Tiger By The Tales.(Books)(Between the Assassinations)(Book review)

Byline: Susan H. Greenberg

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 carsa--? The women would go elsewhere and do the same work." In another vignette, "Umbrella Street," a bitter furniture deliverer ...