Karan Mahajan, The Association of Small Bombs *** 1/2

Despite its explosive title and the dramatic adjectives on its cover ("unpredictable," "breathtaking," "devastating"), The Association of Small Bombs impressed me most with its portrayal of everyday middle-class Indian life. Mahajan doesn't go out of his way to describe the characters and locations where his story plays out, but they felt very real.

The plot kicks off with a terrorist bombing in a small Delhi market. Two young brothers are among the dead, and their Muslim friend survives with injuries. The story follows the boy's parents, their surviving friend Mansoor, and the terrorists who planted the bomb. The bomb changes them all.

On this particular day, [the boys] had gone with a friend in an auto-rickshaw to pick up the Khurana's old Onida color TV, consigned to the electrician for perhaps the tenth time. But when Mr. Khurana was asked by friends what the children were doing there...he said, "They'd gone to pick up my watch from the watch man." ... Why lie, why now? Well, because to admit to their high-flying friends that their children had not only died among the poor, but had been sent out on an errand that smacked of poverty... would have, in those tragic weeks following the bombing, undone the tightly laced nerves that held them together.

I found the mundane details more compelling than the major events, and was similarly impressed by the way that ordinary trains of thought led some characters to terrorism. (This aspect reminded me of Doris Lessing's The Good Terrorist.)