Between the Assassinations

Between the Assassinations is the second book by Aravind Adiga. It was written before his first book The White Tiger. The title refers to the period between the assassinations of Indira Gandhi in 1984 and her son, Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. Indira Gandhi was the serving Prime Minister of India when she was assassinated; Rajiv Gandhi became Prime Minister in 1984, and left office following his party's defeat in the 1989 general election. Between the Assassinations is a collection of short stories and is being published by Picador in India. Special revised and expanded Hardback Edition with new 100 pages hit stores in India on January, 2011. Between the Assassinations is concerned with the beauty of the rural, coastal south where it is set. Its subject is the pathos, injustices and ironies of Indian life. Full of fresh humour and wry observation, a small town in the south of India is conceived and mapped with brilliant precision. Kittur on India's south-western coast, between Goa and Calicut, is a small, undistinguished every town. Here, an illiterate Muslim boy working at the train station finds himself tempted by an Islamic terrorist; a Dalit bookseller is arrested for selling a copy of The Satanic Verses; a rich, spoiled, half-caste student decides to explode a bomb in college; a sexologist has to find a cure for a young boy with a mysterious disease that may be AIDS. Across class, religion, occupation and preoccupation, Kittur is mapped. What emerges is the moral biography of an Indian town in the seven-year period between the assassinations of Prime Minister Gandhi and her son Rajiv. With the cartographer's precision and the novelist's humanity Aravind Adiga composes a group portrait of ordinary Indians in a time of extraordinary transformation. Keenly observed and finely detailed, Between the Assassinations is a triumph of the voice and imagination.