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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

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

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, 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.

Reading Group Guide

Last Man in Tower

By Aravind Adiga

ABOUT THIS READING GROUP GUIDE

The questions, discussion topics, and reading list that follow are intended to enhance your reading group’s discussion of Last Man in Tower, Aravind Adiga’s vivid, compulsively readable follow-up to his award-winning novel The White Tiger.

ABOUT THE BOOK

“[Adiga’s] terrific first novel The White Tiger deservedly won the Man Booker Prize. This one is even better. The whole of Mumbai comes under his microscope in the tale of a middle-class apartment block in a slummy area—and what happens when a property tycoon bribes the various inhabitants to leave. The result is as well-paced as any crime story, but so much more. Every one of the huge cast of characters is brilliantly drawn. I’m aghast with admiration. There is no one writing fiction as good as this in Britain or America.” —A. N. Wilson, Reader’s Digest (UK)

Aravind Adiga’s powerful new novel is a stunning, darkly comic story of greed and murder that lays bare the teeming metropolis of Mumbai.

Real estate developer Dharmen Shah’s offer to buy out the residents of Vishram Society—a formerly respectable, now crumbling apartment complex that abuts the infamous Dharavi slums—is more than generous. But one man stands in the way of Shah’s luxury high-rise: Masterji, a retired schoolteacher who will not leave his home in Vishram’s Tower A. Shah is a dangerous man to refuse, but as the demolition deadline looms, Masterji’s neighbors—friends who have become enemies, acquaintances turned conspirators—may stop at nothing to score their payday.

An electrifying, suspense-filled story of money and power, luxury and deprivation, peopled by brilliantly drawn, unforgettable characters, Last Man in Tower exposes the hearts and minds of the everymen and -women of a great, booming city—ordinary people pushed to their limits in a place that knows none.

QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION

What are some of the major themes of the novel? How does Adiga set them forth even in the first pages through his description of Vishram Society? What do you think the banyan tree symbolizes?

The novel begins, “If you are inquiring about Vishram Society, you will be told right away that it is pucca—absolutely, unimpeachably pucca.” What does the word pucca mean? Why is this fact about Vishram important to the story?

How does Adiga use humor as social commentary?

On this page, there is a quote adapted from the Bhagavad Gita: “I was never born and I will never die; I do not hurt and cannot be hurt; I am invincible, immortal,