A ‘Malgudi town’ defiled by the dirty fingers of history

Between The Assassinations
Aravind Adiga
Picador
284 pages
Rs295 

The second book is always a problem. For one, it has to be as good as the first one, if not better. Besides, the pressure of it having to measure up to the expectations of a successful first book can even induce writer's block. Luckily for Aravind Adiga, he didn't have to write his second book: his first, The White Tiger, is actually his second one. And his second book, Between The Assassinations, released earlier this month, is actually his first — it was ready in 2005. Picador had been sitting on it for two years.

Adiga’s largely unexpected Booker this year galvanised them into action, and who can blame them for wanting to encash a manuscript that has suddenly become a publishing pay order?

Well, whoever reads it, can. Adiga's The White Tiger covered new ground in Indian English fiction by holding up a distorting mirror to the ugly underbelly of Shining India.

Besides being contemporary, it had a raw narrative energy that more than made up for its flaws. In Assassinations, you get all of Adiga's shortcomings as a fiction-writer but without the mitigating qualities of Tiger. Yet one must add that it is unfair to judge the Booker-winner by an earlier effort, which is perhaps best seen as part of his apprenticeship; as an essential part of his maturing as a writer, without which he would not have managed to produce a book like Tiger.

Assassinations falls between two stools: James Joyce's Dubliners and RK Narayan's Malgudi stories. Adiga's Dublin/Malgudi is Kittur, which is a fictional town, not to be confused with the Kittur in Karnataka's Belgaum district. A tourist would ideally want to spend a week in Adiga's Kittur, and that is how the stories are framed: around the key landmarks of the town (school, church, cinema house, railway station) and to be narrated (and heard) over seven days. The stories are set in the period between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of Rajiv in 1991.

Over 280-odd pages, you meet an assortment of characters: Mr D'Mello, assistant headmaster of St Alfonso School, who wants to protect his protégé Girish Rai from 'impure' influences; Jayamma, a Brahmin maid-servant who suffers existential angst at having to work alongside a lower caste girl; Ratnakara Shetty, a 'sexologist' who peddles sugar pills to cure venereal diseases; Murali, a 55-year-old Communist who starts stalking a girl less than half his age; George D'Souza, the mosquito man, who wins the trust of his employer, the wealthy Mrs Gomes, and then loses it; and many more.

The pick of the stories is the one about Gururaj Kamath, a journalist with Dawn Herald, "Kittur's only and finest newspaper". One day he goes to his editor-in-chief with an unusual request: "Let's just write nothing but the truth and the whole truth in the newspaper today. Just today. One day of nothing but the truth. That's all I want to do.

No one may even notice. Tomorrow we'll go back to the usual lies. But for one day I want to report, write, and edit the truth. One day in my life I'd like to be a journalist.

What do you say to that?" Of course, soon enough Gururaj learns that, be it about a road accident involving a powerful businessman, or a communal riot, 'truth' is not a commodity that his newspaper is prepared to sell. His realisation of this 'truth' about his profession sets him free, but not in a way one would expect.

Every one of the stories is well constructed and rich in local colour and detail. Where the book fails is in characterisation (with the exception of Gururaj, who may have benefited from the author's own experience as a journalist). You don't particularly mind that Balram Halwai, the protagonist of The White Tiger, is a caricature, as hearing the story in his own voice makes him real enough. But in Assassinations, the caricatures that pass for characters are unredeemed by the kind of authorial ventriloquism that saved Balram Halwai. As such, they seem, well, kind of pre-assassinated. In the absence of a compelling style, this renders the collection a rather dull one. But you might still find this an enjoyable read if you are interested in a virtual tour of a certain kind of small town India: a Malgudi defiled by the dirty fingers of history — the photographic negative of Narayan's fantasy town.

sampath@dnaindia.net