GRIPPING TALE
Animal’s People by Indra Sinha
(Simon & Schuster)
To tell you the truth, I picked up Animal’s People only after the novel made it to the Man Booker 2007 long list. And, I had long since finished it by the time the shortlist was released. It is easy to sum up the plot – Animal is a young survivor of the ‘apokalis’ in the gassed out city, Khaufpur. Called thus because he lopes about on all fours – his spine has been badly affected – he is pivotal to the novel, as the title suggests – and we see the world through his perspective.
This is the second book that I have read on the disastrous effects of a killer gas, the first being Dominique Lapierre’s Five Past Midnight in Bhopal. Sinha’s literary offering not only kicks you in the solar plexus – with its simple, often coarse, uninhibited language, honest yet raw emotion and an obsessive attention to details – but it also forces you to sit up and think.
There are a plethora of other characters – Zafar bhai, Nisha, Ma Franci, Chunaram – but it is Animal who is at the centre of it all...talking to a ‘tape mashin’ and directing the way the novel moves. It is his sensitivity and human qualities that surface from time to time, his extremely basic desires that are thwarted by his deformed frame that touch one’s heart. There is despair…and yet, in all the hopelessness, there is hope. One does not know when that hope will be realised and justice dealt out to the Khaufpuris.
Sinha brings to life an issue that he has time and again addressed in articles. He recreates the fabric of the lives of the people who survived that night…delves deep into their scarred psyches. It is not a novel for the faint-hearted…but for readers with a conscience, Animal’s People is a must-read.

THE INDIAN EXPERIENCE
Gifted by Nikita Lalwani
(Penguin India)
Earlier this year, Nikita Lalwani was the cynosure of a great deal of attention when her debut novel Gifted was chosen for the Booker long-list. Inspired in part by the story of Safiah Yusuf, a mathematics prodigy who was accepted at Oxford at the tender age of 13 and subsequently ran away after accusing her parents of putting too much pressure on her, Gifted is the tale of a brilliant young girl named Rumi, a teenaged genius who sees the world with arithmetical precision.
Set amidst the wan streets of Cardiff, it examines the Indian experience in England through the eyes of this precocious adolescent. It is a charmingly clever chronicle of her conflicts and aspirations and her desire for freedom from a world centered around the constrictions of her family and the unusual sense of dislocation she feels. Combining delicate humour with a dexterous use of mathematical patois, Lalwani skilfully portrays the ideological chasm between young British Asians and their first-generation immigrant parents without resorting to trite clichés or pathetic displays of melodrama and the end result is a thought provoking journey through the middle-class world of Brown Britain that is both sensuously well-written and original.
Part of me – the pretentious cognoscenti half – loved this book, for its sheer imaginativeness and its melancholic exactitude. The other half – the part which is so sick and tired of reading about the Indian diaspora – thought it really a very facile, even difficult novel. Regardless of this paradoxical quandary, one thing however is certain. Even without the Booker hype, Gifted is an intriguing, involving book and signals the arrival of a new voice of prodigious ability.