4 ideas
Dalton Changoor, a wealthy landowner, vanishes, and his isolated wife Marlee hires Hans Saroop as night watchman over the Changoor farm while the son Krishna pins his hopes on schooling and escape. Working for the landowner's household exposes both families' secrets and appetites and ends in violence rather than the upward mobility the job seemed to promise.
The preta, or hungry ghost, of Hindu and Buddhist cosmology is a being cursed with a hunger it can never satisfy. The novel uses this figure to read its characters: the poor hunger for escape, dignity and land, and the rich hunger for control, love and more possession. Seen this way, violence comes from appetites that each gain only sharpens, whether the character has little or much.
They remain dependent on the landowner's work and the landowner's goodwill. The physical and economic structures of a coercive labor system keep reproducing its hierarchies long after the law abolishes the system itself.
For the poor, a job inside a wealthy household looks like a ladder, but it makes them hostage to that household's crises. The employer's conflicts, fears and crimes become the worker's exposure. The poor family carries the risk of the rich family's instability without holding any of its protections.