This one is surely for the critics who were surprised that The White Tiger won the Booker. Though Aravind Adiga had written these stirring clutch of stories of small-town India before the Booker-winner, he didn?t find a publisher. Soon after the Booker victory, however, the collection was on the bookshelves, and, if we may add, it?s a worthy, if not better, companion to Tiger.
If Adiga shone a light on India?s vast area of darkness in The White Tiger, here he gives us a much more nuanced view of what ails small-town India; if not anything else, it helps you understand a character like Bikram Halwai in his Booker winning novel better.
Adiga takes us to Kittur in south-western Karnataka in between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi when the country will open up to reforms and there will be other sweeping changes. In over 250-odd pages, Adiga lays bare the town?s rich and poor, high castes and low castes, oppressor and oppressed, warts and all. Besides the people portraits, what stays with you is the topographical details he provides on Kittur, making it one of the more fascinating characters of the book. In Adiga?s hands, the lighthouse ? for Kittur is a town by the Arabian Sea ? and Angel Talkies, a pornographic cinema theatre, ?when townsfolk give directions, they use Angel Talkies as a reference point?, Umbrella Street, the town?s commercial district, and other streets and buildings come alive.
The people who live in it are touched by what?s happening in Delhi, but only just. They have their own battles to fight ? be it Ziauddin who gets a job in a teashop provided he keeps away from all ?hanky-panky? and struggles to do just that, keep away from trouble; or Abbasi who has to constantly fight corrupt officials to keep his factory running; or Xerox who makes a living by selling pirated books and dares the police with his one act of rebellion; or Shankara who bursts a bomb, hoping to end the 5,000 year old caste system. Like in Tiger, where the spotlight?s on Balram Halwai, Adiga maps the lives of a host of marginalised and dispossessed people who thrive in the heart of darkness. Outsiders in the framework of a ?civilised? world, struggling to get in.
All the stories are compelling, but the ones about journalist Gururaj Kamath, who wants to convey the ?truth and only the truth? about events around him in the newspaper he works for and the sex doctor Ratanakar Shetty who hands out sugar pills to cure venereal diseases are dark and have a resonance with present-day realities.
?What about the Hindu-Muslim riots? Can?t we write about the truth about that, either?? Gururaj asks his editor-in-chief, who in turn explains why the truth cannot be published. As Gururaj walks into the office the next morning, he thinks: ?it is a false earth I am walking on. An innocent man is behind bars, and a guilty man walks free.
Everyone knows that this is so and not one has the courage to change it.? Gururaj loses his job – and mind ? and it?s one of the most chilling images, of the former journalist with pieces of newsprint stuck to his mouth and his jaw moving when we see him last.
If The White Tiger was darkly comic, this isn?t but for a few images – one being that of the prisoner leading two policemen up the hill: ?The odd part is that the man in handcuffs seems to be dragging along the policemen, like a fellow taking two monkeys out for a walk.?
What?s baffling is the publishers didn?t think much of Assassinations when it was first sent to them: it?s a great prequel to The White Tiger.
