The Association of Small Bombs

The Association Of Small Bombs is a 2017 novel by Karan Mahajan. It narrates the tragedy and aftermath of a 1996 bombing of a market in New Delhi, India from the perspective of different characters, including the Kashmiri terrorist who sets off the bomb. The novel poses the question: what makes up the inner life of a terrorist figure willing to commit a mass atrocity? Though the novel rejects a moralization of the terrorist’s narrative, it nevertheless humanizes him by illuminating the themes of tragedy and dysphoria which can throb at the heart of rage and violence.

The novel first introduces the moment of tragedy through an omniscient narrator, which follows a Kashmiri man named Shaukat Guru (Shockie, for short). Guru is a depressed, overweight and balding man in his mid twenties who harbors a superiority complex and practically worships terrorist leaders such as Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind of the 1993 World Trade Center bombing. Having already failed to bomb the city once due to faulty wiring inside his first bomb, he is too ashamed and on edge to feel any pride in the attack’s success, calling it an “anticlimax.” Guru’s perception of a successful attack as a kind of singular, climactic narrative arc is characteristic of his general ambition, which has been punctuated and paradoxically reinforced throughout his life with failure and tragedy.

The anticlimax of the first scene continues as the story is told from a variety of overlapping perspectives. The second perspective is that of the omniscient narrator, which is melded with occasional insights into Deepa and Vikas Khurana, a married Hindu couple who lose their two young sons in the bombing. Deepa and Vikas meet their sons’ surviving friend, a Muslim who had accompanied their sons to the market. Throughout these perceptual angles on the novel’s central tragedy, Mahajan includes flashbacks to the day of the bombing in graphic detail, describing the victims’ contorted poses and wounds and the surrounding city’s panicked recoil.



At their sons’ cremation ceremony, Vikas notices the interconnectedness of human indifference with the indifferent natural world. As his sons burns in the funeral pyre, children play nearby without care for the meaning behind the event, and a cow in the distance eats ash from the ground which is implied to have come from other cremated bodies. The children grow bored and turn to abuse the cow.

Later scenes explicate the terrorists’ plot and motives. As Guru and his terrorist cohorts journey from their exile in Kathmandu all the way to Delhi, Guru and his main accomplice disguise themselves as farmers and undergo a nearly week-long bus and train voyage. Along the way, they face bad road conditions, intense heat waves, swarms of mosquitoes, and subsist on ketchup sandwiches. His accomplice is described as an idiot with dandruff and the man they set out to meet in Delhi to finish the plot is also incompetent. Guru, meanwhile, is characterized as someone who derives sadistic pleasure from shopping for bomb materials.

After the successful attack, Guru returns to the terrorist base in Kathmandu. His peers congratulate him for killing hundreds of people, and he accepts the accolade knowing that he only killed thirteen. Despite his unspeakable crimes, he is different from the other terrorists in that he hates and actively resists their complacent propaganda and ideology, believing instead that terrorism is an intrinsically aspirational pursuit.



Meanwhile, Vikas and Deepa take a turn for the worse, sinking into a shared depression. They can no longer have sex without stopping in grief and do not have enough privacy as their extended family intrudes to watch over them. The family micromanages their routine, putting sleeping pills in their tea to knock them out and hiding their knives as a naive attempt at suicide prevention. Vikas blames his mediocre career for his son’s death, believing that it might have been prevented had they been able to afford a private driver for errands. Meanwhile, the couple is unable to actually locate and address the source of their agony. Deepa copes by searching for her sons’ killers, hoping to bring them to justice.

One day, Guru’s good-natured roommate, Malik Aziz, is wrongly arrested for Guru’s crimes. Vikas and Deepa venture to Kathmandu where he is imprisoned and watch passively as Malik is beaten. Though he did not commit the crimes, he is not necessarily innocent, having failed to report evidence of Guru’s terrorist aspirations. Malik is last seen awaiting his trial, his fate unknown.

Despite their opposing positions in the narrative, all of the characters in The Association of Small Bombs are ultimately unsatisfied with their efforts to recover from or understand the attack. Through their stories, Mahajan suggests that there exists no great structure or sensibility to the phenomenon of atrocity. In place of an explanation, he brings readers to the individual emotional sites that carry out and respond to the act. Though he rejects historical, social, and political explanations for terrorism, the novel suggests that empathy is the one tool one can use to better understand and prevent terrorism.