With a population speaking nine languages, split between Brahmins, Hoykas (one of the ‘backward’ castes), Dalits (formerly Untouchables), Muslims both Sunni and Shi’ite, Catholics and (representing the secular), Marxist-Maoists — a party with just two members, Adiga’s little town seethes with life and the complexities of inter-caste resentment; the disdain, contempt and fear, that prevail. A kind-hearted man is not admired: ‘his reputation was that of a simple-minded creature prone to regular outbreaks of idealism’…
A rickshaw-puller slogs his way up a hill; 29 years old, already bent and twisted from bearing heavy weights: ‘You have to attain a certain level of richness before you can complain about being poor,’ he observes. ‘When you are this poor, you are not given the right to complain.’ Like others, he had left his village for a better life, but the realisation comes to him that the day he arrived was destined to be the best: ‘You had already been expelled from paradise, the moment you walk into the city.’
Adiga captures the townsfolk with tiny, telling details, rich and poor alike anatomised. By the end it has become clear that with India’s economy, as with the buses in Kittur, even when crammed to bursting point, people clinging on outside and huddling precariously on the roof, some will always be left behind, there isn’t room for everyone.
These lives of desperation — quiet or clamorous — would be unbearable to read about without Adiga’s wild humour and spring-heeled prose. His characters leap off the page, if only to grab you by the throat.
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