Indian writing in the 1980s and "90s was dominated by exuberance, and the novel. Think of the freewheeling language and plots of Salman Rushdie's "Midnight's Children" or Arundhati Roy's "God of Small Things." Writing of a very different sort is flourishing today. Magical realism has been supplanted by gritty, immersive reporting on poverty, sex trafficking and farmer suicides. Think of "The Beautiful and the Damned," by Siddhartha Deb, and Sonia Faleiro's "Beautiful Thing: Inside the Secret World of Bombay's Dance Bars." Faleiro, who reviews Aman Sethi's book, "A Free Man," this week, has always been compelled to write about marginalized communities. Her father entered national politics when she was very young, she told us in a recent e-mail: "I saw up close how people with power are treated in India. It made me very uncomfortable, despite benefiting from it. I'm sure it made my parents uncomfortable too. That early experience of privilege is pretty much why I write about the poor. If I can make their voices heard, I will. If there's one misconception she tries to dismantle, it's that the poor are defined by their poverty. "People seem to believe the poor are one-dimensional," she said, "that they don't lead lives as rounded and complex as those who are better off, as buoyed by dreams, as rich with plans, ideas and humor. Poverty is a wretched thing, and being poor has enormous implications on every aspect of a person's life, but there's much more to the average poor man or woman in India than just their poverty.