2025-05-19
In Halady’s drama set in 1970s Bangalore, a teenage boy who hides his impressive intelligence tries to help his friend raise funds to stay in school.
Vikram is starting the 10th grade as part of the class of 1977—a crucial academic year for those who want to advance to college. He is “naturally brilliant in math,” and a bookish boy, as well, but he conceals his precociousness to avoid the burden of adult expectations. He has no desire to become a doctor or lawyer; in fact, he doesn’t seem to contemplate his future profession all that much, although he does take a shine to the idea of becoming a police inspector. He belongs to a group he calls “last-benchers”—students who have the least promise and ambition and thus occupy the back seats in class. They’re the bottom of the institution’s social hierarchy, as astutely portrayed by the author. The fatherless Vikram seems largely unbothered by his own poverty; his mother, Radha, operates chit funds—a “collective savings scheme” to make ends meet—and he helps by selling chips she makes at home. However, money suddenly becomes a more urgent issue when a friend, Sekar, a talented first-bencher who aspires to become a doctor, is forced to abandon school to help his father raise a dowry for the wedding of his sister, Jaya. Vikram, with the relentless altruism that defines him, devotes himself to raising the funds, while remaining largely indifferent to his own academic destiny; he remains content to let teachers believe he’s “a lazy boy who will grow up to be a mediocre young man and surely die a nobody.”
Halady perceptively limns the socio-economic class system of India in the 1970s, in which there are few opportunities, chased by many. As the narrative goes on, he also effectively shows how one’s fate is often predetermined by ironclad familial need—a nonnegotiable demand that dooms entire clans to perpetual underachievement: “This is the cycle of poverty caused by a sense of duty and self-sacrifice. Why is it that we are both victims and perpetrators?” This is an exceedingly sentimental tale in many respects, and its conclusion seems like a farrago of happy endings and implausible coincidences, all tied up far too neatly. This is not merely a problem of believability, but also one of narrative congruence, as the author explores a world rife with tragedy, but seems loathe to allow any tragic denouements. To be fair, in an author’s note, he does explicitly acknowledge his inclination to avoid gratuitous darkness—there are no “contrived villains” here, he notes—and he does this not to achieve a false cheerfulness, but an authentic moral complexity. Indeed, for the most part, the book manages to avoid despair masquerading as profundity, or facile, manufactured triumph—and it does it all while also telling a deeply beguiling story about a memorable protagonist. Overall, it’s an impressively layered novel that’s as intelligent as it is charming.
A thoughtful novel that’s moving and entertaining, by turns.
