Between the Assassinations is to summer reading what Slum-dog Millionaire was to feelgood movies: the book, like the film, beneath a deceptively beguiling surface, is a Dickensian-dark view of child labour, corruption, poverty, and ruthless privilege in modern India.
Aravind Adiga won the Man Booker prize with his first novel, The White Tiger, a savage picture of modern India seen through the eyes of a murderous entrepreneur hell-bent on power and success. Between the Assassinations sometimes reads like a prelude to that book: from the variously hopeless lives we encounter in these stories could have emerged the appalling yet dazzling anti-hero of Tiger. Set in Kittur, an imaginary everytown on the Malabar coast, the narratives are interleaved with deadpan excerpts from a ‘guidebook’: each a bland description of the neighbourhood where the subsequent story will be set — railway station, pornographic cinema, Jesuit school for boys and so on. The irony lies in the mismatch between the guidebook and what exists beyond its pages.
The book leads us through the streets of the city and into the overlapping lives of its inhabitants in the years between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son Rajiv in 1991. Nasty, brutish and short gets nowhere near the awfulness of these lives: what stands between despair and survival could be a unit of currency almost too small to compute.
A boy finds a gutter to sleep in alongside a sewer and counts himself lucky — until the Boss shows up, demanding payment for the space or else. A small girl begs her way ten miles across town to earn money for her drug-addict father — who then beats her for her pains. The endearingly named Xerox, a peddlar of pirated books, attempts repeatedly, despite limbs broken in police custody, to sell a copy of The Satanic Verses.
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