"Terror is a form of urban planning."
THE ASSOCIATION OF SMALL BOMBS
Karan Mahajan
I'd long wanted to write a terrorism novel. The seed had been planted back in 2006 and had germinated all throughout university where my studies in political economy pushed me further and further in the direction of international crime and its attendants, most saliently terror. I'd wanted it to be scopic. Multiple POVs to simulate the ever-widening aureole of the blast radius. The physical violence of it, the minutiae in the process of terrorism, the ways families can be either cleft apart or glued back together by the tragedy. I'd wanted it to be populated almost exclusively with brown people, to have agency rest with them. I'd wanted the novel to be more than a thriller and to have greater propulsion than the stereotypical "literary" novel. Karan Mahajan, it seems, has written that novel for me.
Market bombings bookend this story about terrorism, its perpetrators, and its victims in India. The story begins in 1996 with a terrorist bombing that kills two young boys but spares their friend, leaving him with a debilitating time-bomb injury. The tale then radiates outward to consider the parents of the deceased as well as the survived. Then outward further to consider the terrorists, rendering them banal in their motivations and their desires (didn't kill enough people to qualify as a major event) but specific in their own pride and heartbreak. The 1996 blast becomes the defining event for several characters and provides a thruline of sorts, though more appropriate imagery might posit the characters as valence electrons in the process of being ejected from the molecule, then by the end, somehow finding their way back into orbit. Indeed, the image on the dust jacket of the US hardcover suggests exactly that.
The novel is smoothly written, but the voice doesn't suggest a wide range. Indeed, the characters think and speak much like how Mahajan writes. This changes slightly towards the end, but only because, at that point, the novel feels rushed. The stint that one of the child survivors of the 1996 blast, now a severely religious adult, spends in prison, the result of a cascade of mistaken beliefs and conclusions, could very well have been its own novel.
Despite the scope of its telling, the story is very tight. The blast doesn't reach very far, nor does it describe a particularly large circumference. It is small, contained, localized. It could have been greater.
Karan Mahajan
I'd long wanted to write a terrorism novel. The seed had been planted back in 2006 and had germinated all throughout university where my studies in political economy pushed me further and further in the direction of international crime and its attendants, most saliently terror. I'd wanted it to be scopic. Multiple POVs to simulate the ever-widening aureole of the blast radius. The physical violence of it, the minutiae in the process of terrorism, the ways families can be either cleft apart or glued back together by the tragedy. I'd wanted it to be populated almost exclusively with brown people, to have agency rest with them. I'd wanted the novel to be more than a thriller and to have greater propulsion than the stereotypical "literary" novel. Karan Mahajan, it seems, has written that novel for me.
Market bombings bookend this story about terrorism, its perpetrators, and its victims in India. The story begins in 1996 with a terrorist bombing that kills two young boys but spares their friend, leaving him with a debilitating time-bomb injury. The tale then radiates outward to consider the parents of the deceased as well as the survived. Then outward further to consider the terrorists, rendering them banal in their motivations and their desires (didn't kill enough people to qualify as a major event) but specific in their own pride and heartbreak. The 1996 blast becomes the defining event for several characters and provides a thruline of sorts, though more appropriate imagery might posit the characters as valence electrons in the process of being ejected from the molecule, then by the end, somehow finding their way back into orbit. Indeed, the image on the dust jacket of the US hardcover suggests exactly that.
The novel is smoothly written, but the voice doesn't suggest a wide range. Indeed, the characters think and speak much like how Mahajan writes. This changes slightly towards the end, but only because, at that point, the novel feels rushed. The stint that one of the child survivors of the 1996 blast, now a severely religious adult, spends in prison, the result of a cascade of mistaken beliefs and conclusions, could very well have been its own novel.
Despite the scope of its telling, the story is very tight. The blast doesn't reach very far, nor does it describe a particularly large circumference. It is small, contained, localized. It could have been greater.