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** spoiler alert ** Balram Halwai grew up in the Darkness -- the immense swath of rural India where the poor vastly outnumber the rich and where the right of the rich to oppress the poor is rarely questioned.

By dint of his intelligence and ambition, he becomes the No. 2 driver to a local landlord nicknamed The Stork, and when he discovers the No. 1 driver has been hiding a secret, is able to displace him and eventually move to Delhi with the landlord's Westernized son, Mr. Ashok, and his modern wife, Pinky Madam.

Quite early in this debut novel, Balram -- writing a long letter to Chinese premier Wen Jiabao, who is about to visit India -- confesses that he has murdered Mr. Ashok, a crime that enabled him to move to Bangalore and set himself up as an entrepreneur.

The flashback journey he relates in his letter describes how he came to that point, and in the process, it lays out a sardonic, seriocomic saga of the plight of India's poor. At one point, Balram tries to explain why the poor don't rise up to overwhelm their masters, and the best metaphor he can come up with is the chicken market in old Delhi, where live roosters sit powerless in cages beneath the carcasses of their freshly slaughtered brothers. He writes:

"Every day, on the roads of Delhi, some chauffeur is driving an empty car with a black suitcase sitting on the backseat. Inside that suitcase is a million, two million rupees; more money than that chauffeur will see in his lifetime. If he took the money he could go to America, Australia, anywhere, and start a new life. He could go inside the five-star hotels he has dreamed about all his life and only seen from the outside. He could take his family to Goa, to England. Yet he takes that black suitcase where his master wants. He puts it down where he is meant to, and never touches a rupee. Why?

"Because Indians are the world's most honest people, like the prime minister's booklet will inform you? No. It's because 99.9 percent of us are caught in the Rooster Coop just like those poor guys in the poultry market."

This novel won the Booker Prize this year, sparked outrage among many in India, but more than anything else, it tells an entertaining tale with the strong, distinctive voice of a man whose soul has had to move from servitude to independence, and who, despite his horrific deed, finds the freedom to live by his own standard of decency.