The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan

Mansoor’s family are the Khuranas’ token Muslim friends, credentials of their liberalism. The survivor, Mansoor Ahmed, wanders away from the explosion and keeps walking through the city in a fugue-like state of dissociation. The trauma of the bomb lingers in bodies and minds, warping behaviour, sending lives spinning off at weird tangents. The loss of their children affects them in various unforeseen ways, but their grief does not organise itself around any one dramatic moment: rather, it is a series of aftershocks. Deepa has a cake-baking business which supplements their erratic income.

Vikas is a film-maker with some success in advertising, but whose aesthetic heart is with the khadi-wearing social realists of India’s leftist cinema tradition. The Khuranas, Vikas and Deepa, are members of the liberal middle class. Its narrative waves ripple out from this point, moving forwards and backwards in time, examining the awful grief that engulfs the parents of the dead boys, the physical and psychological trauma of the survivor, and the damaged, marginal lives of the terrorists who executed the attack. Karan Mahajan’s thoughtful second novel has been rapturously received in the US. Two young brothers, aged 11 and 13, are among the many casualties. A car bomb goes off in a crowded Delhi market, “a percussive event that began under the bonnet of a parked white Maruti 800”.

The Association of Small Bombs by Karan Mahajan