At the courthouse, there is a garden. There is new soil under my feet, the bigness of trees in the yard, light so bright it hits my eyes like broken glass, a stampede of reporters who scream questions and fight to take a picture of my face. Policemen surround me as soon as I exit the van, and I walk as if inside a shell."
Twenty-two-year-old Jivan, a Muslim sales clerk working at a departmental store, who resides in a slum, has a seemingly innocuous reaction to a terrorist bombing attack on a train.
"If the police didn’t help ordinary people like you and me, if the police watched them die, doesn’t that mean, that the government is also a terrorist?" she comments on a Facebook post, in a fit of unthinking rage and emotion. Shortly afterwards, she is arrested for her suspected involvement in assisting the terrorists who planned the brutal attack that killed more than a hundred people.
This is followed by an account of Jivan’s life from within the deplorable confines of prison. When she narrates her life of "poverty and misfortune"—the truth and her innocence—to a journalist who agrees to interview her in jail, she is taken aback when the newspaper article misconstrues her story as the roots of a terrorist's "lifelong anger at the government".
After several hopeless days when she goes to court for trial, she is finally awarded a death sentence due to multiple charges of “waging of war against the government, murder and criminal conspiracy, knowingly facilitating acts preparatory to a terrorist act and voluntarily harbouring terrorists”.
Jivan is a former student of the PT teacher of a girls’ school, another central character in the book. 'PT Sir', who starts attending rallies of an opposition party of the government, ends up getting the work of a false witness in court in return for "gifts" from the party.
By using this power against Jivan in the case, the book gradually traces his journey from being an ordinary physical instructor in a school to a powerful politician—an education secretary in the government. Further, Jivan gave occasional English lessons to Lovely, a eunuch who is an aspiring actor.
Along the way, Lovely describes several of her experiences—the stigma, challenges and humiliation attached to being a eunuch in India. She testifies for Jivan in court, which unfortunately does not help her friend, but instead helps Lovely get noticed by the media—and production houses—leading her to being cast in a dream role.
What is being called one of the biggest international debuts of this year, thus, moves ahead swiftly, flitting seamlessly between its short chapters that captivate the reader with its gripping plot involving three main characters, each of whom seek to rise in life. Jivan craves a middle class existence, PT Sir wants political power and Lovely aspires for fame in the movies.
The writing, though simple, is descriptive and powerful. Recreating some of the recent incidents of lynching in the country, the book also throws light on what it means in today’s India to belong to a "minority religion that encourages the eating of beef".
