Between The Assassinations: Summary & Key Insights

Kittur lies on the southwestern coast of India, between the Arabian Sea and the forested hills. It is a town of ancestral temples, crumbling Portuguese churches, noisy bazaars, and half-built apartment blocks — a place where the ancient and the imported mingle uneasily. It represents a fragment of India unfixed in time, where caste boundaries remain rigid, yet global capitalism hums invisibly through every transistor radio and Coca-Cola ad.

In Kittur, geography mirrors class. The high-caste Brahmins dominate the shaded streets near the old fort, their tiled mansions watching over the poorer quarters; the Muslims live by the port, where the smell of fish and diesel oil blend in the air; the Catholics maintain their schools and orphanages; and the Dalits, the so-called untouchables, are tucked behind the bus stand or along the edges of the railway line. The buses carry workers to industrial units outside town, while the rail tracks, rusty and overgrown, seem to connect Kittur to nowhere.

Yet beneath this social map lies the pulse of a restless modern society. Radio broadcasts from Delhi carry national politics into living rooms that can barely afford electricity. Schoolteachers recite Nehru’s dream of a secular India even as caste dictates who drinks from which cup. Corruption, like dust, is everywhere: it covers the permits that must be signed, the exams that must be passed, the police reports that can be made to vanish with a few rupees. In this landscape, everyone yearns — for escape, for justice, for a modicum of recognition. Kittur’s beauty and squalor live side by side, and every resident learns the art of pretending not to see the other half of town.

The book’s linked stories trace these invisible borders and overlaps. Through a mosaic of perspectives, the reader tours the social anatomy of Kittur and discovers that what divides people is always entangled with what binds them.

Ziauddin is a Muslim boy who rides his rusted bicycle through Kittur’s morning fog, delivering bread from a local bakery to middle-class homes. He moves anonymously through the town, seen but unheard, his uniform soaked with sweat before noon. His story reveals how religion and poverty intertwine to constrain even the simplest life.

After the anti-Sikh riots and the general paranoia toward minorities following Indira Gandhi’s assassination, Muslims in Kittur carry a particular unease. Ziauddin feels it in the stares of customers who distrust his touch, in the streets that grow silent when he calls out the names of his customers, in the police raids that always seem to choose the Muslim quarters first. Yet he is too young and too burdened by work to think politically. His life is survival: the daily balance of delivering on time, avoiding abuse, saving a few coins to send home.

Through Ziauddin, I wanted to show how marginalization operates not through overt violence but through quiet erosion — a child’s potential dissipating one errand at a time. His world is narrow, but his imagination roams. When he stops at the sea to rest, he dreams of sailing to Dubai, like those men who return each monsoon with gold-tinged watches. But every dream ends as the bread basket empties and he returns to the bakery for the next load. Ziauddin’s tale, brief and tender, reminds us that faith, when fenced by poverty, becomes a form of waiting — for justice, for luck, for a door that may never open.