The White Tiger: A Novel Read online

  At that moment I looked at the rearview mirror, and I caught Mr. Ashok’s eyes looking at me: and in those master’s eyes, I saw the most unexpected emotion.

  Pity.

  “How much are they paying you, Country-Mouse?”

  “Enough. I’m happy.”

  “Not telling me, eh, Country-Mouse? Good boy. A loyal servant to the end. Liking Delhi?”

  “Yes.”

  “Ha! Don’t lie to me, sister-fucker. I know you’re completely lost here. You must hate it!”

  He tried to put his hand on me, and I squirmed and moved back. He had a skin disease—vitiligo had turned his lips bright pink in the middle of a pitch-black face. I’d better explain about this skin disease, which afflicts so many poor people in our country. I don’t know why you get it, but once you do, your skin changes color from brown to pink. Nine cases out of ten, it’s a few bright pink spots on a boy’s nose or cheeks like a star exploding on his face, or a rash of pink on the forearm like someone burned him with boiling water there, but sometimes a fellow’s whole body has changed color, and as you walk past, you think, An American! You stop to gape; you want to go near and touch. Then you realize it’s just one of ours, with that horrible condition.

  In the case of this driver, since the flash of pink had completely discolored his lips—and nothing else—he looked like a clown at the circus with painted lips. My stomach churned just to see his face. Still, he was the only one of the drivers who was being nice to me, so I stayed close to him.

  We were outside the mall. We—a dozen or so chauffeurs—were waiting for our masters to finish their shopping. We weren’t allowed inside the mall, of course—no one had to tell us these things. We had made a ring by the side of the parking lot, and we were smoking and chatting—every now and then someone would emit a red jet of paan from his mouth.

  On account of the fact that he too was from the Darkness—he had of course guessed my origin at once—the driver with the diseased lips gave me a course on how to survive Delhi and make sure I wasn’t sent back to the Darkness on the top of a bus.

  “The main thing to know about Delhi is that the roads are good, and the people are bad. The police are totally rotten. If they see you without a seat belt, you’ll have to bribe them a hundred rupees. Our masters are not such a great lot, either. When they go for their late-night parties, it’s hell for us. You sleep in the car, and the mosquitoes eat you alive. If they’re malaria mosquitoes it’s all right, you’ll just be raving for a couple of weeks, but if it’s the dengue mosquitoes, then you’re in deep shit, and you’ll die for sure. At two in the morning, he comes back, banging on the windows and shouting for you, and he’s reeking of beer, and he farts in the car all the way back. The cold gets really bad in January. If you know he’s having a late-night party, take along a blanket so you can cover yourself in the car. Keeps the mosquitoes away too. Now, you’ll get bored sitting in the car and waiting for him to come back from his parties—I knew one driver who went nuts from the waiting—so you need something to read. You can read, can’t you? Good. This is the absolutely best thing to read in the car.”

  He gave me a magazine with a catchy cover—a woman in her underwear was lying on a bed, cowering from the shadow of a man.

  MURDER WEEKLY

  RUPEES 4.50

  EXCLUSIVE TRUE STORY:

  “A GOOD BODY NEVER GOES TO WASTE”

  MURDER. RAPE. REVENGE.

  Now I have to tell you about this magazine, Murder Weekly, since our prime minister certainly won’t tell you anything about it. It’s sold in every newsstand in the city, alongside the cheap novels, and it is very popular reading among all the servants of the city—whether they be cooks, children’s maids, or gardeners. Drivers are no different. Every week when this magazine comes out, with a cover image of a woman cowering from her would-be murderer, some driver has bought the magazine and is passing it around to the other drivers.

  Now, don’t panic at this information, Mr. Premier—no beads of chill sweat need form on your yellow brow. Just because drivers and cooks in Delhi are reading Murder Weekly, it doesn’t mean that they are all about to slit their masters’ necks. Of course, they’d like to. Of course, a billion servants are secretly fantasizing about strangling their bosses—and that’s why the government of India publishes this magazine and sells it on the streets for just four and a half rupees so that even the poor can buy it. You see, the murderer in the magazine is so mentally disturbed and sexually deranged that not one reader would want to be like him—and in the end he always gets caught by some honest, hardworking police officer (ha!), or goes mad and hangs himself by a bedsheet after writing a sentimental letter to his mother or primary school teacher, or is chased, beaten, buggered, and garroted by the brother of the woman he has done in. So if your driver is busy flicking through the pages of Murder Weekly, relax. No danger to you. Quite the contrary.

  It’s when your driver starts to read about Gandhi and the Buddha that it’s time to wet your pants, Mr. Jiabao.

  After showing it to me, Vitiligo-Lips closed the magazine and threw it into the circle where the other drivers were sitting; they made a grab for it, like a bunch of dogs rushing after a bone. He yawned and looked at me.

  “What does your boss do for a living, Country-Mouse?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Being loyal or being stupid, Country-Mouse? Where is he from?”

  “Dhanbad.”

  “He’s into coal, then. Probably here to bribe ministers. It’s a rotten business, coal.” He yawned again. “I used to drive a man who sold coal. Bad, bad business. But my current boss is into steel, and he makes the coal men look like saints. Where does he live?”

  I told him the name of our apartment block.

  “My master lives there too! We’re neighbors!”

  He sidled right up to me; without moving away—that would have been rude—I tilted my body as far as I could from his lips.

  “Country-Mouse—does your boss”—he looked around, and dropped his voice to a whisper—“need anything?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Does your boss like foreign wine? I have a friend who works at a foreign embassy as a driver. He’s got contacts there. You know the foreign-wine foreign-embassy scam?”

  I shook my head.

  “The scam is this, Country-Mouse. Foreign wine is very expensive in Delhi, because it’s taxed. But the embassies get it in for free. They’re supposed to drink their wine, but they sell it on the black market. I can get him other stuff too. Does he want golf balls? I’ve got people in the U.S. Consulate who will sell me that. Does he want women? I can get that too. If he’s into boys, no problem.”

  “My master doesn’t do these things. He’s a good man.”

  The diseased lips opened up into a smile. “Aren’t they all?”

  He began whistling some Hindi film song. One of the drivers had begun reading out a story from the magazine; all the others had gone silent. I looked at the mall for a while.

  I turned to the driver with the horrible pink lips and said, “I’ve got a question to ask you.”

  “All right. Ask. You know I’ll do anything for you, Country-Mouse.”

  “This building—the one they call a mall—the one with the posters of women hanging on it—it’s for shopping, right?”

  “Right.”

  “And that”—I pointed to a shiny glass building to our left—“is that also a mall? I don’t see any posters of women hanging on it.”

  “That’s not a mall, Country-Mouse. That’s an office building. They make calls from there to America.”

  “What kind of calls?”

  “I don’t know. My master’s daughter works in one of those buildings too. I drop her off at eight o’clock and she comes back at two in the morning. I know she makes pots and pots of money in that building, because she spends it all day in the malls.” He leaned in close—the pink lips were just centimeters from mine. “Between the two of us, I thi
nk it’s rather odd—girls going into buildings late at night and coming out with so much cash in the morning.”

  He winked at me. “What else, Country-Mouse? You’re a curious fellow.”

  I pointed to one of the girls coming out of the mall.

  “What about her, Country-Mouse? You like her?”

  I blushed. “Tell me,” I said, “don’t the women in cities—like her—have hair in their armpits and on their legs like women in our villages?”

  After half an hour, Mukesh Sir and Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam came out of the mall with shopping bags; I ran ahead to take their bags from them, and put them in the back of the car, and then closed the back and jumped into the driver’s seat of the Honda City and drove them to their new home, which was up on the thirteenth floor of a gigantic apartment building. The name of the apartment building was Buckingham Towers B Block. It was next to another huge apartment building, built by the same housing company, which was Buckingham Towers A Block. Next to that was Windsor Manor A Block. And there were apartment blocks like this, all shiny and new, and with nice big English names, as far as the eye could see. Buckingham Towers B Block was one of the best—it had a nice big lobby, and an elevator in the lobby that all of us took up to the thirteenth floor.

  Personally, I didn’t like the apartment much—the whole place was the size of the kitchen in Dhanbad. There were nice, soft, white sofas inside, and on the wall above the sofas, a giant framed photo of Cuddles and Puddles. The Stork had not allowed them to come with us to the city.

  I couldn’t stand to look at those creatures, even in a photograph, and kept my eyes to the carpet the whole time I was in the room—which had the additional benefit of giving me the look of a pucca servant.

  “Leave the bags anywhere you want, Balram.”

  “No. Put them down next to the table. Put them down exactly there,” the Mongoose said.

  After putting the bags down, I went into the kitchen to see if any cleaning needed to be done—there was a servant just to take care of the apartment, but he was a sloppy fellow, and as I said, they didn’t really have a “driver,” just a servant who drove the car sometimes. I knew without being told I also had to take care of the apartment. Any cleaning there was to be done, I would do, and then come back and wait near the door with folded hands until Mukesh Sir said, “You can go now. And be ready at eight a.m. No hanky-panky just because you’re in the city, understand?”

  Then I went down the elevator, got out of the building, and went down the stairs to the servants’ quarters in the basement.

  I don’t know how buildings are designed in your country, but in India every apartment block, every house, every hotel is built with a servants’ quarters—sometimes at the back, and sometimes (as in the case of Buckingham Towers B Block) underground—a warren of interconnected rooms where all the drivers, cooks, sweepers, maids, and chefs of the apartment block can rest, sleep, and wait. When our masters wanted us, an electric bell began to ring throughout the quarters—we would rush to a board and find a red light flashing next to the number of the apartment whose servant was needed upstairs.

  I walked down two flights of stairs and pushed open the door to the servants’ quarters.

  The moment I got there, the other servants screamed—they yelled—they howled with laughter.

  The vitiligo-lipped driver was sitting with them, howling the hardest. He had told them the question I had asked him. They could not get over their amusement; each one of them had to come up to me, and force his fingers through my hair, and call me a “village idiot,” and slap me on the back too.

  Servants need to abuse other servants. It’s been bred into us, the way Alsatian dogs are bred to attack strangers. We attack anyone who’s familiar.

  There and then I resolved never again to tell anyone in Delhi anything I was thinking. Especially not another servant.

  They kept teasing all evening long, and even at night, when we all went to the dormitory to sleep. Something about my face, my nose, my teeth, I don’t know, it got on their nerves. They even teased me about my uniform. See, in cities the drivers do not wear uniforms. They said I looked like a monkey in that uniform. So I changed into a dirty shirt and trousers like the rest of them, but the teasing, it just went on all night long.

  There was a man who swept the dormitory, and in the morning I asked him, “Isn’t there someplace a man can be alone here?”

  “There’s one empty room on the other side of the quarters, but no one wants it,” he told me. “Who wants to live alone?”

  It was horrible, this room. The floor had not been finished, and there was a cheap whitish plaster on the walls in which you could see the marks of the hand that had applied the plaster. There was a flimsy little bed, barely big enough even for me, and a mosquito net on top of it.

  It would do.

  The second night, I did not sleep in the dormitory—I went to the room. I swept the floor, tied the mosquito net to four nails on the wall, and went to sleep. In the middle of the night, I understood why the mosquito net had been left there. Noises woke me up. The wall was covered with cockroaches, which had come to feed on the minerals or the limestone in the plaster; their chewing made a continuous noise, and their antennae trembled from every spot on the wall. Some of the cockroaches landed on top of the net; from inside, I could see their dark bodies against its white weave. I folded in the fiber of the net and crushed one of them. The other roaches took no notice of this; they kept landing on the net—and getting crushed. Maybe everyone who lives in the city gets to be slow and stupid like this, I thought, and smiled, and went to sleep.

  “Had a good night among the roaches?” they teased when I came to the common toilet.

  Any thought I had of rejoining the dormitory ended there. The room was full of roaches, but it was mine, and no one teased me. One disadvantage was that the electric bell did not penetrate this room—but that was a kind of advantage too, I discovered in time.

  In the morning, after waiting my turn at the common toilet, and then my turn at the common sink, and then my turn at the common bathroom, I went up one flight of stairs, pushed open the door to the parking lot, and walked to the spot where the Honda City was parked. The car had to be wiped with a soft, wet cloth, inside and outside; a stick of incense had to be placed at the small statue of the goddess Lakshmi, goddess of wealth, which sat above the instrument board—this had the double advantage of getting rid of the mosquitoes that had sneaked in at night, and scenting the insides with an aroma of religion. I wiped the seats—nice, plush leather seats; I wiped the instruments; I lifted the leather mats on the floor and slapped the dust out of them. There were three magnetic stickers with images of the mother-goddess Kali on the dashboard—I had put them there, throwing out Ram Persad’s magnetic stickers; I wiped them all. There was also a small fluffy ogre with a red tongue sticking out of its mouth hung by a chain from the rearview mirror. It was supposed to be a lucky charm, and the Stork liked to see it bob up and down as we drove. I punched the ogre in the mouth—then I wiped it clean. Next came the business of checking the box of paper tissues in the back of the car—it was elaborately carved and gilded, like something that a royal family had owned, though it was actually made of cardboard. I made sure there were fresh tissues in the box. Pinky Madam used dozens of tissues each time we went out—she said the pollution in Delhi was so bad. She had left her crushed and crumpled used tissues near the box, and I had to pick them up and throw them out.

  The electric buzzer sounded through the parking lot. A voice over the lobby microphone said, “Driver Balram. Please report to the main entrance of Buckingham B Block with the car.”

  And so it was that I would get into the Honda City, drive up a ramp, and come out to see my first sunlight of the day.

  The brothers were dressed in posh suits—they were standing at the door to the building, chatting and chirruping; when they got in, the Mongoose said, “The Congress Party headquarters, Balram. We went there the other day—I
hope you remember it and don’t get lost again.”

  I’m not going to let you down today, sir.

  Rush hour in Delhi. Cars, scooters, motorbikes, autorickshaws, black taxis, jostling for space on the road. The pollution is so bad that the men on the motorbikes and scooters have a handkerchief wrapped around their faces—each time you stop at a red light, you see a row of men with black glasses and masks on their faces, as if the whole city were out on a bank heist that morning.

  There was a good reason for the face masks; they say the air is so bad in Delhi that it takes ten years out of a man’s life. Of course, those in the cars don’t have to breathe the outside air—it is just nice, cool, clean, air-conditioned air for us. With their tinted windows up, the cars of the rich go like dark eggs down the roads of Delhi. Every now and then an egg will crack open—a woman’s hand, dazzling with gold bangles, stretches out an open window, flings an empty mineral water bottle onto the road—and then the window goes up, and the egg is resealed.

  I was taking my particular dark egg right into the heart of the city. To my left I saw the domes of the President’s House—the place where all the important business of the country is done. When the air pollution is really bad, the building is completely blotted out from the road; but today it shone beautifully.

  In ten minutes, I was at the headquarters of the Congress Party. Now, this is an easy place to find, because there are always two or three giant cardboard billboards with the face of Sonia Gandhi outside.

  I stopped the car, ran out, and opened the door for Mr. Ashok and the Mongoose; as he got out, Mr. Ashok said “We’ll be back in half an hour.”

  This confused me; they never told me in Dhanbad when they’d be back. Of course it meant nothing. They could take two hours to come back, or three. But it was a kind of courtesy that they apparently now had to give me because we were in Delhi.