Like any good tour guide, Between the Assassinations divides your seven-day sojourn in Kittur by location. The guides change by day and location and the perspective they offer isn't one that you'd normally find through the standard tour companies. How many companies would use an unskilled labourer like George D'Souza to show you around the famous unfinished cathedral? Nor would many hire the student who exploded a bomb in his science class to show you around the well-known Jesuit school St. Alfonso's Boys' High School and Junior College. No, they'd be more likely to hire the assistant headmaster Mr. D'Mello instead, a firm disciplinarian who after more than thirty years of teaching can anticipate what mischief young men can get up to before they even know themselves. Although they may not have had him lead a group of adolescent boys on a tour of the infamous "Angels' Talkies" pornographic cinema.
I'm also certain most tour companies wouldn't have on their agendas the sights our guides show us in and around the locales they represent. How many tourists are going to want visit the back alleys where the poor sleep? I don't think they'd appreciate it either if their guides ran a side business selling fake cures for venereal diseases or included visits to clinics euphemistically named "Happy Life" as part of the tour of the historic fort The Sultan's Battery. However it's these guides and their lives that give our tour of Kittur the authenticity that most lack.
While the majority of the characters we meet in Between the Assassinations are those who feel the weight of caste and class heaviest, Adiga doesn't just give us one perspective as so many other writers have developed a habit of doing. It's a factory owner who gives us a tour of The Bunder, the area of town where criminal activity is concentrated. It's not that he's involved in anything illegal, but among the drug runners and smugglers he finds a sympathetic audience to unburden himself to about the number of bribes he has to pay in order to stay open.
Article comments
1 - Bryan
If you're interested in place-based fiction like this, Donald Ray Pollock's short story collection Knockemstiff is a really great look at poor rural Americans. Also, Haruki Murakami's After the Quake sets five stories in the aftermath of the Kobe earthquake in Japan, showing characters lives without being directly about the disaster itself.
2 - slime
I never read books a lot. I haven't read adiga.
I have lived around Kittur , in Belgaum, played around. Kittur is historic to extent of regional powerhouse. for tourists, it wont make a great tourist spot. I would advise to mix Kittur with Amboli, secenic water falls at hilltop and wind sand beaches of Sawantwadi. This would be a weeks trip with focus on sindhudurg.