Aravind Adiga - Last Man in Tower

‘The light is not good. I can’t see what you’re…’

After a while, Mrs Rego saw, or thought she saw, what her former neighbour was pointing at.

Past the traffic, on the other side of the road, she saw the boundary wall of an old Juhu housing society, displaying three generations of torture devices: primitive coloured bottle-glass shards, stuck into the entire length of the wall, and over them a layer of rusty barbed wire with its ends tied into jagged knots, and over that, rolled into giant coils, a shinier barbed wire with large square metal studs, like she had seen in action movies around American military installations, less crudely threatening than the rusty layer but unmistakably more lethal. Behind these overlapping wires she saw banyan trees; all of which were hemmed in by the fencing; except for one greying ancient, whose aerial roots, squirming through barbed wire and broken glass, dripped down the wall like primordial ooze until their bright growing tips, nearly touching the pavement, brushed against a homeless family cooking rice in the shade; and with each root-tip that had beaten the barbed wire the old banyan said: Nothing can stop a living thing that wants to be free .

Vakola, Mumbai

March 2007–October 2009

Robin Desser at Knopf edited this novel and made it a better one.

I thank my uncle, Mr Udaya Holla of Sadashivanagara, Bangalore, for taking care of my interests for so many years.

I thank Drew MacRae, Ravi Mirchandani, Pankaj Mishra, Akash Shah and his family, Justice Suresh and Rajini, Shivjit ‘Chevy’ Sidhu, Vinay Jayaram, Vivek Bansal, William Green, Elizabeth Zoe Vicary, Professor Robert W. Hanning, Professor David Scott Kastan, Jason Zweig, S. Prasannarajan, Devangshu Datta, Sree Srinivasan, Robert Safian, Jason Overdorf and Ivor Indyk.