Books
Your starter for one billion
by Rachael King
How can a penniless, barely literate waiter from Mumbai possibly win a billion rupees on Who Will Win a Billion (or W3B)? According to the organisers, he must have cheated, so Ram Mohammad Thomas is arrested, imprisoned and tortured until he admits his crime. But before he gives in, rescue comes from Smita, a beautiful female lawyer, who offers to represent him if he will only explain to her how he won.
And so begins the meat of Indian diplomat Vikas Swarup’s debut novel Q&A, when Smita and Ram sit down to watch a videotape of the show. Before each question, Ram tells Smita a story that shows how he came to know the answer – a result of his adventurous life and his sponge-like ability to absorb information, starting at his abandonment by his mother and ending with the reason he came to be on the show.
It’s a good device, essentially linking a series of short stories featuring Ram. Through it we experience child abuse, friendship, first love and first sexual experience, movie star worship, murder, autism, leprosy, organised pick-pocketing and the history of the Taj Mahal. Running through the tales is Ram’s yearning for his mother, always depicted in his fantasies as a wind-swept woman in a white sari, forced to abandon her child through no fault of her own.
The book is deceptively light-hearted and chatty, but at its core is social commentary: “The rich people, those who live in their marble and granite four-bedroom flats, they enjoy. The slum people, who live in squalid, tattered huts, they suffer. And we, who reside in the overcrowded chawls, we simply live.” Ram’s work takes him into the homes of the other half, from where he is able to observe them as the freaks they are. His name – Hindu, Muslim and Christian – draws together all the religious facets of India, giving him a pass into different worlds, cultures and socio-economic groups.
A list of the characters reads like a who’s who of stereotypes: the faded Bolly-wood beauty, the whore with a heart of gold, the paedophile Catholic priest, the closeted gay movie-star, the crooked cop; but Swarup overcomes the clichés with his easy, readable style and highly likeable protagonist, making this a very enjoyable novel if not a challenging one.
Q&A, by Vikas Swarup (Doubleday, $34.95).
