The US edition of Indra Sinha’s Booker-shortlisted novel Animal’s People was just published this week by HarperCollins. Last fall, when I first heard about the book which focuses on the effects of a chemical company explosion in a contemporary Indian city, I didn’t want to wait … so, I immediately ordered my copy from Amazon UK. (I’m glad I did because now I have a paperback copy with a cover that I much prefer over the American edition. See for yourself below.)

Set in the fictional city of Khaufpur—home to a catastrophic gas explosion caused by an unnamed Kampani (if you’re thinking Union Carbide and Bhopal already, you’re not alone)—Animal’s People is the first-person account of Animal, a 19 year old, who walks on all fours, his back twisted by a disaster he is barely old enough to remember. Animal was born just a few days before “That Night” (his Apocalypse) when a chemical factory owned by Americans exploded, killing his parents, totalling his slum, and virtually destroying the health of many of the city’s poorer inhabitants. The Kampani changed his life before he really even knew what his life could be:

“I used to be human once. So I’m told. I don’t remember it myself, but people who knew me when I was small say I walked on two feet just like a human being … Ask people they’ll tell you I’m the same as ever, anyone in Khaufpur will point me out, ‘There he is! Look! It’s Animal. Goes on four feet, that one. See, that’s him, bent double by his own bitterness …”

This is the powerful first line of a novel that I ripped through it at breath neck speed, simultaneously refreshed by Sinha’s raw voice and haunted by the events and images that were unfolding in the novel itself.When the book begins, Animal is talking into a tape recorder, telling a Jarnalis from Ostrali his story in a singularly unique dialect of Inglis, Hindi, and French, punctuated with a vast and bawdy vocabulary (“The things I say, by the time they reach you they’ll have been changed out of Hindi, made into Inglis et francais pourquoi pas pareille quelques autres languges?”). An orphan raised by Sister Franci, a (nearly mad) French nun, he is an embittered young man, angered by the cards that fate handed him and defiant of a society that expects him to rise above his anger.

Things start to change when he meets Nisha, the daughter of a former music teacher (whose voice was disfigured after the explosion), her activist boyfriend Zafar, and their gang of reformers. Animal is forced to confront his human side as Nisha and Zafar pull him into their circle of trust. He also comes face to face with lust, love, desire for Nisha. To complicate things further, an American doctor, Elli, comes to town, with big plans to build a medical clinic and treat all the suffering masses for free. Zafar and his gang are skeptical of her efforts, suspicious that her clinic is a Kampani-backed effort. They boycott her services. But Animal – he can get anywhere and be everywhere, so small and below eye level that he is – he wangles his way into a number of situations, becoming the eyes and ears of Zafar’s “army” and uncovering various truths not just about Elli but also about himself. Parallel to the conflict with the Kampani is Animal’s own conflict with his desire to be loved, with the ghosts of yesterday (who live as fetuses in a jar and are the voices that speak to him), and his struggle over whether to be or not to be human.

Through Animal – a terribly human and honest character–Sinha weaves a narrative that juxtaposes devastation and darkness with humor and hope,and which speaks for the thousands of disenfranchised individuals whose lives have been thrown upside down by similar catastrophes. Sinha pulls out all stops as he draws stark contrasts for us between what life is like for the haves and the have-nots in Khaufpur; between what life was like before the Kampani explosion and after the Kampani explosion; between corporate interests and social justice. The novel swings between extreme realism and a level of surrealism–or you could call it, magical realism (though Sinha doesn’t agree with that portrayal), which reminded me of Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children (another parallel that Sinha doesn’t see) [see my interview].

To date, both the New York Times and the San Francisco Chronicle have featured reviews of the book, critiquing it as unrealistic and somewhat gimmicky–they didn’t buy into Animal’s illusions or the notion of a French nun who speaks no Hindi teaching Animal bits of French. (Those things didn’t bother me at all. I saw them as pieces of the puzzle to understanding the strange, surreal, complex world that Animal inhabits; one that is a mashup of the real and the imagined. But, that’s just me.) At the same time, they have praised Sinha for “an act long overdue in the canon of Indian literature in English: giving the poor a voice that sounds like their own” (SF Chronicle) and “a plainspoken lyricism that brings his subject into sudden focus” (NYT). With this I couldn’t agree more.

After reading Animal’s People, I had many questions for Indra Sinha, both about his intentions and his inspiration, as well as about his writing process. He was kind enough to oblige. Read the interview.