Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga

Of its 193,432 residents, only 89 declare themselves to be without religion or caste.

It's blessed with rich soil and scenic beauty, and it's been around for centuries. It's on India's southwestern coast, bounded by the Arabian Sea to the west and the Kaliamma River to the south and east. 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.īetween 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.Welcome to Kittur, India.

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. 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 factory owner is forced to choose between buying into underworld economics and blinding his staff or closing up shop. A little girl's first act of love for her father is to beg on the street for money to support his drug habit. Gomes, and then loses it all when he attempts to be something more. George D'Souza, a mosquito-repellent sprayer, elevates himself to gardener and then chauffeur to the lovely, young Mrs. 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.Ī 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.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga