Asian Window

Arvind Adiga at the Daily Beast on how he travelled from Brooklyn back to his hometown of Mangalore, and discovered an India he never knew existed.

In 2003, my employer in New York, Time Inc., sent me back to India to be a reporter for Time magazine. One of the reasons I wanted to come back, after more than a decade in England and America, was to finish the literary project I’d begun years ago as a student at Oxford, where I had read large parts of Balzac’s novel series The Human Comedy, a complete portrait of the France of his time. I wanted, in a modest way, to do the same for the one place on earth I thought I knew inside-out: Mangalore, my hometown in the south of India. In my apartment in Park Slope, Brooklyn, I sketched out a plan for a bonsai version of The Human Comedy-a series of interconnected stories about each of the typical residents of Mangalore-businessman, teacher, student, farmer, politician, and so on. The book would be true to the external appearance of Mangalore’s buildings and people, but would also capture the inner drives-jealousy, lust, compassion-that shaped the town.

Late in 2003, after settling down in New Delhi-where my job with Time required me to live- I took a flight down south to Mangalore. I had not been back since 1990, the year of my mother’s unexpected death; so not only was this is my first visit in over a decade, it was also my first trip to my hometown without my mother around. I was here, finally, as an adult-free to wander, to speak to anyone, to look at the town with new eyes. And what I discovered, in the course of a weeklong trip, was that I didn’t know my hometown at all. More:

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