captivated by India Between the Assassinations

This second book by the Man Booker-winning author Aravind Adiga, is written as a travel guide of short stories within a fictional Indian town of Kittur, between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. Over one week, the reader is taken to all the important areas and introduced to everyday individuals who are trying to eek out a living within the cultural mixing pot of traditional and post-colonial India. At first, the cultural complexity seems to be the key point of difference; the caste system, the blatant corruption, abject poverty and the arrogance of wealth. But slowly each story tells of the eternal human struggle, to be the best person you can, amidst the universal apathy, greed and despair. And in tune, the complex physical surroundings are carefully described as being anything between strikingly beautiful and pungently filthy. Minute details are explained so that it is easy to feel as though you are there in the middle of it all, with an understanding of why things happen the way they do... Kittur symbolises the universal crossroads of our civilisation, between naive enthusiasm and endemic corruption, the brightest, most educated and those unable to read, the downtrodden and greedy, and the crazy rich and unimaginably poor; all within the spiritual and cultural complexity of modern day India. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Each character has their own story which gradually emerges. First of all we meet 12 year old Ziauddin, one of "those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India". Then there is Ramakrishna "Xerox", who has been arrested 21 times for selling illegally photocopied books to students; Shankara, the mixed-caste Brahmin-Hoyka student, who sources products from the underworld to set off a bomb in a Jesuit school to protest against the caste system; Abbasi, the idealistic shirt factory owner, who offers drinks laced with his own shit to corrupt government officials; Mr D'Mello, an assistant headmaster who desperately tried to keep his favourite student away from the pornographic cinema in the middle of town; Ratnakara Shetty, the fake sexologist, who sets out to find a cure for a young boy with venereal disease; the Raos, a childless couple who seek refuge within the forested outskirts of the town and their own circle of social intelligentsia who cannot help mocking them; Keshava, the village boy who achieves his aspiration to become a bus conductor; Gururaj Kamath, the newspaper columnist who incessantly "looks for the truth"; Chenayya, the cycle-cart puller who "could not respect a man in whom there was no rebellion"; Soumya and Raju, the beggar children on a mission to buy smack for their drug-addict father; Jayamma, the sixth daughter for whom her Brahmin father could not afford a dowry, who seeks comfort in DDT fumes; George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellant sprayer who systematically elevates himself to gardener, then chauffeur of a lonely rich Mrs Gomes, before he loses it all by trying to be someone else; and Murali, the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist communist party who falls in love with the poorest young woman in dire circumstances. He cannot afford to marry her and must concentrate on developing his skill for writing stories about real people who want nothing. The book is a compulsive read, if only for a sense of hope at the end. Perhaps the resounding message is the simplest, to appreciate what we have...