An Extended Fable ... Really ....

Aravind Adiga

The face of this tower, once pink, is now a rainwater-stained, fungus-licked grey, although veins of primordial pink show wherever the roofing has protected the walls from the monsoon rains.

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As his Man Booker Prize-winning The White Tiger brilliantly demonstrated, Aravind Adiga is a master of the telling anecdote, the quirky detail, and the unexpected.

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You would never call Adiga a subtle writer; he can, indeed, seem a bit ham-fisted at times.

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On Marine Drive, the real-estate broker Ajwani watches representatives of every race of the city around him: burqa-clad Sunni Muslims with their protective men; Bohra women with their Mother Hubbard bonnets chaperoning each other; petite sari-clad Marathi women, jasmine garlands in their braided hair, nuggets of vertebrae in their fatless backs glistening at each twist of their excited bodies; two thick-shouldered sadhus, saffron robes streaming, chanting Sanskrit to the waves; shrieking clumps of college students from Elphinstone; the baseball-cap-wearing sellers of fried things and chilled water.

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Through the residents of a middle-class housing society in Vakola, Adiga coheres a universe in which greed, hypocrisy and arrogance destroy human relationships for a larger, quintessentially amoral Mumbai good. It’s a neighbourhood that Adiga describes as “a cluster of ambiguous dots that cling polyp-like to the underside of the domestic airport”—coincidentally, peripheries of the corrugated setting of Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire. The variegated bunch of families of Vishram Society are selling their residential building to a powerful real estate don, a simulacrum of the all-powerful in Mumbai. 
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Last Man in Tower

Clumsy attempts to coerce Masterji to sign increase his intransigence, based on a principled refusal to be bullied but also bolstered by private guilt associated with the memory of his wife. Adiga's genius is in making the developer's offer so extreme; at about 400 times the average Indian income, it is future ease on a plate, which seeming generosity casts Masterji's resistance in a perverse light. Adiga exploits this tension in an increasingly hostile atmosphere. The residents' amateurish conspiracies are unconscionable but Masterji's indignation bears a whiff of selfishness, which allows an intriguing ambivalence in the reader's loyalties.

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“Last Man in Tower” stays within this new zone of ethical ambivalence, expertly guiding the reader’s sympathy first Murthy’s way, then Shah’s, bringing episodes from their past into the mix to make rational decisions appear questionable, and questionable ones rational.

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Last Man In Tower is an extended fable really, a study in how far civilised people are prepared to go to get the things they want and how easily they can find ways to justify it. It's a slippery slope of a story _ to begin with, the people of Vishram Society use reasonable means to persuade Masterji to change his mind. But they edge closer to iniquity. No one among the vast cast of characters is wholly good or bad: not even Shah the property mogul.

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