Every now and then you come across a novel so honest that it leaves you gasping for breath like a blow to the solar plexus. The emotion is raw, the story honest and the language simply that of the people. You know that once you start reading it will break your heart and yet you keep turning the pages because the story has to be told.

The narrator in Indra Sinha’s Animal’s People is Animal who speaks to a tape “mashin” but addresses the Eye who reads his words. He determines the pace, the content and the context according to his will. “I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being,” says he in his introduction. But at the age of six, he wakes up to a fever that bends his spine permanently and reduces him to a life lived at the level of the crotch. The cause: The poison that leaked into Khaufpur “that night”.

Animal is the damage the gas left in its wake. His life is the embodiment of the destruction. The people around him are a direct result of what happens when despair drags the soul into a dark and bottomless pit. And yet because they are human there is hope and that hope gives strength to the determination to fight the good fight. Zafar, an idealistic and charismatic leader, leads the struggle against the “Kampani” in “Amrika” that refuses to take responsibility for its actions. He is joined by Nisha, the daughter of a famed local musician, who is also the love of Animal's life. When an American doctor Elli Barber joins the fray she changes the equation leading to intrigue, betrayal and an explosive ending.

... contd.