insisted on raiding an art gallery and defacing a painting ort two of Hussains on display. Rabid? I don’t know. He always thought he, was the rational one, not I.  We went back home each day, waiting for the next evening. Drinking tea, debating religion and eating frugal thaali meals. Being  bachelors was easy and more practical – for both of us.

Then it happened. The bombs. The blast. The terrorist disruption of local trains. Blood, bedlam and death. I trudged home after being on foot for hours. 150 dead as per last count, the TV says. My mobile rings. Did you hear? Hear what? I reel. My best friend is dead. They found him in parts. Identified him from his HMT watch and ‘Om’ tattooed on his biceps.

I stay away from work the next few days. I am devastated. I brood. I remember the dialogues, the debates, the discussions. I miss this chap. I sob inwardly. This is injustice. This isn’t fair. So young, so cerebral, so giving. Just blown up…., I stare out of my window, clenching my fists, my forehead furrowed in tension, watching the city go on and on, regardless.

I decide to leave town. I submit my papers. I lock my small apartment and go. Just keep going. To erase the past, forget the hurt. Start afresh elsewhere. Mumbai is dead. I have made up my mind. I will remain incognito. Underground. By myself, isolated. I take a bus and get out of the city. I reach a small town on the west coast, even its name is unimportant. I move into a lodge paying four weeks rent as advance. I cannot eat, I do not want to go around. Just leave me alone! I yell to myself, the gory scene at the station evokes nightmares and sweat.

For the first time in three weeks, I look at myself. God! Is that me? Haggard, aged, wrinkled, emaciated. Bearded. I take my razor and shave off my head hair on a whim. I shape my beard and strip off the moustache.

That evening I walk to a local hospital and meet the surgeon. I tell him my problem, a personal one that requires a little scalpel work. In a few days I am back in my room bolted from the outside world. The barbiturates the doc has prescribed for sleep help me cope with the violent visions that beset my dark hours. I think I am losing my balance. I am becoming paranoid. I develop compulsive neurosis. I bang my head against the wall every ten minutes. Continuously. I see the damage in my mirror, repeated trauma has form a dark circular callosity on the forehead. I must stop before I become insane – and get out. Where to? Bombay? No sir, I will travel to somewhere else. I buy myself a city map. New Delhi. I return to my room and pore over the layouts. Janpath, Rajpath, Mansingh Circle, Gurdwara Road, Ajmal Khan Road, Patel Nagar, Lajpat Nagar, W.E.A, then my eyes move, Old Delhi. Chandni Chowk – my eyes stop, Jumma Masjid. I stare at the name-it is the world’s largest mosque, as grand as the Taj, built by the same man.

I buy a ticket to Delhi. I rent a room. I wander round the city, New and Old. A little shopping for odds and ends from scrap-dealers and petty shopkeepers at Daryagunj. I am ready. On Friday, I leave my lodging. I am belted with explosives. Batteries, wires, acid vials, explosives and control buttons. I am a mobile bomb now. I can blast myself at will, and blow up along with me anyone within a two hundred yard radius, man, machine or mansion.

I purposefully stride into the Jumma Masjid. I kneel low and join the thousands of devout Muslims – all facing Mecca, yonder west. It is time. I shut my eyes and squeeze the trigger.

They say the explosion was stupendous. The blast was heard eight kilometers off. Half of the monument was gone plus seven hundred or more, died instantly, incinerated. Chaos, rage. Delhi, burned. The roads ran red.

It took three days for the police and agencies to identify and hand over the dead to next of kin. Only one, partial body lay unclaimed. CBI honed in. This could be the one, they nodded. The one that caused the mayhem. Not claimed. Not missed. This has to be the bomber.

They pore over my torso, my partial limbs, what remains of my head. They pick up traces of RDX from my skin, and burnt bits of batteries, and residue of molten wires.  My contoured beard, singed though now, was perfectly trimmed, the shaved moustache raised doubts - the spot of hardened dark circle of skin on my forehead – the crack investigation team members stare at each other, incredulously. The marks of a devout Muslim? One who has knelt and bent five times a day for decades, touching his forehead to the floor in supplication. The mark of piety. The beard, the shaven upper lip – could this man be Muslim? A mullah?

The scour my body. Thanks to a minor surgery and to a surgeon who trusted my feigned complaint of pain during urination – phimosis, he’d said and circumcised me. The cops were confused and stunned. He is a Musalman, this suicide bomber. But how can that be? Why would a man of Islam wreak blast a mosque?

The questions were never answered. All I know is that the India’s Muslim population in India was forever changed. The Jumma Masjid episode shook them. Their own man, had done them in. The intellectuals in the community asked for shut down of all madrasas. The Deobandi school, was shut down. Every terrorist outfit was proscribed. Simi leaders were behind bars. Dawood went amiss, and Musharaff was sweated. His days were numbered. Not Hindu militants, but fellow Muslims would get him. Brothers mistrusted each other. The radical Islamics resident in India were terrified. They just scooted. For the life of them, despite their best efforts, the outfits could not figure out how or why one of theirs could even imagine doing this. The Saudis, Libyans, Iranis and Indonesians offered cooperation in ferreting terrorist outfits – they had to, they were now mortally afraid of their won existence.

And I?  I watched the drama from far above. I had unleashed the most perfect terrorist strike anyone could ever conceive. As I said, I am secular. I have no war with any community. My vendetta is personal. Like the character played by Jon Voight in Odessa File. He gets the one from the SS, a horrendous Gestapo – no, not because that one and gassed Jews – but because he had killed Voight’s father, another SS officer. It was tit for tat, a personal feud with one, another German.