V V: Unsettling developments

Adiga opened his fictional exploration of modern India (“Shining India” as it was hyped at the time) with The White Tiger: here was a densely populated urban society, upwardly mobile on its way, not knowing where it was headed. The story was spun round Balram Halwai, a bania on the make, who, by his own admission, was made from “half-baked clay”; but he was street-smart and knew almost instinctively his way about town. The basic theme in Last Man in Tower is much the same except that the scene shifts to the suburbs of Mumbai where housing estates had sprung up on former mill lands or the slums surrounding them.

Dharam Shah, a property developer, is the villain of Adiga’s second novel. He had successfully built high rises peopled by the ageing middle class of pre-liberalised India – accountants, middle men and small entrepreneurs – who moved to the suburbs where living was a little less expensive than central Bombay.

Shah has made his pile but that isn’t enough; he has to grow but land in Mumbai is in short supply. The only way out is to buy Vishram Society, a housing co-operative south of Mumbai airport, and redevelop it into a condominium in which each apartment would be individually owned. Shah had already built a complex, The Fountainhead, that had gone off with a bang. He wants a repeat: “You should look around,” he says to himself, “you should always be thinking, what does he have that I don’t have? That way you go up in life.”

This is the modus operandi of almost all property developers now and Adiga has got it spot on: buy old properties, knock them down and build a stack of luxury apartments, sell out each at a cut-rate profit. But it is never simple, as Shah discovers at some cost, because the problem with co-operatives is that every homeowner must agree for the deal to go through. Any individual member can veto the plan.

Opposing Shah’s redevelopment plans is a group of residents for whom the old ramshackle building represents more than land value. The prospect of easy money is a great temptation for the middle class, but Shah has to encounter a range of voices and experiences: from the blind woman who navigates the building by touch to the secretary who has got used to a little money on the side for favours done to members and so on. Besides, most people are reluctant to move out of their settled ways.

Slowly, the opposition breaks down, thanks to intimidation and the lure of hard cash. Only Masterji, Yogesh Mirthy (the retired teacher), remains Last Man in Tower who holds out against the “encroaching gentrification and slum clearance”. It would have been interesting to find out how the developers led by Shah bought the Last Man and whether it was money alone, and not physical threats, that made him finally give way. It is always a combination of the two. In any case, the new Mumbai is no country for old men.

There are different ways in which you could read this novel: for sheer entertainment or as a timely parable for the age of the property bubble and the corruption bred by greed and the vanity of redevelopment projects. Given that rampant corruption is the hot topic among the middle class, it is with the latter perspective that the book will make its impact on the common reader. But the bourgeoisie rarely turns the light inwards; it doesn’t realise that its avarice is as much a problem as the greed of the land-grabber. What Adiga is saying in not-too-subtle ways is that both the bribe-taker and bribe-giver are accessories to the crime. Adiga has given us an unsettling novel suitable for the febrile and shifting city it seeks to reclaim.