Between the Assassinations in Around the World in 80 Books

Jun 30, 2010 Kay rated it liked it · review of another edition

Shelves: india, fiction, modern-fiction

An uneven and somewhat repetitive collection of short stories

A sense of outrage over social injustices underpins this collection of fourteen short stories, all set in the fictional southwestern Indian town of Kittur during the period from 1984 to 1991, the time “between the assassinations” of Indira Gandhi and her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi. The title’s reference to these two events is echoed in the political frustrations of the characters, who both rail at and participate in small-town cor An uneven and somewhat repetitive collection of short stories

A sense of outrage over social injustices underpins this collection of fourteen short stories, all set in the fictional southwestern Indian town of Kittur during the period from 1984 to 1991, the time “between the assassinations” of Indira Gandhi and her son and successor, Rajiv Gandhi. The title’s reference to these two events is echoed in the political frustrations of the characters, who both rail at and participate in small-town corruption and iniquities. In this microcosm of India, there are high- and low-caste people, Hindus, Christians, and Moslems, those who live in relative luxury and those enduring the basest poverty. But all the characters are bedeviled by longing and disappointment.

Several themes run through book, such as corruption. As Abbasi, a garment factory owner muses, “Thousands, sitting in tea shops and universities and workplaces every day and every night, were cursing corruption. Yet not one fellow has found a way to slay the demon without giving up his share of the loot of corruption.” Abbasi is a principled Muslim so beset by guilt that he closes his factory. Some of the women in his employment have gone blind from the ceaseless, close-up work on fancy hand-embroidered shirts for the Western ballroom-dancing market. His guilt is so intense that he can’t even bear to go into the sewing room.

However, Abbasi must make a living, plus he knows that the women who toil for him have no other jobs. Despite his scruples he reopens the factory but is immediately beset by a stream of officials demanding bribes. Everyone wants to be paid off in return for allowing him to reopen: “The electricity man; the Water Board man; half the Income Tax Department of Kittur; half the Excise Department of Kittur; six different officials of the Telephone Board; a land tax official of the Kittur City Corporation; a sanitary inspector from the Karnataka State Health Board….” on and on the litany goes. Abbasi exacts a peculiar revenge on his tormentors, but we sense that his fundamental problem remains: he cannot square his conscience with his livelihood.

Caste relationships are another touchstone throughout the book, such as in the tale of Shankara, a privileged high school student whose continual misbehavior culminates in a botched attempt to set off a bomb in a hated chemistry teacher’s lab. The maggot that gnaws at Shankara’s soul is his inability to belong to any particular caste: his father is an upper caste doctor but his mother is a lower caste women. What does that make him, he wonders? He muses, “Is it just a fable? If you said to yourself ‘Caste is a fiction,’ would it vanish like smoke; if you said ‘I am free,’ would you realize you had always been free?”

Still another recurrent theme is sexual repression. Murali, a fifty-something bachelor and Communist party lackey, falls in love with a peasant girl but is rebuffed. Lower-caste odd-jobber George both loves and hates his fickle upper-caste mistress, who seems to encourage intimacy but then turns on him when he dares enter her house unbidden. Journalist Gururaj can’t help but notice an unmarried female colleague in his office but forswears marriage, which he sees as an end to his independence.

Finally, there’s a leitmotif of family ties in the most literal sense – as shackles or a burden. Two destitute brothers, one reliant on the other, snarl at each other as they sleep in a back alley; a drug-addicted father coerces his abused daughter to beg for money to buy drugs; an unmarried woman, regarded as a burden on her family, is sent off to work in a succession of dreadful jobs. In the latter story, the spinster clings to the illusion that her higher caste sets her apart from another servant. In the end, however, she ends up shuttled off to yet another thankless job while the lower-caste girl “escapes” into marriage.

The best stories in this collection reminded me of the stories of Chekhov in their ability to make the reader emphasize with the plight of the characters. We see into their souls, and their most cherished illusions and longings are laid bare. Of course, cruel reality dashes these hopes and dreams, and as this happens we feel the frustration and disappointment that the characters feel. There’s a tender quality and sympathy for the downtrodden that also remind me very much of Chekhov.

However, I often wished there had been some way that the characters intersected. There's no connection between them other than the fact that all live in Kittur, and even that is a tenuous commonality given the range of castes and classes. Furthermore, I was baffled by the “tourist guide” preface written before each story. This was a one- or two-page description of some area or feature of the town, usually the area that the character in the upcoming story inhabited. Unfortunately, these “guidebook” snippets were neither well done nor particularly relevant.

It would have helped if there had been a central protagonist among the tales, as in Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg, Ohio. As it is, the characters simply coexist but never interact, which intensifies the sense of alienation permeating the book. Perhaps this was the author’s intention. However, after a half dozen or so stories, the mantra of doom and disappointment became repetitive.
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