‘Dark side of India’ gets Adiga Booker

Not everyone quits a job to think up a story of a rickshawpuller’s son who writes letters to 'Mr Premier' Wen Jiabao over seven days.

Not everyone quits a job to think up a story of a rickshawpuller’s son who writes letters to “Mr Premier” Wen Jiabao over seven days. Not everyone wins the Man Booker Prize at the age of 33. Aravind Adiga has done both; the second he has managed by a whisker — he turns 34 a week from now on October 23.

After his debut novel, The White Tiger, won the Booker for 2008 and 50,000 pounds, Adiga, uncharacteristically beaming in a tux in London, said, “The first thing I’m going to do is find a bank I can put it in. I’m serious!” And then turned characteristically serious: “It was important for me to present someone from the colossal underclass, which is perhaps as big as 400 million, and to do so without sentimentality.”

In Booker’s 40th year, Adiga — the second youngest winner after Ben Okri, who won in 1991 aged 32 — bested fellow Indian Amitav Ghosh, Australian Steve Toltz, Irishman Sebastian Barry and Britons Linda Grant and Philip Hensher.

Michael Portillo, chairman of the five-member judging panel, gave the reason. “My criterion was ‘does it knock my socks off?’ and this one did,” he said. “What set this one apart was its originality. For many of us this was entirely new territory — the dark side of India.”

Adiga’s hero Balram Halwai sees Delhi, driving around in a Honda City. Three years ago, in his previous life as a journalist with Time magazine, Adiga too wandered, not in a car, picking up material for the book.

“In Delhi, I travelled a lot by bus and autorickshaw, and spoke to as many drivers and conductors as I could — they are the sources for many of the things Balram says in the book,” Adiga said. “He is a composite of many people whom I’ve encountered in many travels.”

And travelled he has. Born in Chennai and brought up in Mangalore, Adiga left with his family for Sydney when he was 16. Then came a Bachelors degree at Columbia University and a Masters at Oxford, before he went back to New York as a business journalist. How did a doctor’s son, who dreamt all along of becoming a writer, end up pacing Wall Street? “I did not want to continue in academics. The only job that could use a person with no skills but those provided by an English Masters was journalism,” he laughed. “I became a business journalist mostly out of necessity —- no other jobs were available at the time —- but it proved to a rewarding experience, by exposing me to economics, the stock market and other such financial and economic aspects of living.”

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Adiga came to New Delhi in 2003 as Time’s correspondent, a job he quit in late 2005. That was the year Chinese premier Wen visited Bangalore, and Adiga began his novel. “There is a real historical hook to the opening,” Adiga said. “I wanted things in the book to correspond to reality, but filtered through Balram’s views. India and China are supposed to take over the world this century —- or so we keep hearing in the press —- so I thought it would be nice to present a narrative that acknowledges that apparent takeover of the world and treats it ironically.”

A few months after The White Tiger was released, Adiga suspected HarperCollins, his publisher in India, was making up sales figures. He need not worry anymore. All he needs now is a way to deal with his fame —- and some solitude to finish his second novel. (With agency inputs)