Animal's People by Indra Sinha

“I used to be human once.” With this attention-grabbing declaration, the narrator of Indra Sinha’s novel, shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, introduces himself. Animal lives in Khaufpur, an imaginary Indian city that shares its history with Bhopal, scene of the devastating release of poisonous gas from an American-owned chemical factory in 1984. Animal inhabits a body shaped by the disaster that struck his home town. Orphaned on the night the gas flooded Khaufpur’s streets, he is bent and twisted so badly by the effects of the poison that he can move only on all fours. Other children first called him Animal in the school yard and he has adopted the name in an act of defiantly perverse pride. Now in his late teens, he talks into the tape machine left him by a foreign journalist who has visited Khaufpur in search of human-interest stories. Animal is aware that journalists (and, presumably, novelists in their own, more indirect way) “come to suck our stories from us, so strangers in far-off countries can marvel there’s so much pain in the world”, but he is still eager to have his own tale told.

On the tapes, he relates his involvement with the campaign to win compensation from the “Kampani” for the catastrophe it has inflicted on Khaufpur, and with the clinic opened by an idealistic American doctor to treat the victims. Consumed by love and lust for Nisha, the young woman who plucks him from his life on the streets and gives him a substitute family in the campaigners, Animal struggles to accommodate new feelings of tenderness and concern into his dog-eat-dog vision of the world. Zafar, saintly leader of the activists, arouses both jealousy and admiration. The American, Elli Barber, may or may not be a true friend to the outcast Khaufpuris but she offers Animal the chance of life-changing surgery for his twisted body and takes her own starring role in the sexual fantasies that haunt him. As the battle between “Kampani” and campaigners reaches its climax, the contradictions within Animal can be resolved only by a solitary journey into his heart of darkness.

Sinha makes gestures towards the fantasy and surrealism characteristic of a certain kind of Indian fiction (Animal can read minds and befriends the Khã-in-a-Jar, a two-headed foetus damaged by the gas and preserved in a hospital laboratory, which has somehow achieved consciousness and articulacy), but never seems anything other than half-hearted in his commitment to this subcontinental magic realism. His novel’s true strength lies in his central character. “If talking’s what makes people human, no one is more human than you,” Nisha tells Animal at one point. The voice Sinha has created for him – foul-mouthed, scatological and crude yet curiously generous and insightful – is what makes Animal’s People the memorable work of fiction it is.

Buy ANIMAL’S PEOPLE by Indra Sinha
Simon & Schuster £11.99 pp376

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