Karan Mahajan on where terrorism and evil diverge

When he was 17 years old, Karan Mahajan left India to attend Stanford University in California, arriving the week after the 9/11 terrorist attacks in the United States. It was a political awakening as well as a coming of age. It wasn't his first encounter with terrorism, though — when he was growing up in New Delhi, a bomb exploded in a market near where he lived with his family. Those events percolated in Mahajan's imagination, and years later they informed his second novel, The Association of Small Bombs.

Karan Mahajan currently lives in Austin, Texas, where he is a teacher. He spoke to Eleanor Wachtel from Texas.

On indifference to tragedy in the big city

There's a hustling, but also a self-centred vibe you can get from people in Delhi. ​That's something I didn't want to shy away from in my novel. It's the capital of political power, and there are protests and all sorts of mass movements that happen there. But in many ways, it's become inured to those things. They're treated like just another happening in this big city. And I think the indifference of Delhi is not very different from the indifference of any of the larger cities of India, where if you have 20 million people packed into a tight space, they only have so much time to care about a tragedy happening in one part of the city that's affecting maybe 15 or 20 people. And that is a scary and sad thing, I think, but it's a natural byproduct of overpopulation.

A different kind of terrorist

I think that a lot of terrorists have been middle class and, more surprisingly, many of them have been people who were not directly affected by the things they're angry about. They might have some kind of personal angle — it could be that they feel disenfranchised or discriminated against. Or they feel like they don't fit in. And they transfer their rage onto a much larger issue. That was something I really wanted to dramatize — I didn't want to write about someone who had seen his parents killed in, say, the Gujarat riots in India, and then decided to go kill someone who he thought was responsible for it. It seemed more nuanced to have someone become excited about an abstract idea.

Why less-successful acts make for more-successful fiction

When we talk about 9/11 and 26/11 — which is the shorthand for the Mumbai attacks in 2008 — we're talking about the most successful terrorist attacks in history. When you start trying to study the most successful event of its kind, it actually doesn't make for great fiction because there isn't the kind of failure in it that fiction thrives on. There isn't the kind of drama and disappointment. Also, because those events were so successful, they were overexposed in the media, so there isn't that much more that fiction can add to our understanding of those events.

With these smaller attacks, a lot of them are happening all the time. The motives aren't entirely clear. The effects on victims aren't entirely clear. Something about the smallness made it imperative for me to try to understand it. Most of these terrorist attacks are actually failures, or are smaller than the people who are perpetrating them wanted them to be. And if we look at terrorism that way it becomes a little less frightening than if we think that every attack is the equivalent of a 9/11 or 26/11, which is how the media makes it sound.

The bomb-maker's story

People love talking about the banality of evil and the fact that ordinary people do bad things. I actually want to stay away from that. I do think that, to a degree, the work that [Shockie, a terrorist character in The Association of Small Bombs] does has made him evil. But I also think that he is a technician. He's someone who is very good at concentrating on the details of an operation, whether it's gathering materials for a bomb or knowing where to plant a bomb or making the long journey to terrorize a place. That becomes his chief defining quality in the novel — that he is, and he thinks of himself, chiefly as a bomb-maker, and that by doing that he's also able to avoid thinking about why it is that he's killing so many people or what effect that might have. I think people can connect with that — there's a way in which you can get lost in your work and forget why you started doing that work in the first place. 

Karan Mahajan's comments have been edited and condensed.

Music to close the interview: ​"Boat to Nowhere" composed and performed by Anoushka Shankar.