Amid the slums of Mumbai, the two towers of the Vishram Society are the last bastions of middle-class respectability. The residential highrise isn't perfect: it doesn't have 24-hour running water; proximity to the airport means low-flying jets and constant noise; building repairs are desperately needed. But the tenants have gotten to know each other. It's like a big extended family.
Sixty-one-year-old Masterji is a retired high school teacher, and while living at Vishram he's lost the two people he loved most, his college-age daughter and, just last year, his wife. Vishram is all he has left, and now Dharmen Shah, the oversize managing director of the Confidence Group, is offering all the tenants a fortune in square footage if they'll vacate their homes and let him demolish the Vishram towers to create his dream, a builder's masterpiece, the Shanghai. All the tenants of Tower B decide to sell and move. But in Tower A, not everyone wants to go, and it has to be unanimous. Which means spies are everywhere trying to sniff out the tenants who are holding the others back from the fulfillment of their dreams. Rubbish bins are examined. Bribes are offered. Deals are sweetened. The temptations become irresistible.
Author Aravind Adiga champions the wretched of the earth and presents a five-story tower jam-packed with complex and vivid characters, along with the tenants' grown children, the construction team, lawyers, police, henchmen, vendors and laborers, the teeming masses of the streets, all treated with compassion. Just as he did in his Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger, Adiga presents no easy line between good and evil. Every tenant in Tower A has a point of view and is sympathetic in some way. And the builder has his own griefs, a wayward son and his own health secret, as he strives for a last achievement in his threatened life. At the eye of the hurricane is money, unleashing desperation and greed. The reader watches in helpless fascination as the characters clash and misunderstand each other.
As the deadline creeps closer, allegiances shift, with threatening posters and anonymous phone calls. Formerly good-hearted neighbor comes up against neighbor, loyalties are strained and moral codes abandoned as one frustrated tenant after another decides to compromise and do "just a little thing" before time runs out, each plan more sinister than the last. The suspense becomes almost unbearable. Desperate measures are adopted. Things don't go as planned. Characters change and surprise you. The horror of the haunting resolution is not so much what happens as how it happens.
Adiga isn't entirely neutral in the moral melee that grips the Vishram Society. In spite of the old teacher's stubbornness and single-mindedness, Adiga clearly favors his defiant old Masterji, enough to have the jolly god Ganesha whisper in the old man's ear, "I've been on your side the whole time, you old atheist." --Nick DiMartino
Shelf Talker: The tenants of a highrise in Mumbai are all offered a fortune if they can convince everyone to sell in this gripping tale by a Booker Prize-wining author.