Day: July 28, 2012

“Between the Assassinations” by Aravind Adiga

Between Assassinations- Aravind Adiga

The moment you notice title ‘Between the Assassinations’ and the author as ‘Aravind Adiga’ on a bookshelf, you are most likely to pick that book. And, then as you flip through its inside front cover or the back cover to glance at what the book is all about, you are going to give it a go for the reading.

The teaser page has tourist promo of Kittur, a fictional village located somewhere between Goa and Calicut on the coast of South India. The place is considered worth visiting for seven days.

That gives the structure to the book’s cartographer like precision – “the arches of the railway station frame your first view of Kittur as you arrive as a passenger on the Madras Mail” – and a novelist’s humanity – “The problem is here.. there is a beast inside us”- through the chronologically arranged stories of important landmarks in the history of locations. History and fiction are so well knit in a realistic manner with first and third person narration, providing vintage view to the ‘everyman’ society of an ‘everytown’ Kittur, between the two great assassinations on 31 October 1984 and 21 May 1991. The seven years in between these tragedies are punctuated by several other fictionalized events in the stories narrated.

Stories in the collection are of diverse nature, having protagonists, portraying various shades of characters in our multicultural, ethnic and religious ambience. Adiga’s great theme is power relations—between rich and poor, master and servant, high caste and low caste, majority and minority, corrupt bureaucracy and hard-working citizens —and, the obvious tensions such relationships cause.

The stories could have have been no more than a series of serious-minded tableaux about poverty and disenfranchisement, worthy like a Booker-winner, but not all that enjoyable to read. But by using the earthy native flavor of the language, Adiga has ensured that the stories retain the subtleties of the day-to-day ground realities of a typical Indian town.

Here are a few examples:

“Taking the glasses one at a time to the tables, he delighted the roughman who came to the teashop, by interrupting their conversation with shouts of ‘One-a! Two-a! Three-a!’ while slamming the glasses down in front of them.” {“DAY ONE: THE TRAIN STATION”}

“He bent his head low, rolled his spittle into a ball and prepared to drop it into one of his glasses… He sucked in the spittle. Unzipping his cotton trousers in three gestures, he let them slide down. Bundling the first two fingers of his right hand together, he stuck them deep into his butt; he brought two fingers out, dipped them into one of the glasses of whiskey, and stirred vigorously.” {“DAY TWO: THE BUNDER”}

“For many years this educational institution had spoken to him – spoken rudely; teachers had caned him, headmaster had suspended and threatened to expel him..” {“DAY TWO (CONTINUED) OUR SCHOOL”}

“He spoke of other things that made his head boil. Once, India had been ruled by three foreigners: England, France and Portugal. Now their place has been taken by three native-born thugs: Betrayal, Bungling and Backstabbing.” {“DAY TWO (EVENING): LIGHTHOUSE HILL (THE BASE OF THE HILL”}

“The man and boy got off the bus together. He stood on the main road and waited, while the boy blew his nose and shook off phlegm to the ground.. “ {“DAY SIX: THE SULTAN’S BATTERY”}

And what the protagonists have in common outside of Kittur is a rage both devastatingly funny and heart-breakingly human makes the book well worth a read.

Here are some other interesting reviews published when the book was originally published:

And, one can read more on Araving Adiga on his own site @ http://www.aravindadiga.com/ .  The site does seem to be maintained and updated, hence does not seem to contain his more recent works or articles.

[Between the Assassinations ǁ Author: Aravind Adiga ǁ Publisher   Picador, an imprint of Pan Macmillan Ltd. – www.panmacmillan.com ǁ 2008 ǁ ISBN 978 – 0 – 330 – 45054 – 6]