Between the Assasinations by Aravind Adiga

I'm not sure what exactly is going on. Every time you turn around another new and extremely gifted South Asian writer appears on the scene. Aravind Adiga, whose novel The White Tiger won last year's Man Booker Prize in England, offers a theory.

India and China are the nations of the future, he has argued. And so it's important for writers to focus on such emerging nations as material for their art, and for readers to pay attention.

Between the Assassinations stands as powerful evidence for its creator's argument. The book's dozen or so stories take place between the political killings of Indira Gandhi and her son Rajiv. That's not a broad swath of time, merely from 1984 to 1991.

The setting is not a broad swath of India, either. Adiga focuses on a rather small plot of earth: Kittur, in southwest India. It's a forested town, with Hindu temples and Catholic churches, near the Arabian Sea.

Just six years in a small town. Adiga reduces the time even further with the metaphor of touring the town in six days during that longer period. Six days. It's a relatively short while, yet the length of biblical creation. But the hearts of his characters are where Adiga reveals the greatest depth and breadth, spanning the ages from youth to late maturity.

These characters' caste affiliations and immediate aspirations for their lives range from the highest to the lowest, as well as places in between.

Ziauddin, "small and black, with baby fat in his cheeks, and an elfin grin that exposed big, white rabbity teeth," is a Muslim boy who finds work in Kittur shops but steals from his employers. Abbasi is a businessman trying to deal with corrupt local officials. Xerox, who sells pirated books (including a copy of the banned Satanic Verses by Salman Rushdie), is the son of the lowest of the low: waste collectors. Half-Brahmin (his father), half-low caste (his mother), the rich but confused Shankara sets off a bomb at school and suffers the consequences.

Jayamma, the eighth born in a family of nine girls, is sent out to cook for various well-off families.

George D'Souza, who sprays mosquito repellant for a living, comes under the sway of a rich, young, foreign Christian woman and hopes, right up to the moment when he oversteps certain boundaries, to change his life.

Adiga creates these, and other distinctive characters, with the ease of a god, and deftly tells their sometimes comical, often tragic stories against the backdrop of an often corrupt, and sometimes lovely South Asian world. Like Murali, the aging story writer turned political agitator, we are reminded "of that strange mixture of the strikingly beautiful and the filthy which is the nature of every Indian village. ... "

Between these covers, in Adiga's entertaining and illuminating stories, you'll discover such wonders as these.

This review has been written by Alan Cheuse and was first published in the Dallas News