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 21-23Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Tape 21 Summary
Animal and Elli are informed that Aliya’s fever is worse. They go to Huriya and Hanif’s house, where Aliya is lying dead in her grandfather’s lap. Her grandparents have dressed her up and put makeup on her face to make the angel of death think he has made a mistake. Animal asks why God tortures them while “evil men” (326) dine in luxury. They hear cries that Zafar is dead. A voice tells Animal that this “is the end of your carefree days” (327).
Animal goes home to plead with Ma Franci not to go out, but Ma believes “the end of all things” (328) has come and that this is “the night for which I’ve waited so many years” (328). Animal goes to Somraj’s house, where Nisha is overwhelmed with anger. Animal asks her to marry him. When she says she “will never marry” (332) him, he is hurt, and asks if it’s because he’s an animal. Nisha tells him that if he’s an animal he should “[g]o and live in the jungle” (333) and that he should “leave [her] alone!” (333).
Animal runs out into the street, “for it’s clear that she’s revolted by the idea of marrying such a creature as me” (333). Sitting against Elli’s mango tree, he asks himself, “What is the point of living?” (333). He thinks of how “[i]n a single day everything I care about is lost” (334) and that if Jesus offered to reshape him, he “would tell him to fuck off because this world is too cruel” (334). He eats the remainder of Faqri’s pills.
People set fire to the “Kampani clinic” (335). In his hallucinations, Animal thinks they are demons. He realizes Khã-in-the-Jar is inside the burning clinic and runs inside. Khã tells him to smash his jar. Instead, Animal takes him to the factory, and in the moonlight “I see with horror what it is I am carrying” (337). He drops the jar, which smashes, leaving “a half-rotted relic of that night” (337) on the floor. With the voices of the dead in his ears, he runs away, “fleeing” from himself and “from the things I’ve done” (337). He wants to say goodbye to Jara and Ma before he dies.
At home, Animal’s senses are overcome by burning gas: he hears cries that the factory is on fire, that “[t]hat night has come again” (339). Ma will not run away, for the Apokalis has come and “the people need our help” (339). She tells him “[w]e’ll meet in paradise” and leaves. Jara follows, thus leaving Animal to “watch the last two beings I love go out into that cloud of death” (340). He runs out, suddenly wishing “to clutch onto one more hour” (340).
Tape 22 Summary
Animal awakens the next morning on a truck full of sick people who are being transported to the hospital. He demands to be taken off the truck and left to live where he never has to see a human face again.
Animal takes his shorts off and goes into the forest to “discover [his] true state” (342). He is an “animal returning to its truly [sic] home” (342). Sick and hallucinating from the datura, he imagines Khã-in-the-Jar telling him to set him on fire with his lighter, which Animal has lost. Khã tells him he can snap his fingers instead. When Animal does, he sees a “blue flame, a violet flash” (344), and the Khã-in-the-Jar turns into two handsome angels, who thank him for freeing them.
He imagines trees dancing and telling him they will “wrap our roots around your bones” (344). He sees a monkey eating fruit until its bones fall to the earth, which swallows the bones and turns them into a fruit-bearing tree. A monkey sits in the tree and eats the moon.
Animal throws a stone at a lizard to kill it for food, but he only injures it. When he catches the lizard, it begs him not to eat him. Animal releases it, apologizing for hurting it; the lizard says Animal must be human because “if you were an animal you would have eaten me” (346). Animal is unable to find food or water. That night “[g]rief comes to [him], [and] all [his] rage and fear empty in dry coughing sobs” (346). He begs animals to show themselves so he can be one of them.
Animal continues to hallucinate. He sees his parents, who “[c]urse the day that Kampani left us dead” (348) and want to take him home. He sees Nisha, who tells him she loves him and begs him to have sex with her. Elli tells him to climb a tree so he can spy on her while she undresses, after which she will mend his back. Farouq apologizes “for all the bad things [he] did” (349) and promises him he’ll lie on the coals so Animal can walk on him. Zafar offers to carry him and says he forgives him. The buffalo offers him a job with the Kampani, saying he can ride in his car. He also sees Somraj and Ma. He tells them all to leave him alone, then curses every living person. Animal decides he is truly alone and that “[i]f this self of mine doesn’t belong in this world, I’ll be my own world” (350).
Tape 23 Summary
Animal believes he is among thousands who have died. He feels the lives of the Khaufpuris “were lived in the dark” (352) and that Khaufpur was “a city of stinks and misery” (352). He hears Jara barking and “attracting other ghosts” (354), including Farouq, Zafar, Chunaram, and Faqri.
Animal and his friends hug and joke with each other. Zafar tells him they have been searching for him for eight days. When Animal comments that they are in Paradise, they believe he has a fever and carry him away so Zafar can take him to his house to recover. Animal says they have “left behind the world of suffering” (356); Zafar responds, “Alas […] I fear not” (356).
Zafar tells him they stopped fasting when they heard about the protest at the factory. They were taken to see the Chief Minister, who asked them to help stop the riot. Zafar agreed as long as the Chief Minister promised not to make a deal with the lawyers. They then went to the riot to show people they were alive. Nisha told Zafar to find Animal, who “weep[s] for pity that I was to return to the city of sorrows” (357).
Zafar tells Animal that Elli, Somraj, and Nisha have gone to America and will return after Elli’s clinic is repaired. When Animal says she promised to go back to her husband, Zafar says she only promised to go back to America. Animal is glad there will be two weddings. He tells Zafar he “love[s] the pair of you” (358), and as he speaks the words, “a great peace enters [his] heart” (358).
Farouq tells Animal only three people died the night of the factory fire. After the Chief Minister made his promise, politicians decided to make the deal secretly at the hotel. During the meeting, poisonous gas came in through the air conditioning, blinding the lawyers and making them run from the room, only to be filmed by TV crews that had been alerted to what was going to happen. It was later remembered that a strange woman in a black burqa had gone into the hotel that morning claiming to be a cleaner. No one knows who she is or where she went.
Farouq and Zafar reveal to Animal that the three people who died were Ma Franci, Huriya, and Harif: Ma had gone to warn them to leave, but Huriya insisted on going with her to help people. Harif had refused to leave Aliya. Ma and Huriya are seen as saints. Farouq promises never to be mean to Animal again. The three hug and cry together until they reach the city.
Animal returns home to his “familiar life” (364), though with “everything changed” (364). When Elli, Nisha, and Somraj return, the two weddings occur. The four of them live at Somraj’s house, which Animal visits frequently. The hearing has been postponed, people are still sick, and the factory is still there.
Animal receives news from America that he can have surgery. He says he has been speaking into the tapes to decide what to do. As he speaks, Aliya and Ma sit with him. He has decided that with the money he’s saved he is going to free Anjali and have her live with him. After the operation, he would still be weak, whereas now, he can climb mountains and carry kids on his back. He decides that life is good and that he’d rather be one of a kind than “one of millions” (366).
Tapes 21-23 Analysis
In the climax of the novel, “that night” is repeated as the people revolt at the factory and burning chemicals are released into the city once more. It’s the Apocalypse Ma Franci has been anticipating, the final battle between good and evil in which thousands of angels “come to make an end of this sinning, sorrowful world” (328). The outcome of this battle will determine the message of the entire novel.
By the end of Tape 21, Animal has lost “the point of living” (333), for “[e]verything I care about is gone, swept away in a day and a night” (333). Zafar, he believes, is dead. So is Aliya, the child who used to charm him with her sass and ride on his back through the city. Nisha has rejected him and turned him away, proving to him “that she’s revolted by the idea of marrying such a creature as [Animal]” (333). As the factory burns, letting loose its chemicals on the city, Animal says goodbye to Ma Franci and Jara, “watch[ing] the last two beings I love go into that cloud of death” (340). He condemns himself to living as an animal, stating that “[i]f this self of mine doesn’t belong in this world, I’ll be my own world” (350). He is “a complete miniature universe stumbling around inside this larger one” (350).
That in reality his friends are alive, the city has not been destroyed, Elli has not betrayed him, and the Kampani’s deal is dead suggests that life is, in fact, worth fighting for, that sometimes, good prevails. The world has not, as Ma Franci held it would, been destroyed. It appears, Animal says, that “we won,” that they have “destroyed our enemies” (359). However, as Zafar notes, nothing is “ever as simple as that” (359). Animal returns to a life in which “[e]verything [is] the same, yet everything changed” (364). The people of Khaufpur still suffer. Zafar’s hunger strike, as Nisha had feared, has proven fruitless and ineffective, as the hearing has been postponed yet again. That the factory still stands, despite the protest and the fire, suggests the imperturbability of evil and oppression. Even the burning of Elli’s clinic, though it will be rebuilt, illustrates the tentative nature of forward progress.
Animal’s decision to forego surgery and remain four-footed seems to encapsulate the theme in Animal’s People that beauty and suffering are inextricably linked. His declaration that he “would be one of millions” if he were to undergo surgery to walk upright suggests that the beauty of his life exists not in spite of his condition but because of it. Considering how he “can run and hop and carry kids on my back” (366), how he can “climb hard trees” (366) and explore nature freely, prompts him to ask, “Is life so bad?” (366). Animal’s willingness to accept that joy is never without hardship suggests that in a world where “kampanis” escape punishment and justice is never certain, one can only keep fighting for and rebuilding the life one has.
The final lines of the novel—“All things pass, but the poor remain. We are the people of the Apokalis. Tomorrow there will be more of us” (366)—reinforce that the battle between good and evil, the oppressed and the oppressors, will never end. It also reinforces that the novel is about not only the Khaufpuris but all oppressed people, a point Zafar makes when he observes that there are many cities and that “each one […] has its own Zafar” (296). However, the conclusion is not without hope. His freeing of the Khã-in-the-Jar in his hallucinatory state seems to suggest his awareness of agency, the possibility of justice. His understanding that no one can take from him his humanity—an idea espoused even by the lizard in the forest, who asserts that “your nature you can never change” (346)—shows him to be finally at peace.
