Riot
A Love Story
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- $10.99
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- $10.99
Publisher Description
Who killed twenty-four-year-old Priscilla Hart? This highly motivated, idealistic American student had come to India to volunteer in women’s health programs, but had her work made a killer out of an enraged husband? Or was her death the result of a xenophobic attack? Had an indiscriminate love affair spun out of control? Had a disgruntled, deeply jealous colleague been pushed to the edge? Or was she simply the innocent victim of a riot that had exploded in that fateful year of 1989 between Hindus and Muslims?
Experimenting masterfully with narrative form in this brilliant tour de force, internationally acclaimed novelist Shashi Tharoor chronicles the mystery of Priscilla Hart’s death through the often contradictory accounts of a dozen or more characters, all of whom relate their own versions of the events surrounding her killing. Like his two previous novels, Riot probes and reveals the richness of India, and is at once about love, hate, cultural collision, the ownership of history, religious fanaticism, and the impossibility of knowing the truth.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The death of an American woman in India serves as the pretext for a thoughtful, sociologically precise novel about the religious tensions racking the subcontinent. On September 30, 1989, in a riot that erupts in the town of Zalilgarh, east of New Delhi, 24-year-old Priscilla Hart, a volunteer with a population control organization, is stabbed to death. A few weeks later, Priscilla's divorced parents, Katharine and Rudyard Hart, travel to Zalilgarh to pick up her effects and to find out what happened. Tharoor divides the book into accounts devoted to the various actors, American and Indian, who played parts in Priscilla's fatal stay in Zalilgarh. From Priscilla's letters and diaries, we get a sense of the classic American sensibility, la Daisy Miller that mix of na vet and sexual experience so puzzling to the rest of the world. Priscilla has a difficult affair with the married district magistrate, V. Lakshman, meeting him for trysts at a ruin outside town. Lakshman, the graduate of a highly selective Indian college, St. Stephens, has a penchant for Wilde, but he is bound to Indian tradition, and listens when his friend, police chief and fellow St. Stephens alumnus Gurinder Singh, emphasizes that, in Indian eyes, Priscilla is incurably promiscuous. Framing this love affair is the mounting tension between Muslims and the followers of Ram Charan Gupta, who want to destroy a local mosque and put up a Hindu temple on its site. Katharine and Rudyard Hart, accompanied by reporter Randy Diggs, never find all the clues to Priscilla's death Gurinder has quietly given Lakshman Priscilla's scrapbook. Tharoor's story is about a larger topic than the undoing of one innocent American it is about the potential fragmentation of the secular Indian republic, a tragedy in the making.
