Between the Assassinations

by Aravind Adiga

Overview

Welcome to Kittur, India. It's on India's southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. It's blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it's been around for centuries. Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste. And if the characters in Between the Assassinations are any indication, Kittur is an extraordinary crossroads of the brightest minds and the poorest morals, the up-and-coming and the downtrodden, and the poets and the prophets of an India that modern literature has rarely addressed.

A twelve-year-old boy named Ziauddin, a gofer at a tea shop near the railway station, is enticed into wrongdoing because a fair-skinned stranger treats him with dignity and warmth. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. A factory owner is forced to choose between buying into underworld economics and blinding his staff or closing up shop. A privileged schoolboy, using his own ties to the Kittur underworld, sets off an explosive in a Jesuit-school classroom in protest against casteism. A childless couple takes refuge in a rapidly diminishing forest on the outskirts of town, feeding a group of "intimates" who visit only to mock them. And the loneliest member of the Marxist-Maoist Party of India falls in love with the one young woman, in the poorest part of town, whom he cannot afford to wed.

Between the Assassinations showcases the most beloved aspects of Adiga's writing to brilliant effect: the class struggle rendered personal; the fury of the underdog and the fire of the iconoclast; and the prodigiously ambitious narrative talent that has earned Adiga acclaim around the world and comparisons to Gogol, Ellison, Kipling, and Palahniuk. In the words of The Guardian (London), "Between the Assassinations shows that Adiga...is one of the most important voices to emerge from India in recent years."

A blinding, brilliant, and brave mosaic of Indian life as it is lived in a place called Kittur, Between the Assassinations, with all the humor, sympathy, and unflinching candor of The White Tiger, enlarges our understanding of the world we live in today.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781439159736
Publisher:	Free Press
Publication date:	06/09/2009
Sold by:	SIMON & SCHUSTER
Format:	eBook
Pages:	288
File size:	394 KB

About the Author

Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. He is the author of Selection Day, the Booker Prize-winning novel The White Tiger, and the story collection Between the Assassinations. He lives in Mumbai, India.

Read an Excerpt

Day Two:

Lighthouse Hill

After a lunch of prawn curry and rice at the Bunder, you may want to visit the Lighthouse Hill and its vicinity. The famous lighthouse, built by the Portuguese and renovated by the British, is no longer in use. An old guard in a blue uniform sits at the foot of the lighthouse. If visitors are poorly dressed, or speak to him in Tulu or Kannada, he will say, "Can't you see it's closed?" If visitors are well dressed or speak English, he will say, "Welcome." He will take them into the lighthouse and up the spiral staircase to the top, which affords a spectacular view of the Arabian Sea. In recent years, the City Corporation has begun running a reading room inside the lighthouse; the collection includes Father Basil d'Essa, S.J.'s A Short History of Kittur. The Deshpremi Hemachandra Rao Park around the lighthouse is named in honor of the freedom fighter who hung a Congress tricolor from the lighthouse during British rule.

It happens at least twice a year. The prisoner, handcuffs on his wrists, is striding toward the Lighthouse Hill police station with his head held high and a look of insolent boredom on his face, while, following him, almost scampering to catch up, are the two policemen holding a chain attached to the handcuffs. The odd part is that the man in handcuffs seems to be dragging along the policemen, like a fellow taking two monkeys out for a walk.

In the past nine years, the man known as "Xerox" Ramakrishna has been arrested twenty-one times on the granite pavement in front of Deshpremi Hemachandra Rao Park for the sale, at discounted rates, of illegally photocopied or printed books to the students of St. Alfonso's College. A policeman comes in the morning, when Ramakrishna is sitting with his books spread out on a blue bedsheet; he places his lathi on the books and says, "Let's go, Xerox."

The bookseller turns to his eleven-year-old daughter, Ritu, who sells books with him, and says, "Go home and be a good girl, dear." Then he holds his hands out for the cuffs.

In jail, Xerox is unchained and put in a cell. Holding on to the bars, he regales the policemen with ingratiating stories. He may tell them a smutty tale about some college girl whom he saw that morning wearing blue jeans in the American style, or a new swear word in Tulu he has heard on the bus while going to Salt Market Village, or perhaps, if they are in the mood for longer entertainment, he will narrate to them, as he has done so many times before, the story of what his father did for a living all his life — taking the crap out of the houses of rich landlords, the traditional occupation of people of his caste. All day long, his old man would hang around the back wall of the landlord's house, waiting for the smell of human shit; as soon as he smelled that smell, he came up to the house and waited, with bent knees, like a wicketkeeper waits for the ball. (Xerox bent his knees and showed how.) Then, as soon as he heard the thud of the boom-box being shut, he had to pull out the chamber pot through a hole in the wall, empty it into the rosebushes, wipe it clean with his loincloth, and insert it back before the next person came to use the toilet. That was the job he did his whole life, can you believe it!

The jailors will laugh.

They bring Xerox samosas wrapped in paper; they offer him chai. They consider him a decent fellow. They let him out at midday; he bows low to them and says, "Thank you." Then Miguel D'Souza, the lawyer for the publishers and booksellers on Umbrella Street, will call the station and yell, "Have you let him off again? Doesn't the law of the land mean anything to you?" The inspector of the station, Ramesh, keeps the receiver at a distance from his ear and reads the newspaper, looking at the Bombay stock market quotes. That is all Ramesh really wants to do in life: read the stock market quotes.

By late afternoon, Xerox is back at it. Photocopied or cheaply printed copies of Karl Marx, Mein Kampf, published books, and films and albums are arranged on the blue cloth spread out on the pavement on Lighthouse Hill, and little Ritu sits stiff backed, with her long unbroken nose and faint mustache, watching as the customers pick up the books and flip through them.

"Put that back in place," she will say, when a customer has rejected a book. "Put it back exactly where you picked it up from."

"Accounting for Entrance Exams?" one customer shouts at Xerox. "Advanced Obstetrics?" cries another.

"The Joy of Sex?"

"Mein Kampf?"

"Lee Iacocca?"

"What's your best price?" a young man asks, flipping through the book.

"Seventy-five rupees."

"Oh, you're raping me! It's too much."

The young man walks away, turns around, comes back, and says, "What's your final best price? I have no time to waste."

"Seventy-two rupees. Take it or leave it. I've got other customers."

The books are photocopied, or sometimes printed, at an old printing press in Salt Market Village. Xerox loves being around the machinery. He strokes the photocopier; he adores the machine, the way it flashes like lightning as it works, the way it whirs and hums. He cannot read English, but he knows that English words have power, and that English books have an aura. He looks at the image of Adolf Hitler from the cover of Mein Kampf, and he feels his power. He looks at the face of Khalil Gibran, poetic and mysterious, and he feels the mystery and poetry. He looks at the face of Lee Iacocca, relaxed with his hands behind his head, and he feels relaxed. That's why he once told Inspector Ramesh, "I have no wish to make any trouble for you or for the publishers, sir; I just love books: I love making them, holding them, and selling them. My father took out shit for a living, sir; he couldn't even read or write. He'd be so proud if he could see that I make my living from books."

Only one time has Xerox really been in trouble with the police. That was when someone called the station and said that Xerox was selling copies of Salman Rushdie's The Satanic Verses in violation of the laws of the Republic of India. This time when he was brought to the station in handcuffs there were no courtesies, no cups of chai.

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? And get me and every other policeman here transferred to Salt Market Village?"

"Forgive me," Xerox begged. "I had no idea that this was a banned book, really...I'm just the son of a man who took out shit, sir. He waited all day long for the boom-box to make a noise. I know my place, sir. I wouldn't dream of challenging you. It was just a mistake, sir. Forgive me, sir."

D'Souza, the booksellers' lawyer, a small man with black oily hair and a neat mustache, heard what had happened and came to the station. He looked at the banned book — a massive paperback with an image of an angel on the front — and shook his head in disbelief.

"That fucking untouchable's son, thinking he's going to photocopy The Satanic Verses. What balls."

He sat at the inspector's desk and shouted at him, "I told you this would happen if you didn't punish him! You're responsible for all this."

Ramesh glared at Xerox, who was lying penitently on a bed, as he had been ordered to do.

"I don't think anyone saw him selling it. Things will be fine."

To calm the lawyer down, Ramesh asked a constable to go fetch a bottle of Old Monk rum. The two of them talked for a while.

Ramesh read passages from out of the book and said, "I don't get what the fuss is all about, really."

"Muslims," D'Souza said, shaking his head. "Violent people. Violent."

The bottle of Old Monk arrived. They drank it in half an hour, and the constable went to fetch another. In his cell, Xerox lay perfectly still, looking at the ceiling. The policeman and the lawyer went on drinking. D'Souza told Ramesh his frustrations, and the inspector told the lawyer his frustrations. One had wanted to be a pilot, soaring in the clouds and chasing stewardesses, and the other — he had never wanted anything but to dabble in the stock market. That was all.

At midnight, Ramesh asked the lawyer, "Do you want to know a secret?" Stealthily, he walked the lawyer to the cell and showed him the secret. One of the bars of the cell could be removed. The policeman removed it, and swung it, and then put it back in place. "That's how the evidence is hidden," he said. "Not that that kind of thing happens often at this station, mind you — but that's how it is done, when it is done."

The lawyer giggled. He loosened the bar, slung it over his shoulder, and said, "Don't I look like Hanuman now?"

"Just like on TV," the policeman said.

The lawyer asked that the cell door be opened, and it was. The two of them saw the sleeping prisoner lying on his cot, an arm over his face to keep out the jabbing light of the naked bulb above him. A sliver of naked skin was exposed beneath his cheap polyester shirt; a creeper of thick black hair, which looked to his two onlookers like an outgrowth from his groin, was just visible.

"That fucking son of an untouchable. See him snoring."

"His father took out the shit — and this fellow thinks he's going to dump shit on us!"

"Selling The Satanic Verses. He'll sell it under my nose, will he?"

"These people think they own India now. Don't they? They want all the jobs, and all the university degrees, and all the..."

Ramesh pulled down the snoring man's trousers; he lifted the bar high up, while the lawyer said, "Do it like Hanuman does on TV!" Xerox woke up screaming. Ramesh handed the bar to D'Souza. The policeman and the lawyer took turns: they smashed the bar against Xerox's legs just at the knee joint, like the monkey god did on TV, and then they smashed the bar against Xerox's legs just below the knee joint, like the monkey god did on TV, and then they smashed it into Xerox's legs just above the knee joint, and then, laughing and kissing each other, the two staggered out, shouting for someone to lock thestation up behind them.

Periodically through the night, when he woke up, Xerox resumed his screaming.

In the morning, Ramesh came back, was told by a constable about Xerox, and said, "Shit, it wasn't a dream, then." He ordered the constables to take the man in the cell to the Havelock Henry District Hospital, and asked for a copy of the morning paper so he could check the stock market prices.

The next week, Xerox arrived, noisily, because he was on crutches, at the police station, with his daughter behind him.

"You can break my legs, but I can't stop selling books. I'm destined to do this, sir," he said. He grinned.

Ramesh grinned too, but he avoided the man's eyes.

"I'm going up the hill, sir," Xerox said, lifting up one of his crutches. "I'm going to sell the book."

Ramesh and the other cops gathered around Xerox and his daughter and begged. Xerox wanted them to phone D'Souza, which they did. The lawyer came with his wig, along with two assistants, also in black gowns and wigs. When he heard why the policemen had summoned him, D'Souza burst into laughter.

"This fellow is just teasing you," he told Ramesh. "He can't possibly go up the hill with his legs like that."

D'Souza pointed a finger at the middle part of Xerox's body. "And if you do try to sell it, mind — it won't be just your legs that we break next time."

A constable laughed.

Xerox looked at Ramesh with his usual ingratiating smile. He bent low with folded palms and said, "So be it."

D'Souza sat down to drink Old Monk rum with the policemen, and they settled into another game of cards. Ramesh said he had lost money on the market the past week; the lawyer sucked at his teeth and shook his head, and said that in a big city like Bombay everyone was a cheat or a liar or a thug.

Xerox turned around on his crutches and walked out of the station. His daughter came behind him. They headed for the Lighthouse Hill. The climb took two hours and a half, and they stopped six times for Xerox to drink tea, or a glass of sugarcane juice. Then his daughter spread out the blue sheet in front of Deshpremi Hemachandra Rao Park, and Xerox lowered himself. He sat on the sheet, stuck his legs out slowly, and put a large paperback down next to him. His daughter sat down too, keeping watch over the book, her back stiff and upright. The book was banned throughout the Republic of India and it was the only thing that Xerox intended to sell that day: The Satanic Verses, by Salman Rushdie. Copyright © 2008 by Aravind Adiga

Reading Group Guide

This reading group guide for Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga includes discussion questions and ideas for enhancing your book club. The suggested questions are intended to help your reading group find new and interesting angles and topics for your discussion. We hope that these ideas will enrich your conversation and increase your enjoyment of the book.

Discussion Questions for Between the Assassinations

1) The symbols of each major religion act “like signposts to identify the three religions of the town to voyagers from the ocean (p.39).” Do you think these symbols act as a warning to visitors or are they welcoming signs of the diversity of Kittur? Discuss the relationships these three world religions have with each other within the city and the tensions they cause among its inhabitants.

2) Shankara is from one of the richest families in town, yet he is ashamed of his half-Hoyka background and resents his driver for being a full Brahmin. Jamayya has no issue working for another Brahmin, but refuses to share a room with another servant, because that servant is of a lower caste. In what ways do the all characters in the book struggle with the issues of caste and class in Indian society? How do characters use caste and class to define themselves and their relationships with others?

3) Discuss how the travel guide descriptions of Kittur embellish and contribute to the development of the city’s character, as well as to the individual characters in each of the stories. How do the descriptions act as a foil to the very personal, individual vignettes and unite them into a whole?

4) The assistant headmaster D’Mello is disillusioned with the state of the Indian government, and yet there are hints in the story of his past idealism that are revealed when he speaks to or thinks of his student, Girish. What do you suppose happened to D’Mello and how might Girish remind him of his past? Discuss why he feels compelled to share secrets with the young boy—is he trying to protect his idealism of youth? Live vicariously through the boy? Or protect him from the very idealism that turned against D’Mello?

5) As he is struggling not to collapse, D’Mello pulls the curtains down in the adult theater, exposing all of the pornography. He thinks to himself, “he saw everything, and he understood everything, at last.” What do you think he has finally understood, and how did his final vision bring him to this understanding?

6) While Ratna is waiting in a bus station with the diseased boy who was going to marry his daughter, a stranger says to them, “We’ll have to hand this country back to the British or the Russians or someone, I tell you. We’re not meant to be masters of our own fate.” (p. 287) How is this underlying thought represented in the stories throughout the book? How does it permeate the minds of many of the characters? Discuss the circumstances in Kittur that may have led to these attitudes.

7) Truth is preserved in gossip and rumor more so than in the newspapers in Kittur. Corruption runs rampant through the police and the government. How do the characters subtly fight this? What is holding them back from doing more? How does corruption affect the characters’ mindsets in regard to politics and power?

8) At the Cathedral of Our Lady Valencia, one of George’s friends remarks, “You know what the biggest difference is between being rich and being like us? The rich can make mistakes again and again. We make only one mistake, and that’s it for us (p.246).” How is this concept central to the stories of Kittur, especially that of George?

9) Even though Murali is a high-born Brahmin and successful in life, the stigma of communism prevents him from marrying a lower-caste girl—why? Discuss Indian Communism and its interpretation of caste. In what ways does it become its own kind of caste and why do you think it is seen as one to be avoided?

10) Many of the characters in the stories came to Kittur for a better life only to become disillusioned and lost. How does the city swallow them? Are they limiting themselves or is the city limiting them? Why or why not?

Additional Activities: Ways of Enhancing Your Bookclub

1) Explore the city life of India further by watching a documentary with your group, such as “Born into Brothels” (2004) or “Journeyings and Conversations” (2003), both of which observe life in modern Calcutta.

2) Between the Assasinations is structured like a guidebook. Pick up a guidebook of India and give your group a guided tour of a new city, such as Mumbai, Calcutta, or Mangalore, the town on which Kittur is based. Have everyone pick a neighborhood to research and present their results—whether it be a photo tour of must-see monuments or a delicious regional dish to share before or after your discussion.

3) Indian literature now has a prominent place in the United States; discuss with your group other Indian authors that you have read. How have these books come to shape your perceptions of India? How might they have changed your previous perceptions of India? Exchange book recommendations with other members of your group and read a book on India that you haven’t heard of, fiction or non-fiction.

Editorial Reviews

This short story collection, teeming with life in the small Indian city of Kittur between the assassination of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, serves as a prelude to Adiga's Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger. Loosely based on a tourist itinerary, the stories meander through the lives of a motley array of hoykas and Brahmins, Muslims and Christians. We meet Xerox, the peddler of illegally copied books who doesn't mind having been arrested 21 times, as this seems a step up from his father's work as an excrement shoveler. Then there is Jayamma: the eighth of nine daughters, she is sent out to work because her father had only enough money to marry off six daughters. Her only comfort is getting high on DDT fumes and rubbing the buttocks of a tiny idol of baby Krishna. Adiga's India is a place of wildly disparate fortunes, where a 500-rupee meal at the Oberoi Hotel in Bombay scandalizes a construction worker who marvels at the sight of a 20-rupee note. It's a gruesome picture of existence, and the small epiphanies hit like bricks from heaven. (June)

Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

Publishers Weekly

From the author of The White Tiger, which won the 2008 Man Booker Prize, comes this collection of stories set in Kittur, India, between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Ghandi in 1991. Adiga captures the lives of the poor and powerless, doomed to hopelessness and sometimes rage. In "Market and Maidan," for example, an orphan comes to the city, where he works his way up to become a bus conductor but then loses everything when he falls off a bus and suffers a head injury. In some of the tales, the bleakness is relieved by the power of human connections. Thus, in "St. Alfonso Boys' High School and Junior College," Shankara's wealth can't compensate for the humiliations of his mixed-caste status, so he explodes a bomb in a classroom in retaliation for a teacher's mistreatment. But during the ensuing investigation, he recognizes that the teacher, who stutters, is a kindred spirit. VERDICT A stunning work; highly recommended.—Evelyn Beck, Piedmont Tech. Coll., Greenwood, SC

—Evelyn Beck

Library Journal

Adiga follows up his Man Booker Prize-winning debut (The White Tiger, 2008) with a collection of interconnected stories about the village of Kittur in southwestern India. The title refers to the period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and Rajiv Gandhi in 1991, though there isn't much evidence of chronological progression here. The outside world seldom intrudes on Kittur, yet the tensions of caste and the conflicts of religion course through the narrative, sparking comedy and tragedy-sometimes both at once. The text is structured as a week's walking tour of the village; italicized sections describing buildings and landmarks precede the stories of various characters. Among the protagonists are an ambitious delivery carrier, a workman who oversteps his bounds and a lower-caste schoolboy who sets off an explosion in chemistry class to avenge the mockery he has endured. One of the strongest pieces features a renowned journalist who has become disenchanted with his profession. "Even the writer of the truth should not know the truth entire," he thinks. "Every true word, upon being written, is like the full moon, and daily it wanes, and then passes entirely into obscurity. That is the way of all things." The often-poetic tone recalls fairy tales and folk parables, as poor people in particular come to terms with the way of all things, foremost among them that "the rich own the whole world." Toward the end, Adiga introduces a character who could be confused with his creator, a writer praised as a young man because he has "gone into the countryside, and seen life there, unlike 90 percent of our writers." Returning 25 years later, he falls in love with a much younger woman andrealizes how much of an outsider he is: "he had become the stock figure whom he had worked into several of his stories-the lecherous old Brahmin, preying on an innocent girl of a lower caste."These provocative tales suggest that fiction illuminates truths beyond the reach of journalism.

Kirkus Reviews

"beguiling and often poignant work...deeply etched stories...powerful." —India Abroad

"The book is a work of diverse voices...the stories are always lively and keenly observed; taken together, these rich slices of life form an enjoyable and readable whole." - The Sunday Times

"A page-turner [with a] limber structure...It is Adiga's near-sightedness that brings his writing to life. His subject is the everyday frustration brought about by discriminations of status, class and religion. Yet his sense of a great Indian comedy is never far away." —The Observer

From the Publisher