Ayyan saw a young couple come down the steps. "All well?" he asked. The boy smiled shyly. He was holding a travel bag. Ayyan knew that the bag was empty. It was a sign of love. In some rooms here, over a dozen lived. So the newly-weds slept on the illegal wooden lofts with the unspoken assurance that the rest of the family down below would not look up. Every now and then, incontinent couples went to cheap lodges in Parel or Worli carrying empty bags to pass off as tourists. Some carried their wedding albums too, in case the cops raided. They spent a day in a bed that was entirely their own and returned with fond memories of room-service and love.
To write movingly and yet at an unsentimental, perhaps even ironic distance about poverty in urban India; this seems to be Joseph's goal. His approach, insofar as a generalization about it is possible after reading a few pages, seems to revolve around the deftly placed simile: (about young women walking on Bombay's beaches) "Solitary young women walked hastily, as if they were fleeing from the fate of looking like their mothers." (further on, in the same paragraph) "And their new jeans were so low that their meagre Indian buttocks peeped out as commas." (The novel's first sentence, about our protagonist): "Ayyan Mani's thick black hair was combed sideways and parted by a careless broken line, like the borders the British used to draw between two hostile neighbors." We delight in these riches while being simultaneously concerned about their running out too soon. And the colonial simile: is it placed there purely as an ornament, or does it have a deeper novelistic purpose? We shall see.
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