D’Mello has taken an interest in a bright young boy named Girish. In the fifth story, the Assistant Headmaster at the same school examines societal corruption again. He builds and detonates a bomb in his chemistry class in order to feel some measure of control and revenge. Adiga explores the caste system and the harm it does, telling the story of Shankara, a young boy who is part Brahmin and part Hoyka, who finds himself an outsider in both castes. He is frequently arrested but doesn’t mind very much, and even when he is beaten by the police for selling a banned book, he accepts it as simply part of life. The third story explores poverty and attitudes towards law and order, focusing on a man known as Xerox, who makes a living selling illegally copied books to schoolchildren. A Muslim man, Abbasi, had closed his factory down because the women he employed were going blind from the work, but he needs to make a living and so seeks to bribe officials into granting him a license to re-open, which also requires him to behave in a way that he abhors. The next story delves into the corruption often seen as simply part of life in modern India. However, in working with the man, Ziauddin becomes disgusted and eventually decides to leave town and return to his former life.
Ziauddin discovers the man is planning a terrorist attack on Indian soldiers. His status as an ethnic outsider leads him to take work with a man who initially treats him with respect and kindness. The book is structured as a guidebook to the town, with the stories broken out into sections modeled on a guidebook, such as “Arriving in Kittur,” “How the Town is Laid Out,” and “The History of Kittur.” In the first story, Adiga explores ethnic strife when a Muslim boy named Ziauddin arrives in Kittur seeking work. As the title suggests, the events in the stories all occur between the assassination of Indian Prime Minister Indira Gandhi in 1984 and the assassination of her son, Prime Minister Rajiv Gandhi, in 1991. All of the stories are set in the town of Kittur, located in southern India. Although the book is broken into a series of standalone stories, the characters and incidents in the stories are referenced throughout, linking them into a larger narrative. Between the Assassinations is a collection of connected short stories published by Indian author Aravind Adiga in 2008.
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