Permutations of grief dominate a good part of the sections devoted to the Khuranas. We watch them grope for each other; repel each other; fight, make love and then decamp from whatever solaces each has to afford the other. Theirs are the most thrilling, tender and tragic parts of the novel, which are also periodically funny. It’s hard to know what to make of the novel’s flirtation with drollery, since it really is just a flirtation; no one would call this a tragicomic narrative. In some way, these moments of levity feel almost grossly misplaced, which has the strange effect of also making them feel just right. Drollery is exceedingly difficult to quote out of context, so you’ll have to trust me that when Deepa — the boys’ mother — thinks about her future with her husband but is “in denial too, convinced they would kill themselves,” it’s almost a laugh-out-loud moment. Or that when Mansoor’s mother, Afsheen, thinks about his future, becoming “sentimental and hysterical,” one gets the feeling the narrator is gently and lovingly mocking her for her outsize passion.

Notably, such moments are confined to the novel’s first 100 pages or so, as if to perch us atop its slide toward fatalism. As the narrative suggests, nothing recovers from a bomb — not our humanity, our politics or even our faith. Not entirely, in any case, which is best borne out by Mansoor, whose injuries appear relatively cosmetic but come to traumatize his life for the next six years in the form of debilitating carpal tunnel syndrome. He wants to be a computer programmer; you can imagine how good his chances are.

Of course, the most insidious effects of violence are psychological, and certainly Mansoor, who was only 12 when the blast went off, has not escaped them. His pain is physical and mental and unrelenting — the very sort of thing that makes a man vulnerable to persuasion. But not in the way I expected, which is another of the novel’s pleasures: It continued to surprise me. Mansoor adopts a way of life that seems perilously close to what we Westerners — what this Westerner — associate with a radicalized form of Islam that will not coexist with competing ideologies. But Mahajan’s take on what it means and how it feels to be a practicing Muslim is entirely more sophisticated and nuanced, which is what keeps Mansoor’s story riveting and sad.

Case in point: None of the terrorists in the novel are radicalized Muslims. None of them murder in the misappropriated name of Allah. Instead, they are political activists, some more disaffected than others, in pursuit of independence for Kashmir in one instance and an end to the persecution of Muslims in another (though this is a reductive summary). The violence against Muslims in Gujarat in 2002 — what many call a pogrom orchestrated by then Chief Minister Narendra Modi — is a motivating force in the novel for several Muslims seeking justice, or even just peaceful coexistence. But both seem unattainable, the one because mistrust and rancor between Hindus and Muslims are not easily dispatched, and the other because justice doesn’t serve at the pleasure of the bomb. “A bomb was a child,” one terrorist thinks. “A tantrum directed at all things.” And since when does a child get its way?