Tiger By The Tales

Like a South Asian sister city to Sherwood Anderson's Winesburg, Ohio, the fictitious town of Kittur, India, is full of anguished, solitary souls trying to figure out their place in the world. They fight, complain, love and struggle their way through the overlapping stories in Between the Assassinations, the nimble new offering from Aravind Adiga, the Indian writer who won Britain's Man Booker Prize last year for his savage first novel, The White Tiger. With his latest book, Adiga, 34, strengthens the brash voice that echoed so loudly through his debut. A graduate of Columbia and Oxford who grew up in the south Indian town of Mangalore (the model for Kittur), he is an insider with an outsider's probing eye, taking the country harshly to task for its myriad shortcomings—corruption, cronyism, inequality and indifference, for starters— while pulling hard for its success.

Between the Assassinations is a precursor to The White Tiger, which tells the modern-day story of a wily lower-caste chauffeur who gets rich through corruption and violence. The new book, explains Adiga in a phone interview, covers the period between the assassination of Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984, when "old India should have come to an end," and that of her son Rajiv in 1991, when the country's economy finally began to blossom. Unlike Balram Halwai, the savvy narrator of Tiger, the characters in these short stories are paralyzed by their powerlessness. They can glimpse a better world but don't know how to reach it. "In the India of The White Tiger, if you break the rules, you can get what you want," says Adiga. "But in Between the Assassinations, there is no breaking the rules." In one story, a Muslim factory owner feels terrible that the seamstresses he employs are going blind, but he won't shutter the factory. "Who would send his son to school?" Adiga writes. "Would he sit by the docks with a knife and smuggle cars …? The women would go elsewhere and do the same work." In another vignette, "Umbrella Street," a bitter furniture deliverer fantasizes about escaping his backbreaking labor by stealing money or currying favors from a local politician, but can never quite muster the gumption.

As a work of literature, Between the Assassinations feels slighter and less satisfying than The White Tiger, though Adiga wrote them simultaneously. It's the equivalent of engaging in mildly interesting cocktail-party chatter as opposed to having an intense, sustained conversation with one person. But as a portrait of India, Between the Assassinations is far richer and more nuanced, encompassing the perspectives of Muslims, Hindus and Christians; rich and poor; young and old; upper caste and lower. Set up like a guidebook for a walking tour of Kittur, it includes a map, basic statistics and detailed descriptions of the city. Each story is set in a different neighborhood, and Adiga uses poignant images—a mixed-caste schoolboy gorging himself on ice cream after setting off a bomb at his Jesuit school, a young girl begging for rupees to buy heroin for her addict father, a childless woman fawning over the daughter of a dinner guest—to capture the jumble of voices that makes India so complex.

Adiga, a journalist with a good ear for a story, believes that multiplicity of viewpoints has been missing from contemporary Indian fiction, as well as from the national discourse. The rise of the middle class has underscored how many Indians are still struggling to survive. "The most patriotic thing a creative artist can do is challenge people to see their country as it is," he says. The White Tiger sparked fierce criticism when it came out in India. Adiga submitted a version of Between the Assassinations to his Indian publisher in 2006, omitting two stories that he felt were controversial because they featured lower-caste characters: "Umbrella Street" and "Market and Maidan," the latter about a migrant worker who finds a job as a bus conductor. The collection was published there only after he won the Booker. Indians may not always like what Adiga has to say, but their future depends on his freedom to keep saying it.