The Page 69 Test: "The City Inside"

Samit Basu is an Indian novelist. He's published several novels in a range of speculative genres, all critically acclaimed and bestselling in India,

beginning with The Simoqin Prophecies (2003). His novel The City Inside was short-listed (as Chosen Spirits) for the JCB Prize, India’s biggest literary award. He also works as a director-screenwriter, a comics writer, and a columnist. He lives in Delhi, Mumbai, and on the internet.

Basu applied the Page 69 Test to The City Inside and reported the following:

From page 69:
The digital-only displays are his mother’s design. The largest screen is hers, currently running an old clip-compilation of a trip they’d taken to Paris.

They’re in the Louvre, his father complaining about both the insults meted out to Indian tourists and the atrocious, nation-shaming behaviour of those same tourists, his mother taking pictures of herself in front of each painting, his brother sneaking videos of girls who knew exactly what he was doing. She’s used the videos he’d shot, but as he waves through the rest of the tribute, he notices he’s been cut out of all the others.

He’s overcome by a strange urge to find himself, and he tries the Roy family tribute, next to theirs, scrolling quickly through his father’s childhood photos, and there he is, he exists, he’s stuffing his face with ice cream, but just for a second, and then it’s Romola Aunty telling his father to stop photographing the food, Rajat laughing a little too loudly and turning his camera on her.

The biggest tribute screen is reserved for the one from their guru’s ashram. At least that monster is not here today. One of their biggest fights, definitely a top-ten contender, was when Rudra, still in his teens, had refused to prostrate himself before the godman and kiss his feet. His father had hit him then, kept hitting him until the guru graciously forgave him (he took his time). Rudra remembers the guru’s benevolent hug. His flesh had been cold and clammy, like a fish. It had turned out later that the guru might not have forgiven Rudra: when he’d been severely infected during the third pandemic wave, the godman had insisted that Rajat feed him some strange quack herb mixture instead of getting him actual treatment. Rajat, fortunately, had decided not to sacrifice his son.

The godman’s booth is special in another way: there’s an inbooth camera and a QR panel for donations. He considers making faces, but people are watching
I like this test! Page 69 gives us a decent idea of what The City Inside is like. It’s from the POV of Rudra, the second lead protagonist, who’s at his father’s funeral. One of the key inciting events of the book is around the corner – the main protagonist, Joey, is about to offer him an influencer-manager job that will help Rudra escape from his rich but very shady family, and in the process offend a minor tycoon and set off a chain of events that will transform his life and many others.

A lot of the core of The City Inside is an attempt to capture the confusing, multi-directionally chaotic, overwhelming atmosphere of the world that the main characters find themselves in. I wanted to write a near-future story set in my city (Delhi, India). I wanted to find some sort of clarity, for both myself and my characters, about dealing with the accelerated rate of physical and technological change, and the extreme political and social chaos that India has been dealing with over the last decade, and no doubt will be a decade into an imaginary future. I wanted to look at imaginary people at or above my own privilege level, who would probably be alive in the future, and physically safe if they looked away from the shadows in the world around them. They could have great careers and peaceful lives if they obeyed hard enough, while other people less privileged submitted or vanished or at best escaped.

I wanted to help the reader experience the emotions of people much younger than myself, the real-world children and teenagers of now shifted to a decade in the future, struggling to find their own purpose and focus, their path to action to save themselves and the people and the communities they cared about, their journeys towards first survival and then victory over the invisible power circles of a city of extreme inequality, conflict, polarisation, rising oligarchy, non-stop surveillance, terrifying pollution, heat and traffic, high on propaganda and low on water.

And I think page 69 gives the reader an acceptable sense of where this journey starts, for a character who’s a disengaged recluse, and about to start on his journey from passive to purposeful, distracted to clear-headed and detached to heroic.