Chemical Reactions

Animal, as he proudly calls himself, has two wishes, and two wishes only: first, he'd like to stand upright; and second, like most hormonal teenage boys, he'd like to have sex. Mix Kipling's Mowgli with Roth's Alexander Portnoy and Twain's Huck Finn and you get the errant namesake narrator of Indra Sinha's lively novel Animal's People — a feral jungle boy and randy malcontent with a preternatural gift of the gab. Wounded and brassy, Animal scampers about the bastis (or slums) on all fours — his back crooked like a scorpion's tail — scavenging with street dogs for scraps of cast-off food; begging and scamming for rupees; and yearning to bed any willing local female.

Sinha's standout novel — short-listed for this year's Man Booker Prize — is structurally divided into linked transcripts of 23 tapes, which function as chapters. They are recorded by Animal for an Australian journalist writing a book about the disenfranchised victims of an industrial disaster 20 years earlier at a chemical plant managed by Americans in the fictitious central Indian city of Khaufpur. (Think Bhopal, December 1984.) The journalist gifts Animal a pair of Kakadu shorts, a burnished silver Zippo and a small sum of cash. In exchange, Animal agrees to tell his story, giving recent fiction one of its most gripping voices, and one of its most exceptional opening salvos: "I used to be human once."

Animal scorns his patron-reporter: "You were like all the others," he gibes, "come to suck our stories from us." And he similarly repudiates us, his audience of genteel readers: "They only know what I tell them," he gloats. But beneath the braggadocio and blustery egocentrism is a crippled soul, his swaggering misanthropy a crusty carapace to hide and protect the psychic pain rooted in his physical deformity. Six years after the accident at the chemical plant, the lingering poisons from that night began to ruin him, quickly buckling his back: "When the smelting in my spine stopped, the bones had twisted like a hairpin," Animal grouses. Since that mangling, his gimpy back has defined and misaligned his relationship with the world. Animal is the Quasimodo of Khaufpur.

According to www.khaufpur.com, the bogus municipal website ingeniously created by Sinha as an ancillary foil to the novel, Khaufpur is collared by lush green forests and charming, 11th century man-made lakes. It thrums with buzzing streets and thriving, soaring mosques. But the website doesn't advertise the grimmer Khaufpur of Animal's narration, a city that is congested, crumbling and poor, where children still get sick drinking water from polluted wells near the abandoned plant, which was never decontaminated.

The basic plot of the novel follows a group of activists — whom Animal joins as a paid errand boy — as they campaign for justice against the heartless, faceless American company that packed up ship soon after the disaster and now refuses to send representatives to Khaufpur to answer a lawsuit filed against them in a local court. Corrupt politicos and delayed court dates hamstring their efforts to win financial compensation, or a simple apology, for the victims of the disaster. Like Svetlana Alexievich's Voices from Chernobyl, which reprinted tales culled from interviews she conducted with victims of that nuclear calamity, Sinha's novel admirably gives voice to the sufferers left behind: a widowed husband; a parentless daughter; a widowed wife.

Contrary to the novel's title, though, Animal himself is the book's beating heart. The citizens' hunger strikes and demonstrations are inspiring; only a callous chuff wouldn't be touched by the Khaufpuris' adversities. But it's Animal's spiritual growth, and his peculiarly expressive patois — jagged street slang flecked with artful snatches of French, which he has learned from a daft nun who prattles on and on about the looming apocalypse — that keep the book afloat. Granted, Animal isn't entirely reformed at the novel's end. But he has matured and hardly resembles the peevish guttersnipe of the opening pages.

Early on, Animal wants to straighten his back to attract a woman — specifically Nisha, the girlfriend of Zafar, the beardo who conducts the Khaufpuris' courageous crusade. Nisha rejects Animal's advances, and eventually he comes to accept that his anguish over the turndowns is partly what proves he's human and not the total beast he claims to be. Near the end of the novel, an American doctor offers to take Animal to the U.S. for corrective surgery. But he wavers, a sure mark of his inner growth. He might go ahead with the operation, but he no longer feels it's necessary. Already he is sui generis, a man — and narrator — utterly unto himself.