![]() ![]() A "beautification" program causes those who had built illegal shacks on waste ground and rented them at exorbitant rates to turn into government workers who collect the "homeless" and take them-no questions asked-to a hard labor camp, after bulldozing the shacks. Those are the years of Indira Ghandi, a period called in the novel "the emergency", when social programs intended to modernized the behemoth country turned into terror for ordinary citizens, mostly poor people. The novel takes places mostly in 1976, with lots of backstory on the characters and an epilogue from 1984. ![]() It's a big panorama of a novel that reminds me of Dickens: the intricate plot with lots of coincidences and characters than come back a convenient (or inconvenient) times, colorful secondary characters with names like Worm, Monkey Man, and Beggarmaster-and damning social criticism. ![]()
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