Book talks of trauma left behind by bombings

An intense thought about the 1996 blast in the capital's busy Lajpat Nagar market gave writer Karan Mahajan the idea for his new book which deals with the psychosomatic fear induced in people by bombings.
"The Association of Small Bombs" is about the nullity and grief that binds terrorists and their victims.
Shortly after the 26/11 Mumbai attacks, Mahajan began thinking intensely about this blast at Lajpat Nagar market, near where he grew up.
"I don't know why the memory of the blast came to me then, or why it seemed urgent, but I decided to pursue it. I didn't know then that it would become a way to write about a 15-year period of terror," says Mahajan, whose first novel "Family Planning" was a finalist for the Dylan Thomas Prize in 2010.

In 1996, when brothers Tushar and Nakul Khurana, collect their family's television set from a repair shop with their friend Mansoor Ahmed, disaster strikes. The blast claims the lives of the two boys. Mansoor survives, bearing its physical and psychological effects.
"The Association of Small Bombs" is also an exploration of the Khurana and Ahmed families coping with the after effects of the traumatic but forgotten tragedy. Woven with their story is the tale of Shockie, a Kashmiri bomb-maker who forsakes his own life for the independence of his homeland.
Mahajan says the stories in "The Association of Small Bombs" are researched but not real. The book, published by HarperCollins India, is scheduled for release next year.

"One takes facts that fit with the emotional make-up of the novelist and flies with them. It would be wrong to read the novel as any sort of historical document. It is fiction," he told PTI.