Karan Mahajan traces the intimate urgencies of life after a bombing in Delhi. Illustration by Mikkel Sommer

In “The Association of Small Bombs” (Viking), Karan Mahajan’s second novel, Shaukat (Shockie) Guru, a Kashmiri terrorist, considers the explosion he has just set off at a busy market in Delhi and glumly concludes that it “was all anticlimax.” This is a dark thought about mass murder, and a dark joke about the narrative nature of terrorism. For everyone except the men who execute it, a terrorist attack is all climax, the culmination of a story told in secret until the moment it erupts in violence. Only Shockie and his collaborators know that the bomb is actually a second draft—the first one fizzled because of dud wiring. The do-over is as wounding to the terrorist’s twisted pride in his craft as repeating a punch line would be to a comedian’s.

If anticlimax is a flaw in a terrorist’s plot, it’s critical to Mahajan’s. He has shown Shockie’s bomb going off some fifty pages earlier, a “flat, percussive event” that he plants in the novel’s first sentence, forcing an instant narrative crisis. A writer puts himself in a bind if he begins his story at its point of highest intensity: where to go from here? Mahajan’s answer is to strike out in all directions. The book’s subject inspires its form, a series of shrapnel-like sections that cover the same temporal territory from distinct points of view. “Blast: May 1996,” the omniscient opening sequence that describes the bombing, is followed by “Victims: May 1996” and then “Terrorists: May 1996,” where we see the planning of the attack. Later, Mahajan pushes deeper into the bomb’s aftermath, following a year in the lives of Deepa and Vikas Khurana, a Hindu couple whose two young sons are among the dead, before turning to a Muslim friend of the boys who had gone with them to the market and survived. The effect is a kind of recurring recoil, an exercise in interrupted momentum. Every time we think we’re moving forward, we’re thrown back into the past.

Mahajan, who is in his early thirties, grew up in New Delhi and moved to the United States fifteen years ago. His eagerness to go at the bomb from every angle suggests a voracious approach to fiction-making, a daring imaginative promiscuity that moves beyond the scope of his first, very good novel, “Family Planning” (2008). A comedy of manners that recounts the trials and tribulations of a government minister in Delhi saddled with a stolid wife and more than a dozen children, that book was an exercise in light social satire, which, like all successful entries in its genre, worked by achieving a narrow consistency of tone, the antic goings on at Parliament and the dinner table leavened by the amused detachment of the voice recounting them.

Tragedy deepens Mahajan’s range. In the first few pages of his new novel, he renders the spectacle of the bombing with a languid, balletic beauty, pitting the unhurried composure of his prose against the violence of the events it describes. We see how the car that held the weapon “came apart in a dizzying flock of shards,” an image that seems, before its meaning fully lands, as serene and natural as the sudden flight of birds that it conjures. People press their hands to their wounds “as if they had smashed eggs against their bodies in hypnotic agreement and were unsure about what to do with the runny, bloody yolk.”

Mahajan has a cinematic attunement to the spectacle of disaster, and he often focusses on the minor rather than the grandiose, to eerie effect. At his sons’ cremation, Vikas Khurana “noticed that outside the ring of burning flesh and wood, little snotty children ran naked playing with upright rubber tires. Behind them a cow was dreadlocked in ropes and eating ash and the wild village children kicked it in the gut.” This string of images is unfurled so skillfully that the garish, indifferent vitality of the children and the placidity of the cow turn our attention away from the pyre itself. It takes a beat before we grasp just what kind of ash is being eaten.

A writer working with such material could easily slip from poised precision into a doleful rut. But Mahajan hasn’t lost his sharp comic impulses. The bravura set piece tracking the terrorists’ plot takes the substance of a thriller and bends it into a mishap-strewn heist with buddy-comedy overtones. To get to Delhi from Kathmandu, where he lives in exile with his fellow-conspirators, Shockie disguises himself as a farmer and undertakes a days-long trip by bus and train, a journey marked by one indignity after another: bad roads, oppressive heat, aggressive mosquitoes, ketchup sandwiches. His accomplice is a dolt with dandruff issues; their contact in Delhi is a useless snob. Shockie, who, at twenty-six, is fat and balding, nonetheless nurses a sense of his own superiority; he daydreams about his hero, Ramzi Yousef, the “genius of terror” behind the 1993 World Trade Center attack, and takes “a certain sensual, even feminine, pleasure in shopping for materials for a bomb.” But just as Mahajan seems on the verge of flattening Shockie into a buffoon, he pulls back. Here is Shockie arriving in Delhi, delighting in the city’s pandemonium with a small-town boy’s awe of its supercharged life: