Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

As a reader of fiction I am immediately suspicious of clever narrative devices. When it became obvious that Aravind Adiga’s Booker Prize winning novel, ‘The White Tiger’ , comprised correspondence between a Bangalore businessman and the Chinese premier, my cynicism immediately heightened. It is testimony to Adiga’s deft touch that Balram Halwai, his narrator, unfolds a tale of ambition and murder which dispelled all doubt and held me enthralled to its conclusion. Halwai is an ambitious, able village boy who manages to bridge the gap between two symbiotic but diametrically different Indias. One is an emerging economic powerhouse, fuelled by American outsourcing and represented by gleaming cinemas and shopping malls. Its counterpoint is the rural ’darkness’, squalid, impoverished, filthy; teeming with the homeless and sick. In the gridlocked streets of Delhi these two countries merge and it is the cleavage between them that provides the motor for Adiga’s novel. The narrator escapes