Riot by Shashi Tharoor, Arcade Publishing, New York, 272 Pages, Cd$38.95
ISBN 1-55970-605-8

Sharada Eswar reviews Tharoor’s “Riot’” a compelling novel on the fragility of human relations when religion takes an ugly turn..........

American slain in India. That is the theme of Shashi Tharoor’s latest novel, Riot. A Whodunit? A Murder Mystery? Neither. Group hatred forms the core of the book. A fact that has extra resonance today, in the wake of the Taliban staring down America and in the carnage that swept, closer home, in Gujarat.

Four years in the making, the book starts with the death of Priscilla Hart, a 24-year-old idealistic young woman volunteer with a non-governmental organization in the hot and dusty town of Zalilgarh. She is stabbed to death during a Hindu-Muslim riot. That makes for big news. An American reporter is sent to this remote one-horse town, to do a feature story. Priscilla’s divorced parents have flown in from America providing the human-interest angle. But as you read further, the murder mystery takes a back seat and what emerges is the fragile communal relations in India and the animosity between Hindus and Muslims rising to a fever pitch.

If you are looking for another satirical work of art of the caliber of The Great Indian Novel, then satire it is not. What comes through in Tharoor’s latest novel, Riot, is his passion for his country, India. A passion, that seeps through the diaries and transcripts of interviews among his characters. The radical Hindu, the fundamentalist Muslim, the American trying to bring Coke to India, the secular administrator - all with different perspectives, different points of view on what India was and is. Points of view, which sadly, may never be reconciled.

A book that leaves you with a riot of emotions, making you looking deep within, leaving you to wonder if you put your religious self before the human self.