Immigrants from normal life

Shockie and Malik, members of a terrorist organisation called the Jammu and Kashmir Islamic Force place a (small) bomb in Sarojini Market. Shockie, a man who looks like an electrician, is considered the leading bomb-maker of his group. In fact, he is rather inept. The bomb doesn’t go off. So they come back the next day. In the blast that ensues, Nakul and Tushar Khurana are killed on the spot. Their friend, a young boy called Mansoor Khan, survives.

This series of events sets the stage for the ambitious, deeply compassionate and sometimes comic The Association of Small Bombs, a novel that earned Karan Mahajan a National Book Award nomination in 2016. Mahajan was in India last month to attend the Jaipur Literature Festival, where BLink caught up with him. The following are excerpts from the interview.

I thought it interesting that you were in conversation with Manu Joseph at JLF. His writing, like yours, is fundamentally a work of compassion. And yet it’s full of cruel self-awareness; you place all characters and their motivations under the harshest light. Is that something you recognise from your writing in his? If so, what does it help you understand about his writing? And about yours?

After years of admiring Manu’s journalism, I finally read The Illicit Happiness of Other People. I thought it was cruel, funny, sad, and adept at breaking down concepts like grief and happiness into their component parts. This, in addition to the humour, might be what we have in common: a desire to look at received ideas with renewed clarity. He’s one of our most gifted writers. I was eager to talk to him in Jaipur.

Do you sometimes snigger when you go inside your characters’ minds and dissect their twisted motivations? Do you cackle? Do you feel bad? Did you laugh when you coined the name Peace for All? What visceral responses have you had from meeting your own characters and getting to know them?

No — I didn’t laugh, not in The Association of Small Bombs. Any humour that appears is a holdover of my way of seeing, an outcome of a tone that paints humans as vastly imperfect. Nor did I laugh when I coined the name “Peace For All.” There are plenty of well-meaning NGOs with that sort of earnest name. I actually admire earnestness. One of the things that drove me to write this book was a sense of despair over the failure of non-violence as a strategy in so much political discourse.

You mentioned in an interview that death is a recurrent theme in your work, that you think about it a lot. Vikas thinks about death a lot. There’s also a moment where Vikas sees an SBI board and begins to cry because he feels like he’s met an old friend. (I presumed it was a reflection of your wistfulness for India) Do you wonder if you impart much of yourself to your characters? Do you develop a fondness for those parts of them?

I often use death to put things in perspective. I realise that my time here is limited. So in that sense death and ageing are always on my mind. They can also help clarify the motivations of others — why people who have adopted one way of life mighty wildly swing to another. Death is like a magnet that reveals people’s craziness.

It’s interesting that you call attention to that SBI moment, because I wrote that not when I was living in the US, but when I was in Bengaluru for a year-and-a-half for a job. I didn’t miss India. But I felt that a man who is as far gone as Vikas, who has lost his children, who has become, in a sense, an immigrant from normal life, might find himself at the mercy of all sorts of powerful forces— the government being one of them. And the SBI was a manifestation of that. The book is also a meditation on the economic forces behind terrorism and art. Vikas is a struggling artist. It isn’t an accident that the image of a bank leads to his public breakdown.

As for your final question, there are huge parts of me in every character, but — perhaps this is a sad thing to admit — I am not fond of these parts. When a character says something intelligent, though, I am relieved.

Is there a character that you’re proudest of creating?

I have the greatest fondness for Ayub, because he’s a very intelligent man, a man with noble intentions, who gets drawn into a spiral of nihilism and self-destruction.

Is there a person whose reading list you’d want to be on?

Obama, now that he can freely discuss controversial literature without fear of accidentally endorsing it. Or maybe just Dibakar Banerjee, so he can make a Delhi film out of the book.

You’ve mentioned that you began by writing rhyming poems and that Delhi’s milieu encouraged flowery writing. Is there an old work that you’d be happy to share?

Oh god, absolutely not!

Sneha Vakharia is a Delhi-based journalist and writer

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