Karan Mahajan - The Association of Small Bombs

________

At home, Afsheen fed her son his favorite mix of bhindi, gobhi, and khichdi and asked him a thousand questions. Sharif was dumb and silent. Mansoor was dazed to be home — in this new place, with all the old photographs and leftover Oriental curios galaxied around him. All these years he had been imagining returning to the old house in South Ex — it had taken his parents years to admit they had moved.

“And remember Sultan, Farhan Uncle’s golden Labrador? He wanted to give us the puppy,” his mother was going on, as if he’d been living with them all these years. “Do you want to go out?” she asked finally.

“No,” Mansoor said. “I want to stay here with you.”

He never went out again.

Thanks to: Alexander Benaim for his intelligence and offhand erudition; to Alice Kim, Nicholas Casey, Altaf Tyrewala, Ross Perlin, Thomas Meaney, and Masooma Ali for close reads; to Laura Davis for kibitzing; to Corey Miller for line edits; to Jin Auh at the Wylie Agency for her deadpan humor and literary decisiveness; to Jacqueline Ko at the Wylie Agency for her backstage ministrations and friendship; to Catrin Evans, Tracy Bohan, and Ella Griffiths at the Wylie Agency for their foreign sagacity; to Allison Lorentzen at Viking for her editorial brilliance and suaveness; to Diego Núñez at Viking for his jugglery of the aspects of production; to Karthika VK and Ajitha GS at HarperCollins India and Juliet Brooke at Chatto & Windus for shrewd edits; to Suhani Mahajan, Rafaqat Ali, Sudhir Aggarwal, Mahtab Alam, Gurdial S. Mander, Pulkit Sharma, Ankit Pogula, Zubin Shroff, and Tvisha Shroff for top-notch information; to the Michener Center, the Keene Prize for Literature, the MacDowell Colony, the Corporation of Yaddo, and the UCross Foundation for literary and financial support; to Jim Magnuson, Elizabeth McCracken, and Michael Adams for mentorship; to Jim Crace, Joshua Cohen, Adam Johnson, and Norma Rush for their early endorsements; to Samyuktha Varma, Narayana Murthy, Karim Dimechkie, Travis Klunick, Tom Rosenberg, Tory Stewart, Greg Wayne, Amelia Lester, Ben Lytal, Anthony Ha, Tony Tulathimutte, Vauhini Vara, Jenny Zhang, Rachel Kushner, Marla Akin, Debbie Dewees, and to all my friends in Delhi, Bangalore, Austin, and New York City for their support. Finally, to my parents and brother for their unbending love. To Francesca Mari for everything.