79 pages • 2 hours read
Vikas SwarupQ & A
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2005A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more. For select classroom titles, we also provide Teaching Guides with discussion and quiz questions to prompt student engagement.
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Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Character Analysis
Themes
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BetaChapters 4-7 Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Chapter 4 Summary: “10,000 Rupees: A Thought for the Crippled”
Thomas is now in the juvenile home and has been put in isolation because of having jaundice. He is eight years old. The juvenile home “has a capacity of seventy-five and juvenile population of one hundred and fifty. It is cramped, noisy, and dirty. It has just two toilets, with leaky washbasins and filthy latrines” (74). The deputy of the home, Mr. Gupta, is nicknamed the “Terror of Turkman Gate,” and “calls boys to his room late at night” (75). Thomas quickly becomes the leader of the boys and liked by the authorities because he is the only one who can speak English.
Thomas meets Salim in the isolation ward, and we find out that Salim’s family, all Muslim, were murdered by a group of violent Hindus. One night Gupta calls Salim to his room. Gupta makes Salim take off his pants and attempts to rape him, but Thomas sees what’s happening and screams. Salim escapes, but remains afraid of being abused.
The children of the juvenile home take a field trip to the zoo and a carnival. Each child is given ten rupees, and although Thomas wants to use his money on a carnival ride, Salim insists that they get their palms read instead. The palm reader tells Salim that because he has a beautiful face he will become a famous actor. However, the palm reader is confused by Thomas’s palm lines. He says that his life line is short, and then gives him a lucky coin, saying that he will need it. Thomas drops the coin and finds ten rupees—enough to buy he and Salim ice cream. He decides the coin is his lucky charm.
A wealthy man named Sethji, also known as Maman, buys Thomas and Salim from the juvenile home. The boys move from the overcrowded home to a decrepit building “ringed by a high boundary wall topped with barbed wire” (87). In the back of a building are huge sheds. Thomas and Salim are originally told that the structure is Maman’s school for crippled children, and they are encouraged not to interact with the children. However, after Maman enrolls Salim and Thomas in singing classes, they find out that the crippled children aren’t in a school; they are beggars who must earn one hundred rupees a day to eat. Maman has intentionally crippled the children so that they will earn more money, and he intends to blind Thomas and Salim after they finish their singing classes. Upon hearing this, Thomas and Salim run away.
Smita plays the video and Prem Kumar asks Thomas about Surdas, the blind poet, and which god he was devoted to. Because Thomas learned Surdas’s songs at Maman’s, he answers the question correctly and wins 10,000 rupees.
Chapter 5 Summary: “50,000 Rupees: How to Speak Australian”
Thomas is working as a servant for Colonel Charles Taylor, an Australian diplomat stationed in India. Thomas is his most trusted servant and has access to almost every room, including the room of Roy and Maggie, Colonel Taylor’s teenaged children. The only room he can’t access is Colonel Taylor’s office, which is barred. Colonel Taylor is known as the man who sees allas he somehow knows everything that goes on around the house. Because of this,many servants get fired, including Ramu, an excellent cook, whois let go for stealing Maggie’s bra.
Thomas makes 2,000 rupees a month, but Colonel Taylor keeps it in savings for him because he is a minor. A new cook, Jai, is hired. Thomas doesn’t like him. Thomas accompanies Colonel Taylor on his morning walks to clean up after the dog, and one morning Thomas spies Colonel Taylor secretly talking with Jeevan Kumar, an official from the defense ministry.
Roy and Shanti, two servants, are fired for kissing. Colonel Taylor finds out that his wife is having an affair and that his son, Roy, is doing drugs. Colonel Taylor’s mother dies and the family leaves for the funeral. With everyone gone, Jai breaks into Colonel Taylor’s office to steal money. He finds no money, however, and Jai runs away. Thomas goes into the office and finds microphones, cameras, and VHS tapes labeled with the names of the servants and family members. The entire house has been bugged all along, and Thomas realizes why Colonel Taylor knows everything—he is a spy. Thomas doesn’t want to risk losing his earnings, so he calls Colonel Taylor and tells him what happened.
Soon after, it’s discovered that Colonel Taylor has been receiving top-secret documents from the defense ministry official, Jeevan Kumar, and is “declared persona non grata and asked to leave within forty-eight hours by the Foreign Office” (126). Thomas receives his accumulated salary of 52,000 rupees.
Smita presses play and Prem Kumar asks Thomas what it means when a foreign diplomat is declared persona non-grata by the government. Thomas answers correctly to win 50,000 rupees.
Chapter 6 Summary: “100,000 Rupees: Hold on to Your Buttons”
Thomas is a bartender at Jimmy’s Bar and Restaurant. He is living in Mumbai’s Dharavi slum, in a “cramped hundred-square-foot shack that has no natural light or ventilation, with a corrugated metal sheet serving as the roof” (133). We learn that he has moved away from Agra to escape the memories of Nita, a prostitute who Thomas falls in love with, although we don’t find out who she is in this chapter.
Thomas is working at the bar, hoping that he will eventually get onto the quiz show. He has learned to fake an interest in the bar patrons, coaxing them to buy more drinks and spend more money. On this night, he is coaxing Prakash Rao, a broken-hearted rich man, to share his sorrows and continue drinking. Rao tells Thomas that he is the managing director of Surya Industries, a large-scale button manufacturer. However, that title used to belong to his brother, the man who founded the company. Before his brother died, Rao used to be head of international sales and lived in New York. There, he met Julie, a Haitian woman who initially gave Rao “love, respect, and the most mind-blowing sex” he had ever had (138). Soon after they married, Rao realized that Julie was a voodoo priestess, and she began poisoning Rao’s mind, and turning Rao against his brother. Rao ends up embezzling half a million dollars from his brother. Rao’s brother forgives him, but insists that he pay the money back. Julie makes a voodoo doll of Rao’s brother using a button from his shirt and a clump of his hair. Every time Rao pokes the doll in the head, Rao’s brother feels excruciating pain. Eventually this drives Rao’s brother mad, and he is placed in a home. Rao becomes the head of the company, and Julie is finally rich, just as she has always wanted.
Rao then explains that he has fallen in love with his secretary, Jyotsna, and that he now feels guilty about what he did to his brother. But it’s too late to come clean to his brother because he died in the home. Instead, Rao wants to divorce Julie and expose the truth. He pulls out a gun to show what will happen if Julie doesn’t cooperate with the divorce. Just as he is saying this, he clutches his chest and falls over dead. Thomas takes the man’s gun. We are to assume that Julie has killed Rao with a voodoo doll.
Smita pushes play on the DVD, and Prem Kumar asks Thomas what’s the capital of Papa New Guinea? Because of the story Rao told him, Thomas knows the answer and wins 100,000 rupees.
Chapter 7 Summary: “200,000 Rupees: Murder on the Western Express”
This chapter takes place directly after Colonel Taylor’s arrest. Thomas has his 50,000-rupee salary stashed in a folder inside his underwear, and he is taking a train to Mumbai to visit Salim. This is the first time in his life he is dressed nicely and able to hire a porter to carry his belongings on the train.
Once inside the train cabin, he sees a family of four sitting beside him and a woman with a young baby. He catches a glimpse of the woman’s breast as she is feeding her baby, and this excites him. But he’s more excited by the beauty of the young girl, Meenakshi, sitting with her family. For most of this chapter, Thomas observes the people in his cabin, and notes that for the first time he “doesn’t feel like an interloper anymore. I am no longer an outsider peeping into their exotic world but an insider who can relate to them as an equal, talk to them in their own language” (153).
Thomas and the teenaged boy, Akshay, begin a conversation, and Thomas makes the mistake of telling Akshay about the money stashed in his pants. Everyone eventually falls asleep for the night, but Thomas is awoken by a robber, or dacoit, pointing a gun at his stomach. The robber steals everyone’s belongings and is about to exit the cabin when Akshay tells the robber about the money Thomas has hidden in his underwear. Thomas tries to resist but the robber takes his cash and leaves the cabin. However, just as the robber and his gang are about to jump off the train, the robber comes back into Thomas’s cabin and tries to sexually assault Meenakshi. Thomas kills the robber with the gun he stole from Rao, and then runs away.
Smita presses play and Prem Kumar asks Thomas who invented the revolver? Thomas answers correctly and wins 200,000 rupees.
Chapters 4-7 Analysis
Each of these chapters deals with an injustice of one kind or another. In Chapter Four, injustice arrives in the form of Maman taking advantage of orphaned boys, crippling them and using them for his financial gain. Although Maman has money, he isn’t rich, as witnessed by the fact that his home isn’t a luxurious mansion but rather a decrepit building. As readers, we are to assume that Maman, although in a place of power, remains a lower-class criminal; his actions, then, are a demonstration of lower class versus lower class injustice. Instead of there being a sense of unity among the poor, the orphaned children are preyed upon by a man who is able to wear a figurative disguise to prey on minors in the way that Ali, the actor from Chapter One, wears a literal disguise in the movie theater, in his attempt to molest Salim.
Chapter Five focuseson both racial and social injustice. Colonel Taylor, a rich Australian diplomat, constantly berates his hired help, chastising them for their skin color and their lowly social status. While Thomas is unscathed by Colonel Taylor’s abuse, he feels the sting of Colonel Taylor’s insults against his fellow Indians and Taylor can be viewed as personifying colonialism.Thomas watches as servant after servant gets fired for often petty offenses, knowing that if he says anything, Thomas will suffer the same fate.Thomas could of course walk away from his job with the Taylor’s, but most of his other wealthy employers act similarly, a fact seen in subsequent chapters. In addition, Thomas makes it clear that walking away isn’t that easy. The Taylors pay him a generous wage but withhold his earnings, meaning that if he leaves he could risk losing it all. In this way, Thomas’s time in the home of Taylor is not that different from how he is treated by the quiz show representatives: both Taylor, as a stand-in for colonialist rule, and the quiz show representatives, as stand-ins for corporations, offer the promise of prosperity to a member of India’s lower-class, only to then withhold the sum promised, despite the fact that Thomas, in both instances, has done nothing wrong.
ChapterSix moves the focus to how the promise of wealth impacts family relations and marital love. While corporations remain the backdrop for and source of the wealth in question, Swarup here applies greed and the promise of wealth to Rao, his brother, and Rao’s wife, Julie, with Julie, the greediest and most manipulative of the lot, faring the best of the trio.
This same fate arrives to the would-be robber, in Chapter Seven. The fact that Thomas’s hard-earned money is stolen is clearly unfair, and yet it isn’t the robber’s act of theft that gets him killed; rather, it’s only when the robber returns to the train cabin and attempts to assault Meenashki that he is killed by Thomas. While Thomas responds violently in this moment, he does so for the sake of another, defenseless person, thereby complicating Thomas’s character while at the same time differentiating him from the others who commit crimes for personalgain.
