Urban redevelopment,the new logics of expulsion,and individual precarity in Kleber Mendonça Filho’s Aquarius and Aravind Adiga’s Last Man in Tower

Introduction: redevelopment, expulsion and precarity

Drawing on Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film Aquarius (2016) and Aravind Adiga’s novel Last Man in Tower (2011), this article is concerned with the impact on individuals and communities of forms of impersonal, systemic violence resulting from neoliberal accumulation and the reproduction of mobile capital, which throws ever-widening nets of precarity, as well as opens up new precarities. We examine the experiences of the previously less precarious – that is, members of the middle classes in Recife, Brazil, and Mumbai, India – now rendered newly precarious. We frame the temporality of these precarities via themes of memory, presentism and futurity in order to depict how sites in the Global South are targeted by mobile capital, and how individuals and communities are impacted by the growing extent of precarities, eroding long-established systems of social and communal protection, and undermining social loyalties and securities.

Through the narratives of a novel and a film, we analyse cultural representations of redevelopment projects as epitomes of frictionless, mobile capital. Such capital has the effect of increasing the precarity of individuals, which in turns frays the bonds of communities, heightening network and community precarities. We have selected two cultural artefacts in different media, whose protagonists are the last individuals resisting urban redevelopment projects. This selection is grounded in Jacques Rancière’s argument that ‘[f]iction is at work whenever a sense of reality must be produced’, ¹ and interrelatedly in the critical space offered by the interpenetration between fiction, political life and the construction of social realities. Engaging with the fictional situations depicted in Aquarius and Last Man in Tower adds to the understanding of what happens in the lifeworld when residents are thrown into a condition of sudden and acute precarity when coerced to evacuate their long-time homes as a result of redevelopment projects, and in particular, the pressures faced by the last individuals standing, especially when they speak truth to power. ²

There has been a move in the literature on precarity from describing the effects of labour instabilities to migrants’ experiences of instability of the right to live somewhere. As Hannah Lewis et al. note about the diverse experience and effects of precarious employment, these are interconnected with ‘other areas of life, such as household dynamics, individual circumstances, welfare provision’. ³ Building on expanding understandings of precarity which link it to the pressures of frictionless, mobile capital – or global financialization – and placing it in contexts of the Global South, we begin by using Saskia Sassen’s idea of a ‘new logics of expulsion’. ⁴ This brings to the fore the structural role that expulsion plays in the working of the global political economy within a general matrix of governmentality (as deployed by neoliberal regimes of power) and increasingly so in the last few decades. Lauren Berlant observes that ‘capitalist activity always induces destabilizing scenes of productive destruction – of resources and of lives being made and unmade according to the dictates and whims of the market’. ⁵ Sassen extends this idea of annihilation linked to capitalism to note how ‘[t]he notion of expulsions takes us beyond the more familiar idea of growing inequality as a way of capturing the pathologies of today’s global capitalism’. ⁶ Patterns of ‘development’ build on the dissemination of neoliberal reason ⁷ to transform individuals into disposable entities and, among other forms of radical expulsion, expel them from their family homes.

The category of vulnerable people, shown fighting redevelopment projects in Aquarius and Last Man in Tower, is expanding to encompass the middle classes, not just the urban poor. As our study will illustrate, as a result of aggressive capitalism, more and more of the population are rendered vulnerable and precarious. precarity is moving from the periphery into the mainstream, becoming a majority experience. The situations experienced by Mendonça Filho’s and Adiga’s protagonists expose the lifeworld vulnerability of individuals in the face of capitalism and the possibility of its destructive force. This is a precarity the characters themselves may not have appreciated or comprehended before the trigger was activated by the global demands of the neoliberal marketplace. As Sassen explains, we can no longer understand today’s socioeconomic and environmental dislocations in terms of poverty and injustice alone – we need to regard them as expulsions from livelihoods, living spaces and the very biosphere. An example of this can be found in Emma Fraser’s work (in the cultural geographies’ special issue on precarity), which takes Detroit as a case study to look at how growth-oriented imaginaries shape material and conceptual perceptions and encounters with space. Fraser shows that even a model of development which moves the urban spaces towards economic prosperity produces new modes of precarity for the built environment and vulnerable individuals. ⁸

While studies of precarity have, for the most part, been embedded in Western contexts of the neoliberal marketplace – particularly given that the notion of precarity which originated in France was economic in its inception ⁹ – this article looks at contexts in the Global South where the state has not provided as many safety nets as Western European governments have post–World War II. ¹⁰ In the Global South, interdependency within society has been the counterbalance to precarity, given that precarity has tended to be the norm in these settings rather than the exception or newly occurring. As part of a movement to broaden the concept of precarity, scholars have taken issue with the limited understanding of precarity which is theoretically and empirically framed in European or Global North contexts. ¹¹ This dissatisfaction with the limitations of the concept stems from the fact that the experience of precarity has long been endured in the Global South, but for the most part seems to have gone unrecognised in the literature. This situation, Samid Suliman and Heloise Weber insist, ‘cannot be delinked from colonialism and its legacies’; these are the legacies that, paradoxically, ‘enabled welfare provisions in the West’. ¹²

Significant studies of precarity as the norm experienced by the urban poor in the Global South include Solange Muñoz’s work on gendered precarity, which underscores the uneven impact of precarity on women squatters awaiting eviction in Buenos Aires. ¹³ Muñoz’s study details the negotiations of microspaces of everyday life given how precarity is their existent framework. Our article builds on such studies, extending beyond those already habitually framed and conditioned by precarious lifestyles and situations to look at precarity as a newly arrived-at condition. This is something which the middle classes of the Global South indignantly protest, resisting not just eviction from their homes but their very placement in positions of precarity, as exemplified in our case studies.

Mendonça Filho’s and Adiga’s texts, set in two geographical contexts in the Global South – Recife, Brazil, and Mumbai, India – represent the impacts of the new logics of expulsion in the global economy on middle-class individuals who were not previously considered precarious as they were socially endowed with cultural privilege, as in the cases of the works’ protagonists, Clara and Masterji. We link the emergence of the new logics of expulsion to calls for ‘development’ materialised in the lifeworld real-estate speculation and ‘redevelopment’ projects which trigger the plots of Aquarius and Last Man in Tower. The situations of economic violence depicted in these texts mirror lived experiences in the cities and countries that Mendonça Filho and Adiga use as settings. Furthermore, a comparison of these texts and contexts underscores the similarities of development models between Brazil and India – countries which have been experiencing unregulated patterns of development and whose economies are (or have been, until recently) hailed as ‘thriving’, resulting in their inclusion in the denominated ‘BRIC countries’, but which are nonetheless sites of precarity.

This article connects the key themes of memory, presentism and futurity to the main characters in two narratives of urban redevelopment. The protagonists of both narratives resist the planned redevelopment projects, but their communities exacerbate rather than rescue them from precarity, illustrating an adherence to utilitarian presentism (i.e. the prime consideration of immediate benefits and advantages, at times an un-tensed view indifferent to past or future). Likewise, the goals of the developers may be associated with the desire for futurity. The plots of both film and novel play out chiefly between the developers and the last individuals standing who refuse to share the former’s dreams of futurity. Without communal support, when members of the local community adhere to the principle of utilitarian presentism, the lives of individuals become ever more precarious. As depicted in the cinematic and literary texts under scrutiny, temporary individual precarity can be exacerbated by local communities when utilitarian presentism is valued, countering the expectations of these communities as the providers of a safety net in the form of a sense of stability, security or deep human connection. As Muñoz states, ‘[u]rban precarity and home-making must be understood as collective experiences that produce cultural meanings and realities for a community of people’. ¹⁴

What this article unpacks is the opposite of home-making – what Richard Baxter and Katherine Brickell call ‘home unmaking’, that is, ‘the precarious process by which material and/or imaginary components of home are unintentionally or deliberately, temporarily or permanently, divested, damaged or even destroyed’. ¹⁵ Baxter and Brickell review how a home can be unmade by a number of sources, ranging from evictions to conflict and natural disasters, and point to the positive fallout of how home un-making can lead to the recovery and remaking of the home. However, our article illustrates how, for the newly deprived middle classes, home unmaking is experienced as multiple losses of sanctuaries and physical shelters, and as the erosion of networks, attachments, memories, community ties and trust, and interdependencies, having perhaps not yet progressed to the stage of home-remaking.

Memory

Aquarius, a 2016 Brazilian-French drama film directed by Kleber Mendonça Filho, is set in Recife, in the northeastern state of Pernambuco. It opens with a sequence of vintage black-and-white stills from the 1960s and 1970s of the coastline of Recife, specifically of Boa Viagem, a 7-km urban beach. These are picture-perfect postcards of a beach lined by palm trees, inhabited by sunbathers and families seeking refuge under thatched straw umbrellas. These images of tropical sandy beaches that have made Recife a major tourist attraction are, at first, mostly populated by children, enjoying some well-deserved fun in the sun (Figure 1).

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Figure 1.

A black-and-white picture of Boa Viagem beach displayed before the opening scenes of Kleber Mendonça Filho’s film.

The opening sequence is in 1980. Clara is at a birthday party in her family’s beachfront apartment in the Aquarius building, a 1940s two-storey structure sitting among the high rises in upmarket Praia da Boa Viagem. She is celebrating after having survived breast cancer. The movie leaps into 2014 where, in the same location, we see ‘Dona Clara’, now a local celebrity (a retired music journalist and author), writing a new book, her skin aged by the sun and the passing of time. Various stories starring Clara, past and present, conflate in the building. For example, in one of the film’s initial scenes, we see a man taking photographs of the Aquarius building – a character later introduced as Diego, a young civil engineer boasting an American business major turned project manager, who is embarking on his first redevelopment project. Meanwhile, Clara is taking a nap, oblivious to what is happening. Accompanied by another two men, one the proprietor and one from the building’s administration, Diego calls out at Clara’s doorstep, offering her an ‘over the market value’ proposal to acquire her apartment. They are acting as representatives of a construction company that intends to tear the two-storey Aquarius down and erect a new building: ‘The New Aquarius’. Diego will be the head of the project. The site of the Aquarius, soon to be redeveloped into a modern high-rise befitting an increasingly gentrified location, is to become the stage of Clara’s resistance in the face of impending and unexpected individual precarity and the utilitarian presentism of her local community.

An apartment block in Vakola, Bombay, also marked for demolition, is the focal setting of Aravind Adiga’s 2011 novel Last Man in Tower. Dharmen Shah is a builder and developer who intends to buy the old apartment blocks in Tower A to demolish them, in order to build his ‘Shanghai’ – a glistering, state-of-the-art apartment block. While ‘The New Aquarius’ is Diego’s first incursion into redevelopment projects, Shah’s ‘Shanghai’ is seen as the culmination of his success as an entrepreneur. Residents in Tower A have a cooperative called the Vishram Society. (Tower A is the less affluent block, the poor cousin to Tower B.) Shah makes offers to all the resident apartment owners. All the residents of Tower B accept, but Tower A has four who reject the offer from the outset: Mr Yogesh Murthy (Masterji), a 61-year-old retired schoolmaster; Mr and Mrs Pinto (an elderly couple; Shelley Pinto is nearly blind); and Mrs Rego (the ‘Communist Aunty’, a social worker), a single mother of two whose husband left her (taking all her dowry) and who hence has rather come down in the world. Of these four, Mrs Rego readily capitulates at the thought of being able to move her children to Bandra, a ‘nicer’ part of Bombay where her affluent sister lives. The elderly Pintos yield when, at Shah’s instigation, they are threatened with physical violence. In addition, they hope to have more money after selling up in order to send ‘dollars’ to their two children abroad. Masterji alone continues to refuse to sell or leave, having recently lost his wife and daughter, taking comfort from remembering their joint histories in the building.

Similarly, Clara is adamant in her refusal to sell her family home where her three children were born to make way for a ‘New Aquarius’. When Diego attempts to convince Clara to sell, he proceeds to talk of the Aquarius as a building that ‘used to exist’ in that spot (to which Clara retorts: ‘The building exists now. You’re leaning on it!’). Retaining the name ‘Aquarius’ for the new project (an earlier option was ‘Atlantic Plaza Residence’) is arguably (in Diego’s words, brimming with pride and excitement over his project) ‘a way of preserving the memory of the original building’. Diego is hence forcing identification with the past, possibly to ease the residents’ acceptance of the redevelopment project by suggesting renewal rather than removal or even destruction. As Derek Alderman and Joshua Inwood observe, ‘Naming also represents a means of taking ownership of places, both materially and symbolically’. ¹⁶ Renaming this space ‘New Aquarius’ is a way for Diego to create a sense of new order and to establish a new perspective (his), while claiming a stake and placing himself and his redevelopment project within broader networks of memory. The ‘New Aquarius’ reflects the developer’s relationship with that particular place, becoming inextricably ‘part of the social construction of space and the symbolic construction of meanings about place’. ¹⁷ The ‘real’ history of the Aquarius building is hence to be replaced by nostalgic pastiches of the past.

For Clara, the ‘old’ Aquarius represents social and historical values; its place identity is heavily invested with emotions and attached to meanings given through cultural processes – a space that has become a place. The experience of place is subjective, relational, historical and shaped by the material. Nigel Thrift underscores the inexorable link between identity-building processes and place: ‘[p]laces form a reservoir of meanings which people can draw upon to tell stories about and thereby define themselves’. ¹⁸ The groundedness and rootedness – the placeness – that the family home offers to Clara is first of all physical, comprising intimate knowledge and a feeling of connectedness with the place, epitomised in the recurrent affective image of a chest of drawers that has kept the memories of the place for decades, maintaining a secure and familiar connection with the past. The chest of drawers reoccurs in the present frame, crosscut with scenes of lovemaking (on that same chest of drawers) when Clara’s aunt, Lucia, was younger and her husband was still alive. Metonymically displaced in the present, that treasured piece of furniture becomes Lúcia’s memory of the feeling. Clara’s apartment in the ‘old’ Aquarius is hence strengthened as a focal point of personal and group interactions, a site of culturally shared emotional and affective meanings that need to be protected. There is a multiplicity of presences in the building and her apartment, inhabited by memories and objects from the past, such as the poster of Stanley Kubrick’s 1975 film Barry Lyndon on the wall. Vinyl records, tapes, CDs and photo albums are abundant in her house – they are also physical fragments of memory (Figure 2).

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Figure 2.

Music tapes as physical fragments of memory.

In one scene, Clara is interviewed by a young reporter who attempts to play out the facile opposition between old and new media based on the interviewee’s age and the objects she sees scattered around Clara’s house. She asks, ‘At a time when digital is taking over everything, do you only listen to music in the old-fashioned way?’ The opposition between vinyl records and MP3 and music streaming is immediately undermined by Clara, who tries to convey a message-in-a-bottle argument that can illustrate the layers of memory that emerge when one looks at a physical object such as a vinyl record attentively. She takes John Lennon’s album Double Fantasy, released in December 1980 and which she bought at a used record store, from a shelf. As she recounts to the reporter, Clara discovered on its sleeve an article from the LA Times published the month before the album’s release and weeks before Lennon’s murder on 8 December. Hauntingly, the title of the article is ‘John’s Lennon’s Plans for the Future’. (As already mentioned, 1980 is the year in which the initial sequences of the film take place, after Clara has survived cancer.)

The relevance of the timelines, the layers of memory encapsulated in that object, the border crossings and chance occurrences that brought that particular object into Clara’s possession in Brazil which she holds in her hands, and that have made it so special in her eyes, are however lost to the interviewer. Lennon’s album – not only the object itself but also the playing of the record – becomes for Clara, in David Harvey’s words, ‘the focus of a contemplative memory, and hence a generator of a sense of self that lies outside the sensory overloading of consumerist culture and fashion’. ¹⁹ Before the interview, Clara shares an exceptional sensible experience, a metonymy of affect, in an attempt to prolong its moment to give it consistency in ephemerality, directly opposing the worldview of the interviewer who does not show openness to being affected. The metonymical connection fails. The clash between old and new played out in this scene of Aquarius also becomes a clash between the individual and the community in ways that will become more evident later in the film.

Utilitarian presentism

Precarity, in Nancy Ettlinger’s words, ‘is located in the microspaces of everyday life’ and ‘is not limited to a specific context in which precarity is imposed by global events or macrostructures’. ²⁰ The concept of precarity has extended far beyond its original definitions, in part because it describes the conditions of cumulative instabilities as well as uncertainties, and the increasing exposure to risk that confronts people everywhere, from the macrocosms of global contexts and backgrounds, to daily life in the lived microcosms of the everyday of communities and individuals. As Judith Butler anticipates in her consideration of the centrality of social (but also physical) vulnerability to the concept of precarity, ‘[l]oss and vulnerability seem to follow from our being socially constituted bodies, attached to others, at risk of losing those attachments, exposed to others, at risk of violence by virtue of that exposure’. ²¹ The characters in Aquarius and Last Man in Tower struggle to find a communal safety net (one they have good reason to assume would be available, but which has fragmented under threats of violence and economic needs) and are thus exposed to the realisation of the destructive, even annihilating, forces of capitalism. As the texts represent, precarious bodies – a precarity exacerbated by the absence of community support – are vulnerable to social and physical cruelty, and potentially to death as its definitive form.

Both Aquarius and Last Man in Tower are stories of individuals who find themselves in a situation of precarity if they do not capitulate and accept – and even embrace – the ‘redevelopment’ that the local community has opted for. Precarity, as Merjin Oudenampsen and Gavin Sullivan identify, is ‘the condition of being unable to predict one’s fate or having some degree of predictability on which to build social relations and feelings of affection’. ²² Mendonça Filho’s film and Adiga’s novel track the poignant disintegration of social relations and bonds of friendship and affection precisely because of the increased precariousness the local communities of both Vishram Society and Boa Viagem feel subjected to. Oudenampsen and Sullivan also highlight that when precarity is experienced, the person experiencing it lacks a ‘full social citizenship’, in alignment with Sassen’s new logics of expulsion fostered by the global economy. This is played out in Aquarius and Last Man in Tower when we witness previously pleasant and cordial neighbours turning to violence and persecution, rejecting social conviviality, civic duty and even plain human decency when driven by the forces of capitalism.

Like in Aquarius, the social context of the setting of Last Man in Tower, is predominantly middle and upper class. the events which unfold in the Vishram Society cooperative in Adiga’s narrative are all the more shocking for being perpetrated by and within a community that is characterised as ‘middle class to its core’, ²³ and ‘absolutely, unimpeachably pucca’, ²⁴ the mainstream of Indian society, the ‘decent’, ‘average’ and ‘ordinary’ folk:

The men have modest paunches, wear checked polyester shirts over white banians, and keep their hair oiled and short. The older women wear saris, salwar kameez, or skirts, and the younger ones wear jeans. All of them pay taxes, support local charities, and vote in local and general elections. ²⁵

The novel exposes just how close to a whole range of precarities this ‘absolutely, unimpeachably pucca’ society actually is, being positioned in the context of the neoliberal, consumer-driven new India, and how vulnerable individuals actually are.

Much of the denouncement of the hypocrisies of Indian middle-class society is seen in the juxtaposition of the opinions of the apparent criminal entrepreneur, Shah. His cynicism pulls the rug from under the feet of the Vishram Society cooperative, exposing the baser side of human nature. In making offers to purchase their apartments, he tells his hitman:

You can’t insult these people, Shanmugham. You can’t offer them ten per cent or fifteen percent above market value. You’re asking them to give up their homes, the only home some of them have ever had. You have to respect human greed. ²⁶

Shah’s cynical but (as it turns out) astute estimation of his fellow Bombayites reveals the latent precarities for a community as market commodities, if indeed their loyalties can be bought and sold.

As Adiga and Medonça Filho represent in their texts, once residents have sold their loyalties, precarities multiply because the community then turns on the individual who appears to be the ‘last man standing’ in the way of redevelopment – legally and morally. Last Man in Tower shows the disintegration of societal bonds and community trust as residents and associates of Tower A withdraw support from their elderly resident, whom they may arguably have a moral duty to protect. In Aquarius, Clara is bullied by her neighbours, and her daughter tries to persuade Clara to sell in ‘her own best interest’.

In Adiga’s novel, when the developer Shah’s initial attempts to overcome Masterji’s reluctance to sell by flattery and cajolement do not work, Masterji is defamed by an anonymous public notice besmirching his character, while Tower A residents gather round to chant at him to sign the sales contract. When Masterji proves he will not be intimidated by his neighbours, the residents start a boycott – his students no longer come for classes and his rubbish bin is overturned. Even old friends and allies turn on him. Mrs Puri, for example, a long-time good friend of Masterji’s and particularly close to his son Gaurav from childhood, joins in the persecution. Mrs Puri, whose son Ramu has Down syndrome, wants the apartment block to sell so she can move to a nicer place and secure Ramu’s future. She smears Ramu’s excrement over Masterji’s front door, and when that does not work, she persuades Gaurav to publicly renounce his father. Trivedi, the priest who conducted the last rites for Masterji’s wife, Purnima, refuses to attend her first-year anniversary as part of this boycott, despite having previously agreed to join the celebration. Even Mary, the servant, is complicit just through her knowledge of the planned persecutions of Masterji.

Things escalate alarmingly when Shah’s hitman, Shanmugham, hires two young men playing cricket to break into Masterji’s apartment one night to rough up and threaten the old man. Everyone in Tower A appears to know this will happen, and residents are even told to put cotton wool in their ears and stay in their apartments. No one attempts to intervene or put a stop to it. In the end, the two young men make a hash of their assault, and Masterji routs them. But the precarity of his situation lies more in the complicity of his neighbours than the risk of being beaten up by hired thugs. Life is now made precarious because neighbours and old friends, knowing of the imminent attack and danger, do not warn Masterji, leaving him at the mercy of the assailants: ‘You know a community by the luxuries it can live without. Those in Vishram dispense with the most basic: self-deceptions’. ²⁷ The boycott could apparently end: ‘at a rate of so much rage forsaken, of so much pride swallowed, he [Masterji] would be readmitted into the common life of his Society’. ²⁸

This rather sordid deal could apparently be brokered by Ajwani, ‘a natural-born middle man’, ²⁹ if indeed feelings and principles were nothing more than currencies which can be traded and commoditised. Adiga underlines the absence of humans and societies innately having a conscience when he has Shanmugham say to Ajwani:

‘But . . . the truth is, even if they say no, deep down’ – he pointed the knife at Ajwani – ‘they want money. Once you make them sign, they’re grateful to you. Never go to the police. So all I am doing is making them aware of their inner intentions’. ³⁰

Such a notion of everything having a price tag worsens an already precarious society that seems entirely without social safeguards and thus adheres to the safety of utilitarian presentism.

Futurity

In a setting of unprecedented financialization, the protagonists of Aquarius and Last Man in Tower are under threat of expulsion, despite their social privilege or cultural capital. Clara was a music journalist and writer and Masterji was a schoolteacher, and are both retired and in their 60s. The unexpected social and physical vulnerability they are subjected to results from the pressures of financialization and, interrelatedly, the ‘expulsions’ fostered by the global economy, in Sassen’s formulation, or ‘the neoliberal feedback loop, with its efficiency at distributing and shaping the experience of insecurity throughout the class structure and across the globe’, in Berlant’s words. ³¹ Financialization – on which the entrepreneurs Diego’s and Shah’s desires of futurity rest – is a site of multiple expulsions, of economic violence exercised through actions such as foreclosures and evictions. Expulsion hence appears as one of its chief aims and conditions of possibility. As defined by Arjun Appadurai, financialization is ‘the process that permits money to be used to make more money through the use of instruments that exploit the role of money in credit, speculation, and investment’. ³² Appadurai’s research on the global dynamics of finance focuses on the ‘precarious forms of debt-driven daily life’ (particularly in North America) against the backdrop of growing financialization. ³³ Maurizio Lazzarato argues for an understanding of debt (both public and private) as a power relation of subjection and enslavement that is inextricable from the neoliberal project. ³⁴ Sassen attributes to financialization ‘the use of complex instruments in the making of a short, highly profitable investment cycle for some and elementary brutalities for the many millions who lost their homes’. ³⁵

While the developers Diego and Shah are moved by dreams of futurity embodied in their respective ‘New Aquarius’ and ‘Shanghai’, made possible by frictionless capital, Clara and Masterji share a similar outlook on the pitfalls of ‘redevelopment’ and search for attachment and groundedness in the home. In effect, their homes represent sites of memory and contain forms of permanence, in stark contrast to the spatially mobile and derivative capital that energises the entrepreneurs’ actions. Filled with memories, Clara’s and Masterji’s family homes become the stage of resistance in the face of their imminent precarity resulting from their local community’s utilitarian presentism and the developers’ dreams of futurity.

In part 2 of Aquarius, when leaving her apartment, Clara is confronted with the sight of the other apartments already vacant and emptied of their contents, their doors left wide open, which she shuts. Adhesive stickers with the construction company’s logo are on every door, except hers, and she also takes these off (Figure 3). She is living in a ‘ghost building’, in her daughter’s words. Faeces are left on the stairwells. Mattresses are transported in by the company so that the upstairs apartment from Clara’s can be rented out for loud parties and orgies. Later, the mattresses are removed and burnt in the yard to make way for a religious cult and dozens of worshippers. She is pressured into selling by her former neighbours, who call her selfish and accuse her of boycotting the business arrangement many of them made years earlier.

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Figure 3.

Clara strips an adhesive sticker with the construction company’s logo.

In part 3, titled ‘Clara’s Cancer’, Diego notes how Clara’s accumulated cultural capital, which resulted in her social status and mobility in a highly stratified society, despite her dark skin (he contemptuously points out that her ‘darker-skinned’ family ‘fought to get where they are’), no longer translates in the neoliberal register of economic capital. He tells her that a woman of her age living in Brazil would be better off in a place with quality infrastructure and CCTV security, not in an unsafe, empty building. In fact, whole colonies of termites have already been brought in to decimate the vacant apartments – a cancer growing in Clara’s home. With the building structure unsafe, the construction company would have legal grounds to evict Clara and demolish the old Aquarius. She discovers this secret and illegal strategy involving termites and, to stop the harassment, threatens the company with exposure. In the last scene, Clara, the cancer survivor, asks for a meeting with the representatives of the construction company and releases the cancer they had spread in her home on the table of the meeting room. She opens a travel suitcase and empties out the contents she has brought from the Aquarius – blocks of wood infested with termites (Figure 4). Fighting back, Clara materially and metonymically threatens great damage to the construction company if they continue to enforce precarity of place on her. Clara is, in turn, precaritising (the profits of) the construction company. Precarity can thus encompass agency in its indictment of oppressors and denunciation of the destruction enforced by capitalist greed, and is a double-edged weapon.

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Figure 4.

Clara empties out the contents of a suitcase she has brought from the Aquarius building – blocks of wood infested with termites.

Last Man in Tower unpacks layers of precarities, one laid upon the other, when it details Masterji’s valiant fightback. Masterji tells Mr Pinto they live in a republic and that a man has his resources:

Police.

Media.

Law and Order.

Social workers.

Family.

Students and old boys. ³⁶

Masterji tries each resource. He attempts to take his case to his son, who is unsympathetic, then to his old student Noronha, who has a position at The Times; he writes to many of his old students, but all attempts fall on stony ground. A tabloid does publish the story, but Masterji is suspected of trying to profit from this, which turned out to be unhelpful. Eventually, he seeks a lawyer, Parekh, only to find he is also dishonest. At first, Parekh seems to be on his side, particularly when the Parliament of Vishram Group try to expel Masterji from the cooperative. But Masterji discovers Parekh is speaking with Shah and Shanmugham, trying to negotiate a settlement, and indignantly confronts his lawyer. Mr Parekh justifies his perfidy by explaining that it is actually in protection of his elderly client:

Sir: these real-estate men pick on us senior citizens. Politicians and police are in their pay, you must know that. They shot an elected member of the city cooperative dead the other day, in broad daylight. Didn’t you see it in the papers? Old men must stick together in this new world. ³⁷

When Masterji demands to know if his own lawyer is threatening him, Mr Parekh replies, ‘I am threatening you, sir, with the facts of human nature’. ³⁸ By the lawyer’s reasoning, it is human nature which has created all the precarities and which he is simply attempting to navigate or even mitigate against, but which he did not construct.

The extent of Masterji’s precariousness is exacerbated when, one by one, all the resources he tries so hopefully fail him; this corresponds to lifeworlds, as Waite puts it, becoming ‘inflected with uncertainty and instability’. ³⁹ Already stripped of his community’s solidarity, his work, his safety and his friends, Masterji’s very life and survival grow increasingly precarious, given that his is the only life which stands between assured profit and affluence for so many others. Ajwani (the apparently amoral real-estate broker, the ‘natural-born middle man’) is deputed to push Masterji off the roof terrace. Ajwani, who is willing to deal in the suspect currencies of emotions and principles, finds he cannot kill a man, but instead of welcoming the realisation that he possesses morals, however tarnished, he curses ‘his luck. Of all the things to pick up from Falkland Road – all the horrible names he had worried about for all these years – gonorrhoea, syphilis, prostatitis, Aids – he had to pick this up: a conscience’. ⁴⁰

In the end, Ibrahim Kudwa, Ashvin Kothari the Secretary, Sanjiv and Sangeeta Puri go into Masterji’s flat to kill him by attacking him with a hammer and suffocating him with a pillow. When he is unconscious, they take him up to the roof terrace and throw him over. The narrative device of making most upright and decent people in the building conspire with and carry out murder leaves the reader without a safe berth in this novel, this community and this city. It is the unholy mix of different precarities coalescing which is particularly toxic – the precarity of dependence on people’s morals, plus the precarity of a lawless society where anarchy is close to the surface at all times.

Ajwani, worldly and apparently without illusions, says to Shanmugham,

Every builder has one special man in his company. This man has no business card to hand out, no title, he is not even on the company payroll. But he’s the builder’s left hand. He does what the builder’s right hand does not want to know about. If there is trouble, he contacts the police or the mafia. If there is money to be paid to a politician, he carries the bag. If someone’s knuckles have to be broken, he breaks them. You are Mr Shah’s left hand. ⁴¹

He thus explains the systemic lawlessness which characterises not just the construction industry, but from which it permeates into the wider society, with the dangerous undercurrents which can resurface at anytime, anywhere they are needed. Given this kind of setup with so many ‘left hand men’, life in Bombay is indeed precarious to an extreme.

Adiga’s representations of the more serious instances of precarity are cleverly interspersed with pettier instances, but timed so that each is another demoralisation. For example, the Pintos started out as stalwart supporters and close friends of Masterji, with a 32-year-old friendship between Mr Pinto and Masterji. This long friendship is apparently based on the ‘No-Arguments book’, where small expenses are recorded and balanced. However, Mr Pinto has been cheating his friend for years. The pervasiveness of the precarities Adiga flags up are not just the graver precarities of survival and eviction but also the precarities of bonds, friendships, trust and solidarity, which can dissolve in the face of greed and fear. Adiga also underscores how precarious a man’s reputation is:

But a man is what his neighbours say he is.

In old buildings, truth is a communal thing, a consensus of opinion. ⁴²

At the end of Adiga’s novel, Masterji thinks he has won and found a new peace, and will stay on in his old home. He even thinks about starting a new night class for the cricket-playing boys. But he is killed. His poignant murder underlines the danger of daring to feel safe and contented, assuming one’s affairs are sorted out satisfactorily, as if Adiga is underlining that there is no sanctuary or safe harbour to be found when in a situation of precarity, not even when one imagines one has found it.

The precarities do not stop with the death of Masterji and the sale of the apartment blocks to Shah. For one thing, although the first instalments are paid to the previous residents, the second instalment is delayed, with an insinuation that payments may be less than straightforward. Shanmugham tries to threaten his boss, Shah, with exposure, and in retaliation Shah intends to get rid of Shanmugham. The apparent lack of honour between thieves adds to the precariousness. Moreover, Shah is in turn threatened by JJ Chacko of the Ultimex Group, his competitor. New precarities can emerge even from unsuspected angles. Even Mrs Puri, who gets her yearned-for new apartment and wooden cabinets, finds her precious son’s health failing and that material affluence is not sufficient protection against other precarities.

Conclusion

In the two narratives analysed in this article, the characters of Masterji and Clara are faced with a precarity of residence which represents eviction as a very real possibility. In the Vishram Society and among the residents of the Aquarius, the developers’ offers seem to cause the unravelling of social bonds and the dismantling of neighbourly solidarities at alarming speed. Both narratives depict a situation in which the city is not a space of community or a place of collective (self-)identity, and where the manifestations of civil or political disobedience before the pressures of financialization are no longer collective but scaled at the individual level. As Fraser puts it, in redevelopment, even in the best-case scenario when ruined and decayed spaces disappear to make way for new green and aspirational spaces, there is a need for ‘a complex process of transition, not just one industrial ruin, or one abandoned house, but an intricate network of habitation and abandonment, in thrall to the contractions and expansions of the economy’. ⁴³

Financialization, which tends to neglect this necessary complex process of transition, as well as the complex networks of the temporality of precarities, contributes to disintegrating communal bonds and exacerbating vulnerabilities. In Mendonça Filho’s and Adiga’s representations, characters are presented as precaritised by the violence of global financialization and new logics of expulsion, and also by the fragmentation of communal unity and disintegration of loyalties, where it becomes each individual for themselves. The crushing of the lone voice exacerbates not just the precarity of the individual citizen-resident, but in turn heightens precarity for local and, in time, global communities, exposing the innate weaknesses and fault lines dormant within these communities. Put differently, when mobile capital precaritises individuals, they become more reliant on neighbours, who may prove less merciful than could be hoped for despite long-standing communal ties. This is particularly the case when mobile capital functions to either tempt or threaten those neighbours. Hence it appears that precarities breed precarities, and it may be harder for precaritised individuals to build stable communal bonds.

So entrenched has financialization become in growth-driven urban spaces of the Global South that Adiga’s novel subverts conventional moral standards to suggest that being self-seeking and individualistic has become the new norm. Shah, Adiga’s developer, reflects thus: ‘A man who does not want: who has no secret space in his heart into which a little more cash can be stuffed, what kind of man is that?’ ⁴⁴ Human greed and desire seem to have become the new building blocks of the aggressive capitalisms driving the types of redevelopment projects discussed in Aquarius and Last Man in Tower. These projects correspond to capitalist logic and respond to financial imperatives, and can be calculated and traded. Clara’s and Masterji’s stands against redevelopment are not just those of one woman and one man standing between affluence for all their neighbours and the developers – their defiance threatens the entire new system premised on prioritising individual gain or profit over communal well-being. When sentiment or principles are prioritised over financial gain, the entire new financial landscape may in turn be precaritised and even derailed. However exploitative and oppressive that system may be, the threat to it opens the possibility of new, as-yet-unknown precarities. This may cause a new designation of winners and losers, hence the outrage of developers in the face of residents’ recalcitrance. As Adiga’s narrative suggests, adherence to consciences could precaritise the entire new system if things can no longer be commoditised and purchased.

Looking from the point of view of the ‘villains’ also helps to flag up the difference between precarity and vulnerability. Shah’s and Diego’s projects may be precaritised if they cannot get Masterji and Clara to sell up and move out, but it can hardly be argued that they are vulnerable. Vulnerability has been defined as defencelessness, insecurity and exposure to shocks and stress. ⁴⁵ Precarity, however, looks not only at the vulnerability of individuals and particular groups but also at patterns of global dispossession ⁴⁶ which heighten insecurity and deprivation. Moreover, definitions of precarity hold open a space for agency, even creativity. In our case studies, both protagonists fight back as resourcefully as they can, not perceiving themselves as passive victims, even though they are victimised. Even those cast as villains – Shah and Diego – are creative when they feel their redevelopment projects precaritised by the stubbornness of residents, resorting to schemes beyond the law, such as introducing termites or violence and murder. Although contemptible, they are still instances of creative responses to precarious situations.

In Aquarius and Last Man in Tower, precarity is shown to be due to not merely a loss of home but also because there is no secure or reliable recourse to justice when systems fail or when lawlessness threatens. The protagonists are threatened not just with the loss of their homes but of their individual human rights; their choice was either to be incorporated into the redevelopment projects or be steamrollered by them. When considering the temporalities of precarity, it is noteworthy that the characters of Masterji and Clara have known a gentler, kinder, less capitalist-driven world, which they are indignant at losing. The ability to imagine another geography of neoliberalism, and to reconceptualise human beings as other than disposable entities, is vital in the counterbalancing of ever-increasing precarities.