there are writers who build novels out of sideways glances. i mean those glances that allow you to see something you cannot see if you look straight on. it happens sometimes and it’s strange. i haven’t had in a while. maybe you know what i mean.

this book is built of sideways glances. until towards the end, you don’t quite know where it’s going. you are not really sure what each scene contributes to the whole and how bissoondath came up with it (i do this a lot: i imagine writers at their desks writing up scenes; sometimes what they are doing is clear to me, sometimes it’s completely opaque).

arun, a young man with a missing leg and a college degree decides to chuck the thriving family business in the capital of his unnamed south-east-asian island and travel to the poor, war-torn, beleaguered south to teach children. once there, he settles into a bare-bone shack built of cinder blocks and a galvanized tin roof and bravely starts the business of gathering pupils for his school. there have been previous teachers, of course, but they have all left. the suspicious villagers believe he will soon leave too. fortunately, he doesn’t need to go door to door. the school comes with a large, handsome bell the sound of which will attract the children. and the children do come. but the village is so poor that families cannot afford to let able kids go to school. so arun gets the disabled one — those who miss arms or legs or whatever little mental skill is required to work the fields. he does get a few good ones, but the disabled are the norm.

the physically disabled children of the village are disabled because they stepped on land mines. it takes a while for the novel to get around to telling us the reason for arun’s missing leg, but it’s much less dramatic. he was born with one leg that didn’t develop. his parents and the doctors decided it was better to cut it off and give little arun a prosthesis. he has no memory his leg. the amputation occurred when he was very young.

this may or may not be a metaphor for the island’s south. like arun’s leg, and like the south of so many parts of the world, this south never had a chance. parts of it are now in the hands of fierce rebels (the “boys”), while other parts are controlled by an apparently benign but clearly equally fierce military. there’s a government program that allows two percent of the southerners to get sponsored jobs in the north. needless to say, the two-percent rule is despised with equal vehemence by the northeners and the southerners. both hate the pariah population it creates.

the difference between northerners and southerners is characterized in no other terms than geography (there may be one reference to hair at some point). both people speak the same language, look the same, have the same customs. there’s no reference to accents or any other distinguishing feature that i remember. two percenters are solely determined by class. they are dirt poor. they’ll do any job to get out of the abject south.

as arun makes friends with the not-unfriendly local population, he’s also befriended by the army, which lodges in barracks some distance from the village. in particular, he makes friends with the general’s second on command, an intelligent, sophisticated, well-meaning officer called seth whom he met on the train on which he made his journey south. because he’s the school’s teacher and because he’s an educated northerner, the army treats him as one of them. he, however, doesn’t want to be “one of them.” as the villagers take him closer and closer into their fold and their confidence, arun needs to decide between what he is and what he wants to be.

the novel explores the dodgy, shady, dangerous territory that allows the privileged, the northerners of the world, to shuttle between worlds, a territory mostly barred to those others who live in poverty and are the object of pity, contempt, or charity. while two percenters can cross into the world of privilege only at fantastic personal cost, people like arun need little to gain the trust and warmth of the needy. the terribly underprivileged are in no position to refuse benevolence. and why would they want to? there is no hope in the place where they live.

bissoondath has no interest in portraying the villagers as noble or good. he has no interest in any vast generalization. his characters are deep and rich and subtle. by this same token, the army, with which arun maintains an overtly friendly if wary and sometimes unhappy relationship, may be a nasty institution, but its members are not necessarily nasty. seth, in particular, is a sympathetic character, mostly because he genuinely likes and cares for arun. everyone likes and cares for arun. he’s a young idealist with a plastic leg and no story behind. he’s prime material for projection and manipulation.

even though it proceedes slowly and by sidaways glances, the unyielding clamor of the night ends with a fantastic bang. finally, bissoondath turns his gaze (arun’s gaze) to those fleeting things he had allowed us to see only indirectly, and the sight is terrifying.

i am constantly worried by questions of privilege, partly because i make it my business to be socially active. what do we do when we help others? what do we do when we don’t help others? this book opens up this particular can of worms and does good work with it.