Between the Assassinations » (Unabridged, 9 CDs, 10 hrs)

Aravind Adiga was born in India in 1974 and attended Columbia and Oxford universities. A former correspondent for Time magazine, he has also been published in the Financial Times. He lives in Mumbai, India.

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.

The Barnes & Noble Review

Intertwining the stories of Aravind Adiga's second book, Between the Assassinations, a self-described "novel in stories," is the blandly anodyne voice of a travel guide writer introducing the visitor to Kittur, a city on the southwest Indian coast where the book is set. The cheerful pabulum of the travel guide's spiel works as an ironic counterpoint to the boiling class resentment at the forefront of the stories. "After a lunch of prawn curry and rice at the Bunder, you may want to visit the Lighthouse Hill and its vicinity," suggests our affable guide, but the person going to Lighthouse Hill in the accompanying story is a man arrested for having sold bootleg editions of The Satanic Verses and who consequently has his legs broken by the police.

The stark juxtaposition between sunny fantasy and sordid reality is one of the few rhetorical tools that Adiga has in his kit, and he puts it to frequent use. But in this case the canny device also allows him to explain the dizzying demographics of Kittur between 1984 and 1991 -- that is, between the assassinations of Prime Ministers Indira and Rajiv Gandhi. We learn that nearly ten languages are spoken in Kittur, and that the population is further stratified among Brahmins, Hoykas (members of the so-called "backward caste"), Dalits (formerly called Untouchables), Sunni and Shiite Muslims, Catholics, and sundry other religions.

Arrivingin Kittur 1

Day One: The Railway Station 3

How the Town Is Laid Out 21

Day One (Afternoon): The Bunder 23

Day Two: Lighthouse Hill 41

Day Two (Afternoon): St. Alfonso's Boys' High School and Junior College 49

Day Two (Evening): Lighthouse Hill (The Foot of the Hill) 79

Day Two (Evening): Market and Maidan 107

The History of Kittur 143

Day Three: Angel Talkies 145

The Languages of Kittur 167

Day Four: Umbrella Street 169

Day Four (Afternoon): The Cool Water Well Junction 201

Kittur: Basic Facts 217

Day Five: Valencia (To the First Crossroads) 219

Day Five (Evening): The Cathedral of Our Lady of Valencia 243

Day Six: The Sultan's Battery 271

Day Six (Evening): Bajpe 291

Day Seven: Salt Market Village 309

Chronology 337