The book is a collection of short stories set in a town in South-Western India, Kittur.
The author traverses the various corners of the city, its people, and its social life, like a modern-day Guy de Maupassant.
Yet in truth, as an editor remarks when rejecting the stories,

your characters want absolutely nothing.
They simply walk through richly described situations and think deeply.
They walk through cows, trees, roosters, and think, and then walk through roosters, trees, and cows, and think a bit more.
That is all.

The narrative, in fact, unfolds between the realistic, stark, and often repetitive depiction of modern Indian society, and the pessimistic chronicle of an unalterable social and existential condition.
Despite India’s intense economic dynamism, there is no real shift in the social fabric, in caste relations, in the mechanisms of power—ever dominated by corruption and abuse—nor in the lives of the characters, who, whenever they aspire to or believe they have attained even a modicum of social mobility, are thrust back into the immutable roles of a stratified society.
All the stories are remarkably fine, but the most emblematic of the entire collection is “Market and Maiden”.
Keshaya is a boy from the countryside looking for work in the city: “he is small, thin, dark-skinned, with huge eyes that wander dreamily.”
Full of energy yet at the same time “capable of staring at the ceiling for hours,” the boy does not quite know what he wants, but remains captivated by the life of the tram conductor, who works outside, clinging perilously to the vehicle.
He manages to secure this job and is thrilled because he rides to work on a bicycle given to him by his employer.
It belonged to a former tram conductor, who now begs in the street after being crippled in an accident.
One day, Keshaya falls, strikes his head, is fired, and finds himself wandering through the market like a madman, like a wild man.
And everyone pretends not to recognize him, yet “he was the king of tram number 5,” cries the lame man, the only one standing by him, bound by the solidarity shared among the poor and the wretched.
“That is the way of the world,” remarks the protagonist of another story, “and so it’s a rotten world.”
And what can the writer do? If he does not wish to go mad, like another character in the book, he must convince himself that

every true word, as soon as it has been written, is like the full moon, in a day it vanishes and passes entirely into darkness.
And this is the way of all things

What is truly remarkable in these stories is Adiga’s writing.
It succeeds in transfiguring social realism into the anticipation, or the possibility, of an escape—wholly contemplative and interior—from the deterministic and inexorable forces of economics and sociology.
In “The Bunder”, Abasi is a small-business owner, beleaguered by the corruption of public officials, who endures a profound inner conflict between the necessity of providing security for his family and the harrowing awareness that the manufacturing processes in his factory will inexorably lead the female laborers to blindness.
What is to be done? He climbs onto the roof of his factory:

from here a man can see the limits of Kittur...
and see the Arabian Sea stretching out from Kittur.
The setting sun is shining above it.
A ship is slowly leaving the harbor, sailing where the blue waters of the sea change color and turn a deep dark.
And it is about to meet a broad swath of the brilliant setting sun, an oasis of pure light

Will Abisa throw himself from the roof, or will he submit to the inexorable laws of economics? We are left in a state of suspense, of waiting, which forms the resolution to most of the stories.

Why read it? Splendid stories, marvelous prose, and human and social narratives of powerful resonance.

Between the assassinations