Between assassinations

Between the Assassinations

By Aravind Adiga

The Free Press/Simon & Schuster, 341 pages, $32

INDIAN journalist and novelist Aravind Adiga knows

how to write.

Each of the stories in this collection by the 2008 Man Booker winner for The White Tiger takes only a page or so to snare the reader. The protagonists of Adiga's stories are not heroes; they are often not even good people. But what happens to them matters.

Between the Assassinations, set in the fictional Malabar coast city of Kittur between the 1984 assassination of Indira Gandhi and the 1991 assassination of her son Rajiv, was actually written before The White Tiger.

Connected in the form of a travelogue for Kittur, many (but not all) of the stories tell the lives of the poor. Not the poorest. Only one girl, whose father sends her across town without money to buy drugs for him, is a beggar.

Rather, Adiga's poor are those on the margins of the workforce who are scratching to get by, but for whom the smallest push could topple them into the abyss -- a furniture mover (by cycle-cart!) whose job is growing too difficult for his age, or a servant whose lack of submissiveness promises trouble.

Two village boys come to Kittur searching for a bit of work, and must pay protection just to sleep in an alley at night. One of them rises, despite his intellectual limits, to bus conductor before his push comes.

India's greatest writers -- Salman Rushdie, Kiran Desai, Rohinton Mistry and Arundhati Roy -- have written mostly about their own relatively affluent worlds, Toronto-based Mistry's A Fine Balance being the exception.

In an interview, Adiga, who calls himself a neo-realist, has said that he wanted to depict a cross-section of Kittur, but especially the poor, because a lot of Indian literature forgets them.

Adiga's stories aren't comfortable, pointing as they do to economic and caste inequities (not always the same thing) in India.

And the West doesn't escape either: the women in one story are going blind stitching golden shirts for American ballroom dancers, yet are glad to have a job.

Other inequities will be less obvious to Canadian readers, but one character is shocked to hear that at a fancy Bombay hotel a Beef Vindaloo dinner costs an impossibly extravagant 500 rupees. That would have been $34 Cdn in 1990.

In less skilled hands, these stories could have easily turned sentimental or preachy. But Adiga is an unflinching observer of the world and of the human stain, and he is careful not to let his endings fall into a single pattern, so his stories, while full of emotion, never seem manipulative.

In the final story, an aging and idealistic Communist, who had once hoped to become a writer, remembers an editor saying: "'Every character in Maupassant is like this' -- he bent his index finger and wiggled it -- 'he wants, and wants, and wants.' "

The editor's advice is to write stories about people who want something. It's advice that Adiga heeds.

Some of Adiga's characters want so little -- just a place to sleep. The old Communist, when he gets round to realizing what he wants, finds that he can't have it.

He falls in love with a young woman, but he has no hope of getting her unless he's willing to exercise the little power that he has and bully her into a marriage.

Adiga's slumdogs want what other slumdogs want, and he tells their stories in all their urgency. Just don't expect a Hollywood ending.

Brandon University Prof. Reinhold Kramer's 2008 biography Mordecai Richler: Leaving St. Urbain recently won a Canadian Jewish Book Award and the Gabrielle Roy Prize.

Republished from the Winnipeg Free Press print edition June 21, 2009 D6