That catchy title requires some explanation.  There’s one big bomb at the beginning of this novel by Karan Mahajan, the car bomb that explodes in a crowded Delhi market, claiming many lives, including two young brothers, Tushar and Nakal Khurana.  But it’s the myriad of smaller explosions that follow the car-bomb, the emotional detonations in the lives of the survivors and perpetrators, that dominate this compelling and unusual story.

Although we hear every day about terrorists, it’s rare for them to be given a human face.  Part of Mahajan’s intention is to display how pathetic and mundane that face can be and how easily idealism can get twisted by rather ordinary circumstances into something much more sinister and destructive.  If, perhaps, we hear too much about terrorists, we hear far too little about or from the individual victims of sectarian violence. They have become an amorphous, faceless, voiceless mass; little more than statistics.  Mahajan is well aware of that, portraying sensitively the different devastations of the boys’ parents and friend.

I  liked this novel a lot, but I don’t think it succeeds completely.  The author might have been too ambitious by attempting to draw survivors, victims, and perpetrators into his field of vision.  The narrative felt overcrowded.  Sympathy became too widely and thinly distributed, and the consequence of that was a blurred focus.