Bombay comes alive in Aravind Adiga's Last Man In Tower

Book Review: Last Man In Tower by Aravind Adiga

It was a curious sensation, reading this novel.  Had it been specifically written, I wondered, for me to read? It was one of those novels, I felt, that must have been written with me specifically in mind. Who else could it have been written for, otherwise? 

For… the book is set in one of those lower middle-class, small collective apartment blocks known in Bombay as ‘Societies’ – I too lived in a Society. 
The movement of the book criss-crosses the city like an inexhaustible flaneur, touching upon nearly every famous landmark in the city (from its cricket stadia to its open sewers) – I too zigzagged across Bombay’s lanes and psychic routes, and knew each site. 
The writer observes closely the ordinary habits of this outlandish place – and so did I! 
Written as it was between 2007-2009, Aravind and I must have passed each other numerous times – along Falkland Road, on Juhu Beach, drinking juice in Café Ideal.

Who else could this book have been written for but me?

You’ll note that I haven’t touched on the book’s plot yet.  But, in an odd way, the plot is virtually redundant. Though the plot drives this large book (over 400 pages – and 100 pages too long…), the story barely develops over its course. 
What is the plot?  Okay. One man in this Society refuses to accept a developer’s massive sweetener to the block’s inhabitants to leave their flats; without his agreement, the deal must collapse; his neighbours in the Society are furious with him. Behind that, there is a swirl of thoughts revealing how the city and its people are changing. And that’s it.

The sub-plots have virtually no role except as character illumination.

A book about Mumbai

Oh, forget the plot. It’s best seen as a vehicle for this exploration of Mumbai, (which Adiga sees as a vital, living personality in itself - not just a backdrop for the book), and the daily events therein. It is what you and I could see if we kept our eyes open, and our notepads at the ready.

One can smell Bombay in this book. At one point, one of the characters is on the Churchgate-line local train, and is woken up by the sudden odour of the Bandra sewer. If you don’t know Bombay, this detail will mean nothing; but to me, it awoke a flood of sensations.  It was talismanic. Proust’s madeleine, indeed!

Some day, some graduate student will spend a stupid amount of time plotting the points on Adiga’s map of Bombay. There are easily two hundred locations mentioned in the book – maybe more. None are dropped in in any heavy, clanging way: they do have a reason to be there, just as each scene in a multi-packed Breughel painting seems to slot in properly. The book acts as a large spider-web over the face of the city – with one’s finger one can trace the routes.

And his descriptions are conscious and honed, never over-boiled.  Very, very occasionally, he will wax poetic – the sodden, static pillars of traffic fumes at rush-hour rise in Gothic fashion like “flying buttresses of nitrous oxide”, and a suddenly-heard bird sounds “sharp like a needled thread, as if it were darning some torn corner of the world” – but this is comparatively rare. He likes it simple, and up-front.

The book is as readable as you’d expect from a best-seller modern novelist: some of the chapters are no longer than five pages.

Yet, it’s almost like one is at a mirror theatre – where some magnificent and detail-stuffed scenery becomes so much more interesting than the action of the play.

And the thread of lives. I lived in a Society; the gossip-corner common to Societies is faithfully reproduced (did he too sit in one of those white plastic chairs at a block’s back, at sunset, listening?).  There are Mumbai’s slightly-confused belief systems (if a Christian saint will answer one’s prayers, does it matter that one is officially Hindu?).  And the incredibly strong bonds that parent feels toward child, and neighbour to neighbour (in ways undreamt of in England), emerge fully-grown. The casual consuming of street-vendor’s bhelpuri; the chaotic multiple cricket matches on dusty maidans; the greasy way married men are attracted to young women; a woman washing her long hair from a basin outside a slum hut. Pure Bombay.

Don’t worry about the two-dimensions

Adiga’s characters are two-dimensional; his plots baroque.  Yes, ‘fraid so.

I guess his fans will scream at me – what about the slow unravelling of the main character, Masterji, they’ll cry. Hmm.
I’ll say this: Adiga is going to be a major voice. But he isn’t yet. There’s something pre-prepared about his characters, as though he picked them off the shelf. The cynical and Machiavellian developer; the internalised widower; the grasping, feckless neighbour; the hollow ‘left-hand’ man – they all emerge out of Bollywood’s shadow, too two-dimensional.  (Amitabh Bachan as Masterji, anyone?)

And I guess too that Adiga’s writing style is part of this. These same concise, simple sentences are well-made, but they seem to lack total confidence. In order to be readable he has foregone denseness and complexity. Adiga is no Rohinton Mistry.

But – Aravind (I hope he is reading this) will be great one day. Let him make his cash; then let him alone – and he will produce.

Bombay love

For now… if you are a lover of Bombay, you must take this book to your bosom. It is the most real book of real Bombay I have read.

Bombay is like that slightly smelling, badly dressed uncle that hangs around families. He likes to drink in cheap bars, and reminisce, and tell stories; and his like is disappearing.  Yet, who would not have soft spot for him? Of all the pompous, stuck-up, go-getting, educated, wimpish members of one’s family, he is the only one to spend a greasy, comfortable, useless afternoon with.

Telling little lines…

Masterji (the, er, hero of the novel) says of Bombay: “Listen: Dhirubhai Ambani said he would salaam anyone to become the richest man in India. I’ve never salammed anyone. This has been a city where a free man could keep his dignity.”

Is this Adiga’s swipe at Tata and Ambani and the rest, who are taking over Bombay?  I know one mustn’t confuse what a character says with what the writer thinks, but Ambani is the only leading Indian figure mentioned by name in the book (except Gandhi – of course Gandhi!).

One character, Ajwani, sees “... representatives of every race of the city around him: burqa-clad Sunni Muslims with their protective men; Bohra women in their Mother Hubbard bonnets chaperoning each other; petite, sari-clad Marathi women, jasmine garlands in their braided hair, nuggets of vertebrae in their faultless backs…; two thick-shouldered sadhus, saffron robes streaming, chanting Sanskrit to the waves; shrieking clumps of college students from Elphinstone; the baseball-cap-wearing sellers of small fried things and chilled water.”

‘Nuff said. Brilliant observation.

Mrs Rego sees a woman in Bandra. It is “…her sister, and the foreign thing with her was her American journalist husband, Frank.”

Ha-ha. Yes.

But the most curious thing of all is the ending of this book. I won’t spoil the plot (though the outcome won’t be unexpected). No, what is curious are the last few words of the book, eleven italicised words that have the delivery and portentousness of a Moral Message.
Does Adiga intend this last line as a message? I wonder. If so, it is a surprising and quite sudden twist, and almost an exoneration of the moral outrages that have gone before. It could fit the story… I suppose.
But is it indeed exculpation? Or is it Adiga’s own dispassionate view of Bombay – and thus of the people that make up the city? It’s – like I say – curious.

Here it is. The book’s last paragraph describes an old banyan tree. It appears hemmed in by a wall, but its “aerial roots, squirming through barbed wire and broken glass, dripped down over the wall, nearly touching the pavement… Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free.”

If you have read the book, do tell me what you think – in the context of the book’s final terrible act - the significance of this last line is.

A take on Aravind Adiga's White Tiger

This is the story of a boy from the village, who becomes a driver, is sickened by India's rich class, murders his master, and yet then ‘graduates’ to become one of the "India Shining", an entrepreneur.  That’s it in a nutshell, and it won the Man Booker Prize 2008.

Actually, it's not that good a book, being a little glib and very speedy (I read it in a day), but it is NOT just a pot-boiler; and for someone like me it was both evocative and provocative.

It addresses the question: why do India's servant classes accept the contempt and the oppression and even the hatred they daily receive from their employers? 

Underclass

I've often been astounded with the nastiness in the ways that otherwise quite reasonable people (familiar acquaintances of mine in fact) treat their servants. It's quite eye-popping to observe a cultivated man suddenly act in a peremptory and outrageously angry with another human being - whom they obviously regard as little better than an insect (check out servants' living areas if you don't believe me - family pets are better treated). It's doubly shocking to think that these servants are paid a pittance. But, in fact, the most shocking thing is that happens everywhere in this - a democracy.
Now, I hear the objections from the India patriots: what about, they will say, the shocking record of America, where true equality came belatedly to black people - and less than fifty years ago?  What about the horrors of Victorian London, only some one hundred & fifty years ago?
You (dear reader!) are right to object, of course... in a general sense.  But I am talking about those Indian rich who profess total urbane sophistication but who yet seem to have TWO contrary belief systems in their heads, one expressing full egalitarianism and support for meritocracies, the other an extreme and almost totalitarian disregard for the masses.

(This weird mind-split can be very corrupting, and affects even visitors to India.  I went round to an American's house in central Colaba, and there I found him talking in the most cruel and dismissive way about his maid, who as far as I could work out had been nothing but hard-working and loyal.  He found my doubts and problems about the problems of employing such poor people laughable.  Yet I have absolutely no doubt that, once he returns to America, he will return to being utterly classless and adopt a respectful attitude to all his fellow citizens).

Karma. Whatever.

In one of the 'Introduction To India'-type books that I bought on entering Mumbai, the writer put this attitude down to the legacy of caste and karma. 
The theory in the book was that the rich believe (in their hearts, if not their minds) that they have been chosen by the Universe to be what they are - i.e. rich, and, having been chosen, are therefore provably better than the rest. The corollary is also true: that the poor are poor because the Universe gives them very little value. Poor and rich, so the Introduction claimed, then take on the valuation they appear to have divinely received.
I honestly cannot believe this.  Yet... and the reason this book makes the claim I suppose ... there isn't a better theory around!  It is quite a puzzle.

Sadly, while I felt Aravind Adiga got close to understanding both the driver's world and the rich man's world (quite a feat when you think what light years they are apart), and to explaining the main puzzle of 'why don't India's servants rebel?', it didn't help me with my own question - "why do the rich behave so badly?"
Now, I guess inherent beliefs about caste and karma do come into play with older people - but what about the new rich, those who have travelled extensively, those who are aware that people like me shudder at the blatantly inegalitarian relations they exhibit with their servants?

Strangely enough Adiga does play on one aspect of the rich, and makes it a metaphor for their outlook - their sleek, fat glossiness. (The rich in Britain and America are also well-rounded of course, but the nature of the extra pounds almost seems different somehow.  The corpulence of the rich Anglo-Saxons seems an aberration, a failure to deal with prosperity properly, whereas the Indian rich wear fat as a badge of office. I've been continually surprised at how Indian aunties see the obesity of the new family toddler with pride (!) and not dismay.)  This glossy fat is another way that the ostentatious rich mark themselves firmly off from the poor.

Review…

I seem to have wandered off the subject of reviewing White Tiger. Hmm.  Back to the book.

The 'White Tiger' introduces us to a character who begins to realise and be sickened by the enormity of this social divide. The main character, Balram, takes matters into his own hands - despite the huge power of the system which seeks to confine him. (Interestingly, his main weapon is not his own courage or his righteous anger, but his ability to abandon his sense of family responsibility. In India, this is almost unthinkable, and makes him, like the amoral Richard III of Shakespeare, ‘himself alone’).

Actually though, I can’t think of much good about it as ‘literature’. Yes, the narrative sweeps one along (like so many best-sellers), and I can think of many plane-journeys on which I would have longed for this work. But – aren’t the characters just a little too wooden, and the scenes too predictable?

But… why doesn’t one just throw this book in the remainder pile with so many others?
Because: something nags at me.
The world Adiga talks of is, yes, the real world. It’s one I recognise and know from experience – I can fill in the gaps he leaves in his descriptions – it is the world of the dusty Mumbai street-corner, the stink of the drivers’ room, the shabby call-centre, the darkly-lit taxi office, and even the kitsch classical-style (sooooo ridiculous!), gated houses of the really rich Rich.
And into this real world comes a tiny whiff of gunshot, from Balram. He would never describe himself as a revolutionary, but his view is almost unique – because he decides to ignore The Universe. That’s pretty radical for India; and that is why this book nags at one.

  
Link:  Review of White Tiger on ‘Middle Stage’