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How to pronounce Karan Mahajan: KAHR-uhn muh-HAH-juhn
Karan Mahajan discusses how a terrorist bomb near his home inspired him to write The Association of Small Bombs
Is the bombing at the beginning of the book based on a real event?
Yes. In 1996, Kashmiri separatists set off a bomb in Lajpat Nagar market in Delhi, about fifteen minutes from my home; the bomb killed thirteen and injured thirty. My grandmother had been there the day before to buy yarn, and my parents and I often went to the market to run errands: buying medicines, getting electronics repaired, purchasing school uniforms. It remains one of the few terrorist attacks in which I—or a family member—may have plausibly died.
The attack stayed local, though—it never became a major news event, and though Delhiites of a certain age remember it, it isn't part of the larger discussion of terrorism. This makes sense: before 9/11, India treated terror with the same overall indifference it applies to other tragedies: as yet another manifestation of a national malaise.
I should also stress that, though my novel takes the blast as a starting point, it deviates from fact.
Where did the idea for this novel begin?
It began in my unformed fury at the 26/11 Mumbai Attacks, which were broadcast on television for four days straight, like a mini-series of terror. I remember sitting in my office in New York—I worked then for New York's Economic Development Corporation, a city agency—and thinking that radical Muslim terrorists had gone too far (my first weeks in America had been defined by terror too; I emigrated a week after 9/11). It also struck me that this ill-defined rage was exactly what the terrorists wanted. The ideal response to such a situation is not to strike back—as the US did after 9/11—but to wait out the suffering.
From this, and my own personal experiences, I came upon a memory of the Lajpat Nagar blast. It had been there, in cold storage, for years, and it appeared fully formed, and the world and the characters poured out in a single sitting. I had the opening of my book.
It would take years of struggling with the meaning of this blast, of researching terror and radical Islam, of creating characters, before an actual story emerged, but the seed was there. And though the book is about small bombs—about the futility of such bombs in the shadow of the larger attacks—it speaks directly the psychology of the terrorists behind 9/11 and 26/11.
It also answered the question: what if an attack doesn't go off perfectly? What happens then? And how do victims respond to being linked to smaller, more forgettable attacks than to the larger ones that are constantly in the news? This premise had not only depth, but, rare in the context of terrorism, dark humor, too.
Now that the book is about to be published, do you find it difficult to revisit the characters and story?
Yes, I do. This is a function of the fact that I took on an unusually painful subject: a couple who lose both their children in an attack. For a long time, it was hard to move forward with the grief of the couple. But when I hit upon the voice for the final draft, everything cleared up and the story wrote itself. My memory of writing the book is a positive one; but the memory of the struggle that preceded it is unpleasant, and when I look at the book it sometimes rushes back. Luckily, that is not something a reader has to cope with!
You grew up in New Delhi. Did you write the novel based on your memories from your childhood, or did you travel back for research?
Both. There was my experience with Delhi—and Lajpat Nagar—growing up, but more than that, there was experience with India as an adult. From the 2010-2012 I worked for the founder of a tech company in Bangalore, traveling around the country interviewing entrepreneurs for a private project. India opened up for me in a way it had never before: not only were people coming to me with their stories, but I was visiting factories, small towns, slums, homes in far-flung places. India seeped into me through my travels; I think this is evident in the book. But the emotional weight of the book comes from deep childhood experience and memories. I have spent large chunks of time back in Delhi since college. For once though, I wasn't documenting the city as it was now but as it was in the past. I visited Lajpat Nagar market and spoke to shopkeepers about the blast. I imagined my way into the politics of the time. I sat in the courts for a day, listening in, till a judge asked me to leave. I really wanted to know, on a personal level, the spaces occupied by terrorists and victims. The novel, in the end, is rich with this awareness.
Did you draw on your own life to shape any of the characters? Do you see yourself in any of them?
I would say that every character has a basis in my emotional experience. But the odd thing about emotional experience is that one can only access it if one imagines a character quite different from one's self. For a while, for example, Mansoor Ahmed, the Muslim boy injured in the attack—who is about my age and whose first semester of college in California is defined by 9/11, just as mine was—seemed too much like myself; I couldn't write him. The minute I created more distance, he became alive.
For the bombers, I needed to create an actual philosophy of why they turned to terror. It was the most challenging part of the book, because I hadn't seen it done well anywhere else, except perhaps in Conrad: but Conrad sometimes ruins things with his contempt for his characters. I wanted to be perversely even-handed. Hitting upon the tone of Shockie's experience—making him someone focused on the bomb rather than the victims—was a breakthrough. Terrorists don't—and can't afford to—think much about their victims. They lose themselves in details.
As for the characters who are activists in the novel, I was an activist myself, briefly, in India in the early 2000s—part of a group that wished to educate people about the anti-Muslim riots in Gujarat in early 2002. But my experience was very different from that of Mansoor and Ayub. The group I was in wasn't the least bit radical.
Why did you decide to tell part of the story from the bombers' points-of-view?
I thought that was the most crucial thing. What I see again and again in the US—and in India—is a failure of the imagination. Every time a blast happens, people ask, "But why would someone do this?" Weirdly, it hasn't been answered well anywhere—neither in fiction nor non-fiction. In non-fiction, everything is ascribed to the appeal of radicalism. Well, that's good, but how do these people hold up their nerves in the face of true danger, plan attacks, balance their secret lives against their public ones, and reconcile all this with their Western educations? You see how futile the simplistic explanation is. Terrorists are as torn as anyone else.
Similarly, I found that modern fiction tended to skirt the issue completely. There have been so many books that are supposedly about 9/11 or larger attacks—Netherland, Open City, Leaving the Atocha Station, even The Reluctant Fundamentalist and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close—but these books treat the attacks as a sort of political performance art that tells us something about a protagonist at a remove; in these books 9/11 is a deus-ex-machina that imbues the solitude of the narrator with importance. I am being harsh—I love these books—but I feel it is a symptom of a larger avoidance.
The only place I found terror explored in depth was in Conrad—and there, particularly in The Secret Agent, it was treated as a subject of dark comedy. Conrad saw that terrorism was just another mode of pettiness, of stupidity, of expression, and we shouldn't unnecessary exalt terrorists because of their recent successes. Terrorists are people too—they are given to error. Naipaul and then DeLillo do a good job in their novels of drawing this out: I'm thinking of DeLillo's contention in Mao II that terrorists have replaced writers as the people who "alter the inner-life of the culture." I thought that was marvelous! Terrorists have goals beyond their supposed pacts with God. They are authors too.
Which writers inspire you?
I love too many, but a few come immediately to mind: Saul Bellow, Cynthia Ozick, Yashpal, Arundhati Roy, RK Narayan, VS Naipaul, Ernest Hemingway. Some of Conrad. And I thought Aatish Taseer's new book The Way Things Were was wonderful.
You said the idea for The Association of Small Bombs came as your last book, Family Planning, was coming out. Are you working on a new work now?
Yes. I began working on a new book two months after selling The Association of Small Bombs to publishers. I was sitting in an eye doctor's office in Delhi when I was told I might be suffering from a degenerative eye disorder that eventually leads to blindness. What surprised me about this diagnosis was that a number of characters in Small Bombs fear blindness—or do go blind: the motif of eyes is ever-present in the book. But I had known nothing about my own condition when I wrote the book. Could I have physically intuited something? At that moment, in the doctor's office, I was struck by several characters I felt I needed to write about, to get off my chest. The verdict of blindness made my priorities clear.
Later, after another eye exam, I was told the condition wasn't serious at all, and that I wouldn't lose my vision. But that window of fear and clarity was enough. I had my next novel.
Unless otherwise stated, this interview was conducted at the time the book was first published, and is reproduced with permission of the publisher. This interview may not be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the copyright holder.
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