In 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 constant noise; repairs are desperately needed. But the tenants are 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 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 and let him demolish the Vishram towers to create his dream, the Shanghai. All the tenants of Tower B decide to sell and move. But in Tower A, not everyone wants to go, and the decision has to be unanimous. Spies are everywhere, trying to sniff out the tenants who are holding the others back from the fulfillment of their dreams.
Author Aravind Adiga 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 is sympathetic in some way. Even the builder has his own griefs, as he strives for a last achievement in his threatened life. As the deadline creeps closer, allegiances shift, loyalties are strained and moral codes abandoned.
Adiga isn't entirely neutral in the moral melee that grips the Vishram Society. 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, Nick's Picks, University Book Store, Seattle