All acts of terror are shocking but the Gujarat bombs, both the ones that went off and the ones that didn’t, are peculiarly unnerving. Not because of the evident planning and coordination of the explosions — synchronized or serial explosions seem to have become a standard feature of terrorist violence in India in recent times — but because the people who designed these carnivals of violence seem to be post-modern villains who both quote from and take their cues from popular cinema.

When I first read reports in the newspapers that the pattern of the Ahmedabad bomb explosions seemed inspired by Ram Gopal Varma’s film, Contract, I didn’t pay much attention. The reports claimed that there were uncanny similarities between the film and the terrorist atrocity. The terrorists in the film had apparently set off explosions in hospitals a little while after the first blasts, to target relief and rescue operations. Real life and real conspirators appeared to have mimicked the movie because the hospital bombings in Ahmedabad occurred an hour after the first explosions. Doctors were killed and, according to news reports, some good samaritans who had helped the people injured in the earlier blasts by taking them to hospitals, lost their lives as well. I thought this was a coincidence rather than a connection. I was sceptical because it seemed unlikely that terrorists about to do something as hideous and irreversible as blowing up people randomly, would need a Bollywood storyline to inspire them.

I began to take the connection more seriously when I read the threatening email sent to news outlets just before the blasts by a sender named ‘Indian Mujahideen’ from an email address that read: alarbi_gujarat@yahoo.com. “await 5 minutes for the revenge of GUJARAT” was the subject line and the body of the email carried a message that the stagiest scriptwriter in Hindi cinema would have hesitated to write for its most lurid villain:

“In the Name of Allah
The Indian Mujahideen strike again!
Do whatever you can, within 5 minutes from now, feel the terror of Death!”

The hideous truth was that the person who sent the email was in earnest because five minutes after it arrived the bombs did in fact go off and dozens of people in Ahmedabad felt the “terror of Death”. That’s when I began to wonder about the imagination of the conspirators and its connection with the tropes of popular cinema. There are so many movies made in Hollywood that feature a mocking villain taunting both law-enforcers and the fearful public with forewarnings of attacks, that it began to seem reasonable to suspect that life was, in this case, imitating art.

It was Wednesday’s headlines about the 18 bombs in Surat that didn’t go off that seemed to confirm the merger of real terrorists and villains in summer blockbusters. Eighteen live bombs were defused by policemen in Surat throughout the day. For three days running, the police had recovered unexploded bombs and cars loaded with explosives. Many of these bombs were found in congested, working-class areas in the city where terrorists had successfully set off bombs on the first day of the violence. This time round it seemed as if the plotters wanted the police to find the bombs because the newspapers reported that the the explosive devices weren’t wholly concealed. The explosives had been made into boat-shaped objects and wrapped to be visible in coloured paper. They were placed, in two instances, in front of police stations. It was as if the bombs were props in a lethal Easter-egg game, where the policemen were the children and the terrorists were the designers of the diversion.

The use of plot-lines from popular cinema, the warning email before the event, just to let the world know that the conspirators are in complete control, the taunting ‘treasure hunt’ with bombs at every streetcorner, even on the doorsteps of police stations suggest perpetrators who don’t just watch popular cinema as much as live and breathe it. The grotesque playfulness of the Surat episode is particularly hard to reconcile with the idea of adult vengeance for the Gujarat pogroms.

This isn’t to say that the pogrom of 2002, where Muslims were massacred in public view in the presence of policemen, wasn’t on the minds of the bombers. It may well have been. But it’s hard to believe that anyone who had been directly affected by the killings would have plotted his revenge in this preening, taunting, clever-dick way. “The Indian Mujahideen strike again!” — this isn’t raging grief from a pogrom victim; it’s a line out of Zorro.

Because revenge for the Gujarat pogrom this is not. If anything, the bombings will help consolidate the systematic subordination of the province’s Muslims that has been accomplished over the past six years. Every bomb that exploded (or didn’t) helped demonize the community further, justified greater police surveillance and encouraged talk of ‘the enemy within’. There’s something surreal about an act of allegedly Muslim vengeance that allows Narendra Modi to look statesmanlike in the face of violent provocation. One newspaper speculated that Modi’s restraint was part of a concerted effort to re-make his resume for a future bid at becoming prime minister. If it was, then the ‘Indian Mujahideen’ were supplying the cues for a script not of their devising.

For what it’s worth, I don’t think these explosions are the work of local Muslims. If the name “alarbi_gujarat” is any guide, the perpetrator’s provenance is more likely to be Arabia than Gujarat. If it is an Indian Muslim who organized these explosions, he is a comfortable, tech-savvy, grandstanding hipster who probably plays first-person shooter games on a game console while drinking in the kool-aid of some internet hate site. There’s a remote-controlled cleverness to the operation, a leering detachment that suggests a villain who lives half his life in a virtual world and the other half at the movies. May he spend the rest of it in solitary confinement, in a windowless cell.