Walls, Wires and Ruins: Infrastructure, Invisibility and Urban Decay in Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger

This study reads two Indian English novels, Rohinton Mistry’s Such a Long Journey (1991) and Aravind Adiga’s The White Tiger (2008), through Infrastructure Studies. It asks how fiction makes the hidden systems of city life visible, and what political meanings these systems carry. The study uses close reading and thematic coding. It draws on four concepts: infrastructure invisibility (Star), the politics and poetics of infrastructure (Larkin), splintering urbanism (Graham and Marvin), and ruin and decay (Stoler; Gupta). The analysis finds that both novels make infrastructure visible mainly through breakdown, blockage and absence. Mistry’s Bombay of 1971 shows a shared but failing public infrastructure, symbolised by a compound wall. Adiga’s India of the 2000s shows a splintered landscape of “Light” and “Darkness,” where people such as drivers become infrastructure themselves. The study argues that the two novels record a shift from a decaying public ideal to a privatised and unequal network. It concludes that infrastructure offers a useful new way to read Indian Writing in English.