Book Review

By Derryll White

Mahajan, Karan (2016). The Association of Small Bombs

One of the first things that Karan Mahajan made clear to me is that the desire to stereotype and discriminate is not unique to North America. He has Sikh and Hindi people slagging Muslims vehemently. And sad to say, the slights are returned with pipe bombs.

Mahajan is very good at showing the western reader how divided today’s India is by religion. It would seem that partition has left Muslims without a place in many minds, except Pakistan. Muslims living in urban situations such as Delhi consider themselves Indians, whereas non-Muslims would seem to wish them away – to Pakistan.

This book forced me to think in images. Perhaps life is merely a ripple. Mahajan has a small bomb go off in a Delhi market, and from that act the life of all the characters in the novel radiates outward. All of this takes in the normal human drama of religion, pride, sex, fear. It made me think of the things I carry forward from my own youth.

‘The Association of Small Bombs’ demands a lot from the reader – piercing a different culture, extrapolating the meaning of Indian words from the context they are used in. But ultimately this story is about all of us, about the way we manage our individual worlds and personal actions. I would recommend this work for readers who happily question the society they live in and who aspire to a peaceful post Trump and Putin world.

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DELHI – They walked through the annihilating crowds to the car. From the high steel roofs of the stations, birds raced down, avoiding a jungle gym of rafters and rods. People pressed and pushed as the trains hurtled through their routes of shit and piss, plastic and rubber burning weirdly in the background, spicing the air. The station was so bloated with people that the loss of a few would hardly be tragic or even important.

DEFINITION – He’d become a man whose kids ahd died. This was his chief distinction. It occurred to him now that people are defined much more be their association with death than by what they do in life. Poor thing, she’s a widow, they say. She lost her mother when she was ten to cancer.

DELHI – Delhi – baked in exquisite concrete shapes – rose, cracked, spread out. It made no sense – the endlessness, the expanse. In Kashmir, no matter how confusing a town was, you could always shrink it down to size by looking at it from a hill. Delhi – flat, burning, mixed up, smashed together from pieces of tin and tarpaulin, spreading on the arid plain of the North – offered no respite from itself. Delhi never ended. The houses along the road were like that too: jammed together, the balconies cramped with cycles, boxes, brooms, clotheslines, buckets, the city minutely re-creating itself down to the smallest cell. From one balcony a boy with a runny nose waved to another. A woman with big haunches sat astride a stool next to a parked scooter, she was peeling onions into a steel plate and laughing. Before municipal walls painte3d with pictures of weapon-toting gods – meant to keep men from urinating – men urinated. Delhi. Fuck. I love it too.

THE ELDERLY – “why aren’t there old people in New York?” He looked at Mansoor. “They’re all in retirement homes, of course. Hidden away from sight the way dead people are immediately put in a morgue or buried. In America, you see, you’re not supposed to take care of the elderly. You’re supposed to look after yourself, chase your dreams..”

RATIONALE – “People say 9/11 was the worst terror attack of all time – was it? I think the small bombs that we hear about all the time, that go off in unknown markets, killing five or six, are worse. They concentrate the pain on the lives of a few. Better to kill generously rather than stingily.”

– Derryll White once wrote books but now chooses to read and write about them.  When not reading he writes history for the web at www.basininstitute.org.

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