Summary

The novel begins with a short, seven-page section entitled “Blast: May 1996.” The section contains just one chapter, Chapter 0, and describes in detail an explosion in Lajpat Nagar, a crowded market in India where, we later learn, Nakul and Tushar Khurana, along with 11 others, are killed.

The omniscient narrator recounts the explosion in past tense and often jumps around in time and space. Although the book starts with the bomb going off, “for which Mr. and Mrs. Khurana were not present” (3), the narrator, without breaking, skips ahead in time to tell us that Mr. Khurana dug through leaves to find “the bodies of his two sons” (4). But Mr. Khurana did not find them. By the time he arrived at the market, his sons were already “dead at a nearby hospital” (4).

The narrator delves further into the past...