After the Peshawar school attack in 2014 , in which 148 were killed, a majority of them children, harrowing images came out of Pakistan — of tiny black shoes lying in blood-splattered classrooms and of mothers wailing as they leaned over small coffins. Last week, in Parkland in Florida, when Fred Guttenberg lost his daughter Jamie in the gun attack that killed 16 others, he simply did not know “what to do next”, he told The Washington Post . “My wife and I are broken.”
The worst tragedies are arguably those in which children die. While news reports focus on the immediate reactions of leaders and affected families, they are quick to move on to the next big news. Where reporters don’t linger, writers do. In his novel The Association of Small Bombs , Karan Mahajan examines a bomb from all sides: How does a bomb-maker feel when his creation doesn’t cause as much destruction as he would have liked? How does a survivor feel when his two friends die and he narrowly escapes? And how do Vikas and Deepa Khurana cope with the loss of their two boys? Initially filled with rage, Deepa is determined to take revenge. But the case drags on and she becomes disheartened when she realises that what for her was a life-changing event is nothing but another attack, another number, for the rest of the world. Vikas and Deepa break down in turns, struggle to keep their marriage alive, and wallow in the guilt of having let their children go to the marketplace in Delhi where the bomb went off. They later start an organisation to remember smaller blasts. “The smaller attacks are more deadly, because a few have to carry the burden of the majority,” says Vikas. “Then, as these victims’ grievances get forgotten, as the blasts themselves are forgotten, the victims of these small bombs turn against the government instead of the terrorists. Is that a situation we want? No. That’s why… we’ve decided to take matters into our own hands.”
In Russell Banks’ The Sweet Hereafter , in the fictional town of Sam Dent, 14 children are killed when a school bus named Shoe goes down a ravine and into a sand pit one winter day. Says the father of one: “It was as if we, too, had died… and now we were lodged temporarily in a kind of purgatory, waiting to be moved to wherever the other dead ones had gone.” Banks looks at the tragedy from the positions of four people — the bus driver, a survivor, a parent who loses his child, and a lawyer — to underscore how unpredictable life is and how people live as shadows of their former selves after tragedy strikes.
