Balram Halwai Laxmangarh, the home village
The Darkness
The narrator is born into a landless family in a village he calls Laxmangarh, in the poorest stretch of rural Bihar. His father pulls a rickshaw; the boy is taken out of school to work and left with no name of his own beyond Balram. Everything that follows is his escape from this place, which he treats less as a dot on the map than as a whole condition of life.
The First Night
inferred Laxmangarh is an invented village, but the narrator places it in the real Gaya district of Bihar, in the impoverished Ganges belt he calls the Darkness. Sited at the city of Gaya as a representative anchor for that countryside.
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Balram Halwai The Ganges at Varanasi
The Darkness
A funeral takes the narrator to the sacred river, where the dead are burned at the water's edge. He treats the holy Ganges with open scorn, reading its black mud and half-burnt bodies as a fitting emblem of the Darkness he means to escape rather than a source of grace.
The First Night
explicit The narrator names the Ganges and the holy city on its banks. Sited at the Varanasi riverfront, the classic place of cremation on the river.
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Balram Halwai The coal town of Dhanbad
The Darkness
Sent to earn money, the young narrator works in a teashop in Dhanbad, the coal-mining town in what is now Jharkhand. Wiping tables and eavesdropping, he studies the drivers and businessmen around him and decides that learning to handle a car is his one way out of the servant class.
The Second Night
explicit Dhanbad is named in the novel. Sited at the city centre of the coal-mining hub, historically part of the wider Bihar region.
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