The book opens with the story of Ziauddin, one of "those lean lonely men with vivid eyes who haunt every train station in India". Adiga gives a human face to each of these characters. We meet upper-caste bankers and lower-caste rickshaw pullers, Muslim tea boys and Christian headmasters, capitalist factory owners and communist sidekicks. Adiga's cast is limited, but his tableau covers a wide social and economic spectrum. Kittur, the fictional coastal town "between Goa and Calicut" which serves as the backdrop to these linked stories, is said to have 193,432 residents. You have gone into the countryside and seen life there, unlike ninety per cent of our writers." Adiga, too, has boldly gone where few Indian writers choose to venture, casting his gaze beyond the complacent smugness of middle-class drawing rooms to the anger and squalor lurking in the underbelly of urban India. I n one of the stories in Between the Assassinations, Aravind Adiga's collection written in parallel with his Booker-winning The White Tiger, Murali, a young communist and short-story writer, is told by his editor: "There is talent in your writing.
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