Aravind Adiga’s new book consists of short stories, many written before his 2008 Man Booker-winning The White Tiger. Rushed out in the author’s native India last year in the wake of that success, Between the Assassinations has been “expanded and revised” for this British edition and is described by its publisher as a “new work of ­fiction” rather than as a volume of short stories. This is to some extent fair, since Adiga’s ­intention, inspired by reading La Comédie Humaine, was to write what he calls a “bonsai version” of Balzac’s huge and sprawling ­portrait of French life. The resulting stories are bound together by geography and theme rather than by ­characters whose lives overlap or intersect.

Set in the fictional coastal city of Kittur (based on Adiga’s hometown of Mangalore in southern India), the book is placed in the 1980s between the assassinations of Indira and Rajiv Gandhi and before the rise of the modern India depicted in The White Tiger. Beyond providing Adiga with a striking title, the Gandhis barely feature, and the book follows no chronology. It is arranged instead like an unusually frank guidebook in which districts or sites are used as springboards for individual ­episodes. Each story is prefaced by a guidebook description of the location or landmark and the whole is interspersed with brief essays explaining the layout, history, languages and some basic facts about Kittur.

Once again, Adiga concentrates on the inequalities between rich and poor, employers and employees, servants and those they serve, and many of the stories deal with the problems of caste. He has said he wants to portray the underclass that forms the vast bulk of India’s population — and when he turns his attentions to the well-off pupils at St Alfonso’s Boys’ High School or the denizens of a salubrious suburb at the edge of a forest, the stories are less engaging.

Adiga is at his best when describing the everyday realities of village people who escape to a big city, or are sent there by their families, and end up living on the streets and doing the most menial jobs. The most striking and lasting image is one of crushing physical labour. A man using a bicycle-drawn cart to deliver heavy goods pauses in the congested street: “When the horns began to sound, he rose from his seat and pedalled; behind him, a long line of cars and buses moved, as if he were pulling the traffic along with an invisible chain.”

Adiga’s portrait of India in The White Tiger caused considerable offence in that country, and Between the Assassinations is unlikely to win him many more friends there. One character observes, “black-marketing, counterfeiting and corruption, we are the world champions. If they were included in the Olympic Games, India would always win gold, silver and bronze in those three”. Bribes and other kinds of cheating and duplicity are recurring features of the book.

One of the best stories is about a seller of bogus pills to cure venereal diseases who ends up genuinely helping one of his daughter’s infected suitors. While Adiga clearly doesn’t agree with the schoolmaster who suggests that India’s great mistake “was made on 15 August 1947, when we thought this country could be run by a people’s democracy instead of a military dictatorship”, one senses that it is with a certain amount of fellow feeling that he tells the story of a journalist whose attempt to print the truth leads to his going mad.

The great strength of The White Tiger was the highly individual voice of its narrator, but Between the Assassinations is a work of many voices. Its constituent parts sometimes lack much in the way of structure or resolution, but are always lively and keenly observed. Kittur is intended as a microcosm of India, and if Adiga doesn’t achieve this in the way Tabish Khair did in his marvellous 2004 novel, The Bus Stopped, taken together these rich slices of life form an enjoyable and readable whole.

Between the Assassinations by Aravind Adiga
Atlantic £14.99 pp352

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