73 pages • 2 hours read
Indra SinhaAnimal's People
Fiction | Novel | Adult | Published in 2007A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Tapes 4-6Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Tape 4 Summary
Animal tries to deny his romantic feelings for Nisha, but the voices in his head torment him with crude sexual comments. He tells the voices to “fuck off” (45). With sex always on his mind, Animal wanders through streets lined with brothels. A prostitute named Anjali says he’s handsome. He considers that he is not bad-looking, despite his twisted back.
Animal ponders how love happens without a person thinking about it. Animal notices that Nisha’s smile is beautiful and attempts to make her smile; he is filled with jealousy when she smiles at Zafar or goes with him up to her bedroom alone.
One day, as Animal sits on the veranda, Somraj discusses with him how a frog is singing a musical note and how all the world’s sounds form harmonies. He informs Animal that “music does not all have to be made with strings and bows and pipes, it can also be made by drops of rain or wind cut by a leaf” (48). Somraj asks that Animal not share their conversation; he confided in Animal because “you too have a power of hearing” (49).
Animal goes with Nisha and Zafar to court for “yet another hearing in the case against the Kampani” (49). Zafar, as he’s done many times, asks the judge to order the bosses in Amrika to come to trial and to punish their Indian assets if they refuse. To everyone’s surprise, the judge says he will consider the request, defying years of precedent. Zafar tells the people that having nothing makes them “invincible” (54).
Shortly after, Animal has “a roundabout of madness” (55) when his voices shout “all kinds of weird and fantastic things” (55). Ma Franci takes him to the hospital. Animal translates between Ma and the doctor, who specializes in children poisoned by the Kampani. Rather than discussing his voices, Animal, “afraid to ask” (56) but feeling as if he “will die” (56) of his desire for Nisha, instead asks the doctor to help him walk upright. The doctor says there is “no hope” (57).
In the doctor’s office, Animal fixates on a jar containing a two-headed fetus deformed the night of the accident. The fetus tells him to consider that at least his back is only twisted—he himself is “still fucking waiting to be born” (58). He tells Animal the second head contains “secrets they’d love to get their hands on” (59) and begs Animal to free him. Animal explains that this is how he met “my mate the Khã-in-the-Jar” (59).
Tape 5 Summary
On September 11, 2001, Animal, Zafar, and others watch television in Chunaram’s chai shop. Animal refuses to believe the events he sees are real, thinking the planes flying into the buildings are simply special effects in a movie. He at first claps, annoying Zafar, who uncharacteristically swears at him. Women in the shop are crying, yet Animal still believes it’s “a hoax”—it “[h]as to be” (60). He believes tragedies like this don’t happen in “Amrika.”
When he tells Ma Franci later—they now live together in the dilapidated tower he’d found her in—Ma Franci begins speaking of the “Apokalis,” of how it began in Khaufpur and that “now others are getting a taste” (62). She believes God is “full of anger and is going to unleash his full fury on the world” (62) and that the scorpions in the walls will grow into giant warriors to smite those who have hurt others. Animal believes she is mad. She insists that “terror […] began here” and that “here it will end” (64).
After Ma Franci falls asleep, Animal thinks about “the thing that happened in Amrika” (64), trying to reconcile with the fact that people died in such terrible way. Ma Franci wakes up screaming, mistaking the sound of a train for “an angel in a sooty robe blowing the last trumpet” (65).
Tape 6 Summary
An American woman, Elli Barber, buys the building across the street from Nisha and Somraj’s house to open a “health laboratory.” She wears “blue jeans […] so tight you can see everything” (67), and “she carries herself like someone who knows what she’s about” (67). Zafar believes that the Kampani seeks to counter claims that their poison killed and injured people by establishing that the people “are not so seriously ill” (69) and that their illnesses are “caused by hunger and lack of hygiene” (69).
When they discover the “health laboratory” is actually a free, “well-equipped modern clinic such as scumbags like us have never known” (70), Zafar is suspicious of the fact that government officials support the project, as “[p]raise from that quarter does not come free” (70).
One day, a traffic jam occurs when a truck becomes stuck on some tree branches, blocking a cart. Elli emerges from the building and helps. When Animal crosses the street to speak with her, she explains that the cart is delivering her piano. Animal notes that “[c]loser up [Elli] doesn’t seem so glamorous” (71), though her legs inspire his voices to “start making filthy comments” (71).
Elli inquires about his back, and Animal walks away. A voice tells him she will change his life, and he blacks out. He wakes up in Nisha’s house, where a voice acknowledges that the episode had been triggered by his anger at the fact that he was attracted to her but she only saw his injury. When Nisha frets over him, he dismisses all thoughts of sex, for “sweeter by far is love” (72).
Elli hires staff who explain to the people that she “left a big job in Amrika out of pity for the people of Khaufpur” (73) and opened the clinic with her own money. People argue over whether the Kampani is involved. Whether the Kampani is involved or not, most “are all for the clinic” (75).
Against his judgment, Animal begins to hope to have sex with Elli, and his voices constantly speak to him of sex, his “second impossible wish” (75). His first impossible wish, to stand upright, is inspired by the second.
One night, spurred by the men, Animal climbs the tree outside Elli’s bedroom window and discovers her bathing. It is his first time seeing a woman naked, except in his dreams, when he envisions having sex with Nisha, only to wake up “shaking with hope” (78). After, Nisha is concerned by the scratches on Animal’s skin. A tense moment follows when she puts ointment on his belly. Animal imagines what Zafar and Nisha do in her bedroom.
Tapes 4-6 Analysis
Animal’s People presents a world of pain, injustice, and devastation, but among the ruins of tragedy lie opportunities for beauty or knowledge. Somraj hears music and harmony everywhere, claiming that “if you listen carefully you can hear […] notes in many other things which you wouldn’t expect such as the creaking of bicycle wheels” (49). However, his enjoyment is tempered by the fact that the Kampani “stole away” his “breath” (33), leaving him unable to sing himself. Similarly, love, though it enables one to see beauty even in a “plain” face (46), is a “poison” (46) that leads to jealousy and heartache: though he has “no chance with” her (47), Animal feels he “will die” (57) if his love for Nisha is not requited.
Suffering is sometimes not only a counterpart to beauty or knowledge but also the source of it. For example, though they frequently fixate on sex, Animal’s voices often offer him visions of elusive truths. At the end of Tape Four, Khã-in-the-Jar confides in Animal that he contains “secrets of plants, minerals, lead to gold, mermaids, sun, moon laughter immortal life” (59), telling him, “Long I’ve waited for a one like you” (58). Somraj, too, tells Animal he has chosen to share his knowledge with him because “I understand that you too have a power of hearing” (49). The connection between suffering and extraordinary vision seems confirmed in Tape 3, when Zafar suggests Animal should consider himself not disabled but “especially abled” (23)—as someone who has “skills and talents” (23) that others don’t.
These tapes also offer to readers a glimpse of Animal’s complicated relationship with hope. Though hope is a “desperate business” (56) that is “not to be encouraged if you can be content with small happiness” (56), Animal, compelled by his love for Nisha, asks the doctor if he will ever walk upright. His speaking with Khã-in-the-Jar, an unborn fetus deformed and deprived of life the night of the industrial accident, immediately after being disappointed is a reminder of all the Kampani has stolen. Hope becomes “bitter and repulsive” (75), for it makes one yearn for something one can never have. Despite this disappointment, when Animal dreams of marrying Nisha, he is not upright but “exactly as I am now” (78). Readers may sense that Animal’s journey will be not to conform to a world seemingly unsuited for him but rather to make the world work for him, to accept himself as he is.
In a minor but telling passage set in the courthouse, Animal describes to Zafar and Nisha how once, when he was a defendant in court, the judge believed no one was in the dock because he couldn’t see Animal, who was on four feet. The judge’s inability to see Animal is symbolic of the people’s insignificance and invisibility to the government and the law. That Zafar, despite the indifference of the law, has returned year after year to petition the judge to order the Kampani to court demonstrates that hope is natural and human. The judge’s agreeing to consider the petition after so many years is a small but significant victory, one that seems to suggest that hope and perseverance can work hand in hand.
Animal’s sensitivity to emotion is in contrast with the dehumanization he suffers in court and with his insistence that he is not human. Animal is touched when at the hospital Ma Franci calls him “her son” (55). He feels “thrilled” (49) when Somraj teaches him how to hear music in unlikely places. After the September 11 attacks, he lies in bed feeling “a deep dread” (64), for “who would have thought it could happen to others, to die in terror” (64). His spirit is evident nowhere more clearly than in his love for Nisha. Though his thoughts on sex are often crass and vulgar, Animal’s descriptions of Nisha and of the process by which he fell in love with her are achingly heartfelt and poetic. These displays of humanity help make him sympathetic to readers.
