AT 6 A.M., THE FULL FURNACE OF SUMMER SUN HAS YET to focus upon Delhi, but the air still seems to waver and warp as Vikas enters Lodi Gardens. Mr. Kohli is waiting on the lawns beside the Glass House, windmilling his arms, touching his toes. “Buck up, beta, oy! I’ve already done one round.”
Vikas smothers a yawn and falls into step beside his father. They set off down the narrow paved pathway girding the ninety-acre garden. Past the palm tree with “Vikas” carved around its grey trunk—he had been trying to impress Kiran.
Which brings to mind her husband and his bloody lawsuit. Game over, Amanjit Singh. India’s Hindu bomb turns law meaningless, criticism treasonous and simple crimes—like financing a church-burning or a gurdwara-burning—unimportant. Justice has been saf-fronized. Let Amanjit Singh pit his Sikh Chieftain money against a leader in one of India’s RSS Hindu organizations for a few more years. The nuclear playing field will make everyday violence petty and permissible.
“Saw BBC yesterday?” Mr. Kohli breaks into his thoughts. “Five underground nuclear devices.”
Vikas nods. “New Delhi TV showed their PM Nawaz Sharif saying it was ‘inevitable’ and then the uproar in our Parliament yesterday.”
“There they were in Islamabad, lighting sparklers, dancing in the streets as if they’d all had one big Sufi mystical experience.”
“Just because we got ourselves a bomb, Pakistan had to set off a Muslim bomb.” Vikas turns toward the tomb of Muhammad Shah Sayyid. “Like ours, mated to a missile so they no longer need to shove it out of an aircraft. But these are mini-nukes, ji. Just thirty-five kilotons. American seismologists will minimize that and say twelve, just like they said ours was much less than forty-five.
“But even if it was only twelve each, Pakistan’s now in the nuclear club with us,” says Mr. Kohli. “And we can’t even blackball those fellows.” He marches into the shadows, as the path winds between thickets of bamboo.
“We and Pakistan are entangled in a quantum connection,” says Vikas.
They fold their hands to greet an acquaintance as they walk past a fifteenth-century mosque.
“How come they were ready just days later? For everything else, it’s ‘inshallah.’ Huh!”
Laughter floats across sun-scalded lawns, from yoga-laughers, standing before the towering sandstone domes of the Burra Gumbad, aspiring for longevity. Past the yoga-laughers, father and son slow to stare at two women in salwar-kameez kicking a football between them. Another woman is doing push-ups a few feet away. Mr. Kohli shakes his head in disapproval and Vikas follows suit.
Parrots and pigeons take wing from a ruined turret, and soar into a blue sky. Over the park boundary wall, Vikas can just see the buildings of the India International Centre. Tongues of academics and diplomats must be wagging in its dining room. Turning northward to the gateway, another mosque comes in his way—is there any place in Delhi where he can avoid them? Muslim architecture, Muslim monuments, Muslim history, the Urdu language. Older and more pervasive than anything left by the Brits.
Father and son walk in silence till Mr. Kohli says, “One commentator started talking about China’s test at Lop Nor three years ago, and he kept bringing up that we fought the Chinese in 1962. Eyewash. Why didn’t he mention the US test in Nevada last year—underground, mind you, underground. Their President Clinton unilaterally broke a five-year moratorium. Why should they do it, but not India?”
Or Pakistan, but it wouldn’t be patriotic to say that.
“Wait while I get us the Hindustan Times.” Mr. Kohli detours off the Athpula Bridge to the free newspapers stacked by the entrance gate. Vikas amuses himself by flicking stones at ducks and geese swimming in the lake beneath the bridge, and then takes the path that runs along the ruined walls of a fourteenth-century fort. He’s almost to the corner turret when his father catches up.
“Listen! ‘Even after the fall of the Soviet Union there are still thirty-six thousand nuclear weapons in the world, most in arsenals of the USA.’ ” Mr. Kohli is reading from his folded paper in rhythm with his stride, “ ‘About five thousand of them are still on alert.’ Don’t you think any one of them could be misdirected by some Pakistani hand to land in India at any time?” He doesn’t say how a Pakistani hand will find its way to an American missile to misdirect it, but there’s always a question mark.
Mr. Kohli leafs through a few more pages, then tosses the paper into the bushes by the boundary wall. Passing dog-walkers hush the barking and whining that breaks out.
Women sitting cross-legged on blankets in a shoulder-to-shoulder huddle are listening to advice from a saffron-clad sadhu. The sadhu dangles spindly bare legs from a metal bench before them. From the few words Vikas can hear, they seem riveted to his lecture on ego-annihilation.
Two young women, deep in conversation, pass him without a sidelong glance. Vikas stares after them. “The problem,” he says, “is women and gays. Every international agency is full of them now. They’ve been pumping money into Pakistan for development, and Pakistan has been spending it on atom bombs.” He leads his father in the direction of the Sikander Lodi’s tomb.
“And the Americans! Einstein said when America got the bomb that it was like putting a razorblade in the hands of a three-year-old. But do CNN experts bring that up? No.”
“Americans want a ‘level playing field’—well, India and Pakistan have now given them the battlefield of Kurukshetra,” says Vikas.
“They don’t know Kurukshetra. All Americans know of the Mahabharat is the line Oppenheimer quoted, ‘Now am I become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.’ ”
“He was right, Dad—a single person can do a lot of damage.”
“But my point is: these are not the most important lines Krishna ever said to Arjun in the Gita. If I were producing their show, I would quote the most glorious lines.”
Mr. Kohli climbs the steps of the tomb and declaims as if to wake Sikandar Lodi:
He that thinks of it as being a killer and he who thinks this is slain:
both do not know—it neither kills nor is slain.
this is not born nor ever dies, not in the past present or future
un-born, changeless, eternal it is, primeval;
it is not killed when the body is slain
knowing this is indestructible, constant, unborn, immutable,
how does a man kill anyone, Partha, who does he kill?
Vikas looks around, embarrassed. When Mr. Kohli has finished, he climbs down the steps and they walk on.
“Did you broadcast Swami Rudransh’s reaction to our bomb last week?” says his father.
“Yes, he said Indian scientists must do their dharma, regardless of consequences. And that science is the weapon of spirituality.”
“Will he give a statement about this Muslim bomb?”
“Oh yes, he’ll say Christians and Muslims have only one life to live, while we Hindus will reincarnate and inherit what’s left. And if the world blows up, then what? Every thing is everything. We will all be returned to brahman.”
“And if any Americans are left, they can still be furious.”
Vikas stops by a row of palms. The dome of the Sheesh Gumbad blocks the whole sky. “Americans have been playing baseball in the Imperial Gymkhana Clubs for so long, they don’t realize the game is now kabaddi. And the arena has shifted to the Indo-Pak Line of Control. Now we too can deal death from afar, as Europeans did for centuries.”
“With enough power to make mountains fall to pieces,” says Mr. Kohli.
The path returns to the entrance and the sign bordered in red: Glass House. A few stones still weigh Vikas’s pockets. He looks around. By this hour there are so many in the park, that throwing stones would provide public amusement. But laughter still rings in his ears—the yoga-laughers?
He follows his father to the exit, glances back, but can’t see them.
What is there to laugh at?