Serena Davies reviews Animal's People by Indra
Sinha
Animal's People took a while to persuade me of its merits. At
first it appears to be ticking off the clichés of a particular type of
fashionable novel: quirky first-person narrative from one of the
dispossessed; unreliable syntax; setting amid the travails of the
Indian subcontinent; magic realism levered into a story that was
fantastic enough already. But when Indra Sinha
calms down, this novel has qualities of its own: a glorious sense of
humour and, in the second half, a shattering punch. Its
narrator, Animal, is a beggar-boy damaged so badly by a disastrous
chemical leak perpetrated by an "American Kampani" in the town of
Khaufpur that his spine has melted and he has to walk on all fours. Bullied
all his life, he has grown up believing he gives not a whit for anyone.
The novel traces his journey towards the revelation that he does care;
that the opening line, "I used to be human once", is wrong. He still is. Teaching
him so are his "people": the colourful, oath-given sorts around him,
many of whom have devoted their lives to seeking retribution for what
the Kampani did. Although Sinha's imagining of the
Kampani as a satanic embodiment of corporate America isn't entirely
fair, his conjuring of a shanty-town feels utterly authentic. It is in
this proud "kingdom of the poor", where there is no point wearing a
watch because there is only "now time", that people are most alive. And as calamity looms, Sinha's lyrical story touches on universal truths about suffering and resilience. | 
