Aravind Adiga: Reading Between the Streets
Hometown: Madras (now Chennai), India
Book: Between the Assassinations
For Fans Of: Richard Wright, Kiran Desai, Roberto Bolaño
Aravind Adiga had just returned to India after years in Anglophone
countries when he changed his mind about what to write. He’d assumed he
would focus on himself and his family—“idealists and intellectuals,” by
his own estimation. But after talking to slum dwellers, servants,
rickshaw pullers, coolies, cooks, prostitutes, teashop gophers,
gardeners and chauffeurs while on assignment for Time magazine, Adiga
about-faced. “I realized that most Indians were completely unlike me,”
he recalls. “I decided to write about them instead."
So he did—first with his prize-winning novel The White Tiger (in which
a murderous, social-climbing manchild pens his furious tale for a
visiting Chinese dignitary, a story-within-a-story), and then in his
follow-up Between The Assassinations, which connects 12 short stories
of desperation, desire and disgust among India’s lower castes. Adiga
wrote the two books as companions, one speaking to the other from the
opposite side of 1991, which he calls “the great divide in Indian
history.” White Tiger navigates the world afterward, when India became
a free-market player with a high-tech sector on the rise, while the
sketches of Between The Assassinations explore the period before,
during the failed reforms undertaken by Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi
after the death of his mother and predecessor, Indira.
Adiga, the former reporter, capitalizes on the creative powers of
fiction. He deftly illuminates intents and questions motivations,
revealing cracks in an edifice as quickly as it’s produced. And both of
his books involve storytelling tricks that propel them forward, making
frustrating tales of frustrated characters not at all frustrating to
read. “Journalism strives for clarity and precision,” Adiga says.
“Literature often relies on ambiguity. I believe that literature,
ultimately, reaches to a deeper truth than journalism does.”
