Editor: Albin Michel, 1998
Traduit of English by Francoise Adelstain
Would you to share intimacy of characters of people in contemporary India crunched in the manner of Eugene Süe or Charles Dickens? Read then This long novel of 700 pages and you can measure the balance of the world.
Dina Dalal, a young person and pretty widowed appears in the center of a realistic swirl which will crush cruelly the majority of the protagonists .Dalal is ant conformist, who sees herself forced, not to depend financially on her brother, to accommodate at his a paying guest, a young student, and two tailors who manufacture for her the part of the dresses that she sells to one local company.
The author tells successively the past of these four principal characters, then what they live together during an academic year, and what they become after their separation.
The destinies are tragic, on context of India which is modernized and democratize but in an anarchistic way submerged by not-right, pitiless law of the strongest, corruption, , cruelty, relentless application of the antiquated rules which govern the relations between the castes, , and the collapse of all the hopes to escape social rigidity.
the King of the Beggars, exploiter and cynical guard of the beggars of the city, of which Shankar legless cripple, mutilated shortly after his birth, the collector of hair which kills to ensure its harvest, the receiver of the rents, Ibrahim, which is made an honor to expulse the tenants who are not able to pay, Kesarn a police officer, which leads without pity the demolition contractors of the shantytowns installed, with the complicity of municipal persons in charge corrupted on the public spot, all are at the same time feeling reluctant and pitiful, each one showing, surprisingly, in certain circumstances feelings of a beauty which anybody would believed them.
The manures more stinking always nourish flowers…that what appears through the situations, the dialogues, the places are of a realism believed, commonplace, revolting, horrifying sometimes. But vulgarity, the obscenity, the human rot are registered in a so natural way in this immense court of the miracles that the reader made there quickly, in this nauseous universe.The four central persons , as well as others randomly met, seem sanctified little by little by their own acts, stripped gradually their defects, and their ambitions.