The complexity, colour and conflict that is India’s modern inheritance is magnificently explored in Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga (Penguin, R200).
It is a careful deconstruction of the best and worst of India’s pride, greed and resourcefulness and, in my view, usurps even The White Tiger for which he won the Man Booker Prize in 2008.
It has that wonderful, rare quality of “seizure”: it both grips and erupts in the mind during its progression until it consumes entirely. It has been too long since I’ve been held this helplessly by a novel.
Last Man in Tower is located within that most precarious perch, the fine dividing line between socially disreputable poverty and deeply desirable gentrification.
That gap may be relatively tiny in monetary terms, but in India it is everything. It can be the difference between starving in a sewage-riddled, rat-infested camp, or the ability to live like pukka ladies and gentlemen, with attainable aspirations for your children.
The ability to leap across that gap takes enormous effort and a steely determination, and may involve deeds which are not pukka at all. But when you live cheek by jowl with seething poverty, the terror of being drawn down into its midst as opposed to the lure of a shiny, clean life, can cause even the well-intentioned to behave like feral rats.
The building in question is Tower A in the Vishram Co-operative Housing Society, one of two that have managed to literally rise above the surrounding slums to achieve a 50-year reputation of social propriety in Mumbai.
The potential to use this reputation to re-enforce his property empire has not escaped the beady eye of Dharmen Shah, a man who has, himself, escaped from the tentacles of poverty.
In Shah’s world there is no room for ethics; only what brings success. He is willing to use an efficient method of empire-gathering – offering a tempting price. If that doesn’t work, there are other unsavoury options. For this, he has that necessary accoutrement for all ambitious acquisitors in Mumbai – a “left-hand man” whose job is to arrange and enforce such matters.
The inhabitants of Tower A are living as innocents in a metaphorical garden of Eden, isolated from the clutch of their immediate squalid surroundings, neighbourly and concerned for each other. They are the urban equivalent of a village, with the usual minor squabbles and differences, but united against the “unclean”world beyond their boundaries.
Shah, however, is a snake of rare insight into the weakness of human hearts. Greed, he knows, is the great temptress.
Even though the families and inhabitants of Tower A are anxious about leaving, Shah knows each of them has a weak spot.
But this time, Shah encounters the unique – a man who wants nothing. The widowed Masterji is the most respected man in the Tower. His flat holds all his memories, his immediate neighbours share their meals with him, and he has no material desires.
Shah is a master manipulator of innocents, but is paralysed in the face of purity.
Adiga’s novel tightens the noose slowly but inexorably. Last Man in Tower is a masterful insight into perfidy, and how smoothly it can grip an otherwise decent community.
Even more impressive is his ability to conjure up the authenticity of the Mumbai streets, the textured layers of interaction, the colourful use of language and gesture.
Nor does he paint a simplistic notion of good versus bad: when you are born into a nation of a billion people, it takes exceptional qualities to rise above the common herd.
Adiga has once again drawn a vivid, penetrating portrait of India’s beauty and corruption.
Breathtakingly good. – Beverley Roos Muller