Bjorn
Reader
Aravind Adiga: Between The Assassinations (2008)
I haven't read Adiga's Booker-winning debut novel The White Tiger (yet, I should add). However, I've recently read at least two Indian novels - Farahad Zama's The Marriage Bureau for Rich People and Vikas Swarup's Q&A - that try to present the issues facing modern India for a Western audience. There's a lot of talk about the conflict between the old caste society and new "modern" values, clashes between different religions, the supposed but not all-encompassing rise from third-world poverty to a major economic power, etc, but in both cases they end up as simple fluff. Let's all just get along, and if you're lucky you'll win a lot of money and move out of the shack and be happy, and hey, here's a dance number in saris.
Not so in Between The Assassinations, a collection of 14 loosely connected short stories set in (a fictionalised version of) the city of Kittur. The assassinations referred to are the ones of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 and 1991, and even though the book is divided into seven days, they're not necessarily presented in order. Adiga doesn't offer solutions or easy ways out; at best, he offers a black sense of humour. We get to meet 14 people from all walks of life, from beggars to rich industrialists - and when I say 14, I mean millions; because in setting every story in the same city, having the characters cross each others' paths, the fleeting but always present references to the larger world outside, we're never allowed to forget that they all make up a part of a much larger puzzle. That's just one of the rather delicious dark ironies in this; everyone knowing their place is part of their failure in escaping it.
Obviusly, some stories stand out more than others. Some are darkly funny (the wealthy low-caste school boy who thinks he's supposed to become a terrorist; the journalist who tries to tell the truth about corruption), others desperately grim (the bicycle kuli who realises his body is giving up at 30, and that every day he wastes more calories than he can buy with the money he earns), and some just depressingly realistic. Adiga sticks to a very limited third-person narration, taking us into the head of each protagonist (not that many of them are in a position to do much protagonisin'), having each story tell one character's truth only to move on to a different one with no clear moral.
And then there's the frame story: Adiga prefaces every section of the book as well as every story with a short, supposedly objective description of part of the city: here's the shopping district; here's the various churches, temples and mosques; here's the park; here's the adult cinema. There are fact sheets about population and chronology. And then he undercuts the tourist brochure-like descriptions of buildings and architecture with the lives of the people there, everything that keeps them there, the invisible but real patterns that make sure things don't change too much. "The untouchables are 90% of this town," say politicians trying to curry favour with them, while a fact sheet elsewhere in the book points out that they're nowhere near that many. Every story here can be read on its own; yet together, they start questioning each other, mistrusting each other, undercutting and trying to gain advantage over each other. Some fail. Some succeed, only to still find themselves trapped in a book with cheerful Indian colours on the jacket. And it begins, and ends, with people getting killed.
***00+
I haven't read Adiga's Booker-winning debut novel The White Tiger (yet, I should add). However, I've recently read at least two Indian novels - Farahad Zama's The Marriage Bureau for Rich People and Vikas Swarup's Q&A - that try to present the issues facing modern India for a Western audience. There's a lot of talk about the conflict between the old caste society and new "modern" values, clashes between different religions, the supposed but not all-encompassing rise from third-world poverty to a major economic power, etc, but in both cases they end up as simple fluff. Let's all just get along, and if you're lucky you'll win a lot of money and move out of the shack and be happy, and hey, here's a dance number in saris.
Not so in Between The Assassinations, a collection of 14 loosely connected short stories set in (a fictionalised version of) the city of Kittur. The assassinations referred to are the ones of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi in 1984 and 1991, and even though the book is divided into seven days, they're not necessarily presented in order. Adiga doesn't offer solutions or easy ways out; at best, he offers a black sense of humour. We get to meet 14 people from all walks of life, from beggars to rich industrialists - and when I say 14, I mean millions; because in setting every story in the same city, having the characters cross each others' paths, the fleeting but always present references to the larger world outside, we're never allowed to forget that they all make up a part of a much larger puzzle. That's just one of the rather delicious dark ironies in this; everyone knowing their place is part of their failure in escaping it.
Obviusly, some stories stand out more than others. Some are darkly funny (the wealthy low-caste school boy who thinks he's supposed to become a terrorist; the journalist who tries to tell the truth about corruption), others desperately grim (the bicycle kuli who realises his body is giving up at 30, and that every day he wastes more calories than he can buy with the money he earns), and some just depressingly realistic. Adiga sticks to a very limited third-person narration, taking us into the head of each protagonist (not that many of them are in a position to do much protagonisin'), having each story tell one character's truth only to move on to a different one with no clear moral.
And then there's the frame story: Adiga prefaces every section of the book as well as every story with a short, supposedly objective description of part of the city: here's the shopping district; here's the various churches, temples and mosques; here's the park; here's the adult cinema. There are fact sheets about population and chronology. And then he undercuts the tourist brochure-like descriptions of buildings and architecture with the lives of the people there, everything that keeps them there, the invisible but real patterns that make sure things don't change too much. "The untouchables are 90% of this town," say politicians trying to curry favour with them, while a fact sheet elsewhere in the book points out that they're nowhere near that many. Every story here can be read on its own; yet together, they start questioning each other, mistrusting each other, undercutting and trying to gain advantage over each other. Some fail. Some succeed, only to still find themselves trapped in a book with cheerful Indian colours on the jacket. And it begins, and ends, with people getting killed.
***00+