Aravind Adiga maps the moral geography of a small town between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. This book is the laboratory that would produce The White Tiger
The existentialist perspective on the crisis of humanity has made the Joe Christmases and the pathetic little flies of Katherine Mansfield the only authentic representatives of man allowed us. They are Everyman, sliding down the wall of the glass back into the sea of life, only to secure a toehold on that wall and make a fresh effort at extricating themselves, only to slide back into the muck. Beginning in the ditch, they return to the ditch.

Man Booker Prize winner Aravind Adiga’s new (or should one say older?) book, Between the Assassinations, which is being released next week, hints in every page that the human individual attains his apotheosis when he is finally shorn of all adornment, braving the storm naked on the heath — the very picture of “unaccommodated” man. We don’t, of course, see the evolution or devolution of the characters to that end, catching them as we do in passing, voyeuristically watching a slice of their lives, but always at a moment of crisis. They all fell off the course that life should perhaps have taken, but didn’t, and are thus characterised by alienation. Each one of them is an outsider, in fact, more accurately, a “stranger” to life — estranged from its dark, sad absurdity.

At 12, Ziauddin, the protagonist of the first tale, is put on a bus by his father without a penny and asked to hang around the Kittur market till someone took him in. One teastall owner, not unwilling to hire a Muslim, gives a job to the boy — the epitome of naivete. He goes home to work the fields when the rains come and returns, four months later, changed: one doesn’t know what happened to him in the period but he rages and rants against “Hindus” and reiterates that he’s a “Pathan”. He also steals and loses jobs, whether given by Hindus or Muslims. As he works as a porter at the station, he is hired by a mysterious stranger, a moneyed and handsome Pathan, who begins his educative process, asking him to count trains. Finally, he employs him to count the trains carrying Indian soldiers to and from a military base being set up. The stranger is a terrorist, possibly foreign, who arouses Zia’s hatred for those who have wronged him and his community. Zia, the volatile and messed-up illiterate, decides to get out at this point. This story encompasses genuine social exploitation and prejudice and their life-destroying capacity even as it identifies the other danger — the exploitation of that sense of being wronged for a sinister purpose on a different scale. Zia is a victim of society, so brutalised that he rages at the universe, but pulls back from the brink and returns to his original state of exploitation.

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