Real Estate Agents Are All The Same

[commonpeople1]

Last Man in Tower by Aravind Adiga

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

The word Shanghai conjures up images of an utopian paradise where all are happy and life is good. In this novel, The Shanghai is a new development planned beside Mumbai's airport by big shot (and unscrupulous) real estate developer Dharmen Shah which will bring to the area smart apartments, shopping malls and other comforts that the rising middle-class in India believe is their right. There's only one obstacle in Shah's way: a retired and grieving teacher, Masterji, who lives in the old building - Vishram - where the new development is planned. Unlike his neighbours, Masterji refuses to take the big payout offered by the real estate developer on principles that sit at odds with modern capitalistic India. His stance sets in motion a chain of events that throws him against his neighbours, leading to tragedy.

Mumbai holds up a surreal mirror to London. Like here, Mumbai is riddled with a greed and fever for property development that leaves winners and losers in its wake. The growing poor and homeless in London may now not be too far from the slum dwellers in Mumbai; the alienated rich in their smart neighbourhoods (where working-class communities used to exist before) could easily be the converted Victorian houses in the West End that sit beside crime-ridden council estates. The lives spent on uncomfortable commuter trains that occasionally grind to a halt because of someone on the tracks is all too familiar to both Londoners and Mumbai residents.

The novel is beautifully set in Mumbai, offering the reader a glance to the lives of the very poor all the way up to the new rich.  Adiga's characters quickly lose their humanity to the money offered to them. Where once they lived in harmony in a communal society, helping and looking out for each other, the introduction of a chance to make it big exposes them to dark desires that had remained silent until then. The Vishram's residents love for Masterji's Agatha Christie's novels is a sort of foreshadowing of what's to come.

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