‘Between the Assassinations’

Written before The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga’s story collection Between the Assassinations was launched in the U.S. Tuesday. It’s a book I thoroughly enjoyed, though didn’t entirely love. Assassinations is easily as powerful as Tiger, but more varied in content (obviously) and less evenly written. Where Tiger moves like a spare Elmore Leonard tale, Assassinations luxuriates in a welter of sociographic detail about a city based on hMangalore.

Set in the interregnum between the untimely ends of Indira and Rajiv, Assassinations is about India before Manmohan Singh waved the wand of liberalization. Once again Adiga’s characters rage against indignities of class-conscious India, as thoroughly trapped in casteism, corruption and government dysfunction as perhaps an Egyptian citizen would be today.

Like Tiger, Assassinations is a book more about ideas than delicately-shaded characterization. Adiga’s subjects are extruded in bas-relief, often vehicles for political treatises in the guise of stories. The book pulses with observational absurdism about life in fictional Kittur. The first two stories are flat political parables about the poverty-terrorism connection and the Chai Pani Raj. But the stories run deeper and more complex as you get further in.

I have a soft spot for the hero of the third tale. In ‘Lighthouse Hill,’ a book pirate sticks up for Salman Rushdie during the Valentine’s Day fatwa. It’s typical of Adiga’s perverse sense of humor that our hero Xerox’ principled defense of free expression comes through selling knockoff versions of that Jahilian tale. And what a lovely shout-out to a seminal author:

… someone called the station and said that Xerox was selling copies of Salman Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses… Ramesh slapped him. ‘Don’t you know the book is banned, you son-of-a-bald-woman? You think you are going to start a riot among the Muslims?’ … D’Souza, the booksellers’ lawyer, a small man with black oily hair and a neat moustache, heard what had happened… ‘That fucking untouchable’s son, thinking he’s going to photocopy The Satanic Verses. What balls’…

Xerox turned on his crutches and walked out of the station. They headed for Lighthouse Hill…. The book was banned throughout the Republic of India and it was the only thing that Xerox intended to sell that day.

Assassinations has a lighter sense of humor than Tiger. The author perches above his hapless downtroddens like a modern-day Naipaul. He’s hopelessly cynical, but it’s the pose of a jilted romantic. Where Tiger is snappier, more Elmore Leonard, Assassinations gives its stories time to develop. ‘The Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia’ looks at a handyman’s crush on his open-minded memsaab. ‘Salt Market Village’ shows the corruption of an incorruptible, and it’s heartbreaking. Like a carafe set aside to breathe, Assassinations comes into its own in its second half.

The usual trouble with advocacy stories like Animal’s People is that their tone is often hectoring and unsubtle, distrusting their audience. In this book, I least enjoyed ‘Umbrella Street,’ a tale a frustrated furniture delivery boy which prefers to spell out its conclusions: ‘The [elephant's] eyes gazed sidelong at him… The beast also seemed to be saying, “Things should not be this way.”‘ A similar line from ‘Salt Market Village’: ‘”You’ve been fooled,” everything in the room said to him. “You’ve wasted your life.”‘ Meanwhile, the implied solutions are often naïve, hoping for either a top-down mandate or a magical change in human nature.

Some of Adiga’s stories succumb to the first problem, but never the second. His writing consistently seems to press for unleashing the animal spirits of Indian entrepreneurship. Balram Halwai becomes a businessman, while Assassinations slams both the License Raj and the ideological fixations of India’s communists.

In MSM interviews, Adiga says that Assassinations is about the powerless in socialist Old India, while Balram Halwai is the purest expression of a ruthless New India entrepreneur. In his formulation, Halwai swallows India Shining ideology and remakes it in his own murderous image. I’m always a bit suspicious of neat origin stories. If indeed that was the plan all along, the books together are a lovely matched set, but they’re not the same book and they’re worth reading independently.

By the way, Adiga tells me the U.S. edition is longer than the Indian. I’d have preferred fewer intros and outros between the tales. Like video game cut scenes, the Kittur guidebook interludes are mainly interesting on first encounter. But the U.S. getting the director’s cut of Assassinations almost makes up for all the wonderful novels that never make it out of India.