Capturing the pulse or flavor of any particular place is difficult. One person perceives things differently than another. Some have access to places and locations others could never enter or may fear to enter. This is particularly so for a country as diverse as India. Aravind Adiga's Between the Assassinations attempts to surmount that problem by putting together several loosely connected stories of life in fictional Kittur, India.
Between the Assassinations was written about the same time as The White Tiger, for which Adiga won the 2008 Man Booker Prize. The book's title refers to the period between the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the 1991 assassination of her son, Rajiv Gandhi, who had also served as prime minister and was running for parliament at the time of his murder. Adiga considers 1991 "the great divide in modern Indian history," the year in which India opened itself to the global market. While The White Tiger is set after that time, Between the Assassinations is set specifically in that time frame, a period he views as "years largely of squandered idealism and hope."
Adiga structures Between the Assassinations around the concept of a guidebook to his fictional city, located on the Arabian Sea in southwestern India. He lays out the history and geography of the town, but the "tour guides" to the areas are the stories, each representing a different part of the city. The opening of the "guidebook" tells us that, because of the town's "diversity of religion, race, and language, a minimum stay of a week is recommended." Thus, Adiga gives the impression we are touring Kittur over the course of seven days. In fact, a review of the chronology at the end of the book indicates the sketches did not occur within such a timespan. Not only do they occur throughout the entire period between the two assassinations, the tales do not appear to be presented in chronological order.
Perhaps this is Adiga's way of reinforcing that when it comes to India -- and other nations -- we should not rely solely upon what’s on the surface. In fact, many of the characters in this story would be largely invisible in the course of the city's everyday life - the young Muslim who comes from his village and gains work as a gofer in a tea shop, a youth from another village who arrives on the bus and rises to the level of a tram conductor before suffering a head injury that leaves him homeless two years later, or the girl who begs on the streets so her father can buy drugs.
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