I have to admit that I was terrified of ending the book, precisely because I go around saying about pretty much every book I read, "It fell apart at the end." I have friends who are waiting to ridicule me forever.

The only solace can come from the state. In the Boston bombing, only a handful of people died in the end, even though a huge number were injured - and that was a huge attack in America. The government was very involved in providing aid and following up in the investigation.

There's no way of preventing the media from covering attacks as huge events and until the media stops doing that, they will be huge in people's consciousness, and we have to treat these things differently from the smaller random acts of violence.

But I think the goal of all these attacks is the same, which is to seize maximum media attention. Maybe some of these attacks were meant to be small. Some of them might have been failed larger attacks. And some of them are just part of a new strategy of doing lots of tiny attacks, as opposed to one large one.

It's the feeling right from the beginning that the government is not on your side, the government thinks you're going to use this opportunity to cheat them, even though you've just been through this huge trauma.

In India the government is very chaotic and poorly run. They are forced into action by public pressure. When it's a larger event, there's a lot more pressure - to do something, to investigate, to give some kind of compensation to the victims. With the smaller attacks, the pain is concentrated on those affected, because they've not just been forgotten by everyone else, which is normal, they've also been forgotten by the government, which lets the cases drag on for years in the courts.

The feeling I got from my research is that the victims of bombings end up becoming as alienated from the government as the terrorists who cause the attacks.