Animal's People

Blurb

Animal's People is a novel by Indra Sinha. It was shortlisted for the 2007 Man Booker Prize and is the Winner of the 2008 Commonwealth Writers' Prize: Best Book From Europe & South Asia. Sinha's narrator is a 19-year-old orphan of Khaufpur, born a few days before the 1984 Bhopal disaster, whose spine has become so twisted that he must walk on all fours. Ever since he can remember, he has gone on all fours. Known to every-one simply as Animal, he rejects sympathy, spouts profanity and obsesses about sex. He lives with a crazy old French nun called Ma Franci, and his dog Jara. Also, he falls in love with a local musician's daughter, Nisha.
The story was recorded in Hindi on a series of tapes by Animal himself and it has been translated to English as well. The author uses Animal's odd mixture of Hindi, French and Indianised English such as "kampani", "jarnalis" and "jamisponding".