Q & A - Vikas Swarup

Title: Q & A
Author: Vikas Swarup
Genre: Fiction
Pages: 361
Published: 2005

When Ram Mohammed Thomas, an eighteen-year-old waiter from the slums of Mumbai, wins one billion rupees on India’s newest imitation of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire, he is arrested almost immediately. Having offered a prize they are incapable of dispensing, the producers face bankruptcy unless Ram is convicted of cheating. A confession should be easy to obtain; after all, the odds against an uneducated orphan guessing twelve correct answers are astronomical. Even Ram’s lawyer, Smita, is sceptical at first – but behind each answer is a tale from Ram’s remarkable life, and as each tale unfolds, she comes to understand the luck he has made for himself.

If Oliver Twist had been born in twenty-first-century India, his life might well have turned out something like this. Vikas Swarup’s debut novel Q & A is a vibrant new take on the trials and adventures of a familiar heroic archetype – the penniless orphan – structured into an absorbing jumble of short stories. Each story stands alone as a snapshot of Ram’s experiences, complete with its own twists and revelations, but together, they paint an engrossing portrait of modern India, where rich and poor alike are swept up in the chaotic vicissitudes of life. With simultaneous frankness and feeling, Swarup captures not only the appalling conditions of India’s slums and chawls, but also the depth and humanity of the people who inhabit them – people with dreams and passions and senses of humour, rather than mere statistics to be pitied.

The narration is thoroughly readable, and the pages slip away with refreshing speed. Swarup has a storyteller’s gift; a talent for taking the reader to where he wants them and evoking his material in punchy snippets which blend seamlessly into each other. The style, fittingly, is reminiscent of memory, pushing strict chronology aside in favour of ideas and feelings, and swinging from scene to scene without dropping the reader for a moment. It is not a striking replication of our thought processes, but it is certainly a convincing one.

Admittedly, the realism wears thin in places – there are some yeah right moments and some clichés – a few of the twists and revelations feel contrived, and some of the prose seems amateurish. All of these flaws, however, melt easily into the hyper-real style of the piece. Once the reader has been swept up in this convincingly childlike and irresistibly big-hearted yarn, any overblown passages seem only to contribute to the extraordinary atmosphere.

Impressively plotted, absorbingly structured, powerfully paced and written with enough energy to carry it all off, Q & A will keep its readers turning pages right to the very last rupee. A thoroughly enjoyable book.