The White Tiger: A Novel Page 11

  A group of farmers came to the headquarters, and weren’t allowed inside, and shouted something or other, and left. A TV van came to the headquarters and honked; they were let in at once.

  I yawned. I punched the little black ogre in its red mouth, and it bobbed back and forth. I turned my head around, from side to side.

  I looked at the big poster of Sonia Gandhi. She was holding a hand up in the poster, as if waving to me—I waved back.

  I yawned, closed my eyes, and slithered down my seat. With one eye open, I looked at the magnetic sticker of the goddess Kali—who is a very fierce black-skinned goddess, holding a scimitar, and a garland of skulls. I made a note to myself to change that sticker. She looked too much like Granny.

  Two hours later, the brothers returned to the car.

  “We’re going to the President’s House, Balram. Up the hill. You know the place?”

  “Yes, sir, I’ve seen it.”

  Now, I’d already seen most of the famous sights of Delhi—the House of Parliament, the Jantar Mantar, the Qutub—but I’d not yet been to this place—the most important one of all. I drove toward Raisina Hill, and then all the way up the hill, stopping each time a guard put his hand out and checked inside the car, and then stopping right in front of one of the big domed buildings around the President’s House.

  “Wait in the car, Balram. We’ll be back in thirty minutes.”

  For the first half an hour, I was too frightened to get out of the car. I opened the door—I stepped out—I took a look around. Somewhere inside these domes and towers that were all around me, the big men of this country—the prime minister, the president, top ministers and bureaucrats—were discussing things, and writing them out, and stamping papers. Someone was saying—“There, five hundred million rupees for that dam!”—and someone was saying—“Fine, attack Pakistan, then!”

  I wanted to run around shouting: “Balram is here too! Balram is here too!”

  I got back into the car to make sure I didn’t do anything stupid and get arrested for it.

  It was getting dark when the two brothers came out of the building; a fat man walked out with them, and talked to them for a while, outside the car, and then shook their hands and waved goodbye to us.

  Mr. Ashok was dark and sullen when he got in. The Mongoose asked me to drive them back home—“without making any mistakes again, understand?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  They sat in silence, which confused me. If I had just gone into the President’s House, I’d roll down the windows and shout it aloud to everyone on the road!

  “Look at that.”

  “What?”

  “That statue.”

  I looked out the window to see a large bronze statue of a group of men—this is a well-known statue, which you will no doubt see in Delhi: at the head is Mahatma Gandhi, with his walking stick, and behind him follow the people of India, being led from darkness to light.

  The Mongoose squinted at the statue.

  “What about it? I’ve seen it before.”

  “We’re driving past Gandhi, after just having given a bribe to a minister. It’s a fucking joke, isn’t it.”

  “You sound like your wife now,” the Mongoose said. “I don’t like swearing—it’s not part of our traditions here.”

  But Mr. Ashok was too red in the face to keep quiet.

  “It is a fucking joke—our political system—and I’ll keep saying it as long as I like.”

  “Things are complicated in India, Ashok. It’s not like in America. Please reserve your judgment.”

  There was a fierce jam on the road to Gurgaon. Every five minutes the traffic would tremble—we’d move a foot—hope would rise—then the red lights would flash on the cars ahead of me, and we’d be stuck again. Everyone honked. Every now and then, the various horns, each with its own pitch, blended into one continuous wail that sounded like a calf taken from its mother. Fumes filled the air. Wisps of blue exhaust glowed in front of every headlight; the exhaust grew so fat and thick it could not rise or escape, but spread horizontally, sluggish and glossy, making a kind of fog around us. Matches were continually being struck—the drivers of autorickshaws lit cigarettes, adding tobacco pollution to petrol pollution.

  A man driving a buffalo cart had stopped in front of us; a pile of empty car engine oil cans fifteen feet high had been tied by rope to his cart. His poor water buffalo! To carry all that load—while sucking in this air!

  The autorickshaw driver next to me began to cough violently—he turned to the side and spat, three times in a row. Some of the spit flecked the side of the Honda City. I glared—I raised my fist. He cringed, and namasted me in apology.

  “It’s like we’re in a concert of spitting!” Mr. Ashok said, looking at the autorickshaw driver.

  Well, if you were out there breathing that acid air, you’d be spitting like him too, I thought.

  The cars moved again—we gained three feet—then the red lights flashed and everything stopped again.

  “In Beijing apparently they’ve got a dozen ring roads. Here we have one. No wonder we keep getting jams. Nothing is planned. How will we ever catch up with the Chinese?”

  (By the way, Mr. Jiabao—a dozen ring roads? Wow.)

  Dim streetlights were glowing down onto the pavement on either side of the traffic; and in that orange-hued half-light, I could see multitudes of small, thin, grimy people squatting, waiting for a bus to take them somewhere, or with nowhere to go and about to unfurl a mattress and sleep right there. These poor bastards had come from the darkness to Delhi to find some light—but they were still in the darkness. Hundreds of them, there seemed to be, on either side of the traffic, and their life was entirely unaffected by the jam. Were they even aware that there was a jam? We were like two separate cities—inside and outside the dark egg. I knew I was in the right city. But my father, if he were alive, would be sitting on that pavement, cooking some rice gruel for dinner, and getting ready to lie down and sleep under a streetlamp, and I couldn’t stop thinking of that and recognizing his features in some beggar out there. So I was in some way out of the car too, even while I was driving it.

  After an hour of thrashing through the traffic, we got home at last to Buckingham B Block. But the torture wasn’t over.

  As he was getting out of the car, the Mongoose tapped his pockets, looked confused for a moment, and said, “I’ve lost a rupee.”

  He snapped his fingers at me.

  “Get down on your knees. Look for it on the floor of the car.”

  I got down on my knees. I sniffed in between the mats like a dog, all in search of that one rupee.

  “What do you mean, it’s not there? Don’t think you can steal from us just because you’re in the city. I want that rupee.”

  “We’ve just paid half a million rupees in a bribe, Mukesh, and now we’re screwing this man over for a single rupee. Let’s go up and have a scotch.”

  “That’s how you corrupt servants. It starts with one rupee. Don’t bring your American ways here.”

  Where that rupee coin went remains a mystery to me to this day, Mr. Premier. Finally, I took a rupee coin out of my shirt pocket, dropped it on the floor of the car, picked it up, and gave it to the Mongoose.

  “Here it is, sir. Forgive me for taking so long to find it!”

  There was a childish delight on his dark master’s face. He put the rupee coin in his hand and sucked his teeth, as if it were the best thing that had happened to him all day.

  I took the elevator up with the brothers, to see if any work was to be done in the apartment.

  Pinky Madam was on the sofa watching TV; as soon as we got in, she said, “I’ve eaten already,” turned the TV off, and went into another room. The Mongoose said he didn’t want dinner, so Mr. Ashok would have to eat alone at the dinner table. He asked me to heat some of the vegetables in the fridge for him, and I went into the kitchen to do so.

  Casting a quick look back as I opened the fridge door, I saw that he was on t
he verge of tears.

  When you’re the driver, you never see the whole picture. Just flashes, glimpses, bits of conversation—and then, just when the masters are coming to the crucial part of their talk—it always happens.

  Some moron in a white jeep almost hits you while trying to overtake a car on the wrong side of the road. You swerve to the side, glare at the moron, curse him (silently)—and by the time you’re eavesdropping again, the conversation in the backseat has moved on…and you never know how that sentence ended.

  I knew something was wrong, but I hadn’t realized how bad the situation had become until the morning Mr. Ashok said to me, “Today you’ll drop Mukesh Sir at the railway station, Balram.”

  “Yes, sir.” I hesitated. I wanted to ask, Just him?

  Did that mean he was going back for good? Did that mean Pinky Madam had finally got rid of him with her door-slamming and tart remarks?

  At six o’clock, I waited with the car outside the entranceway. I drove the brothers to the railway station. Pinky Madam did not come along.

  I carried the Mongoose’s bags to the right carriage of the train, then went to a stall and bought a dosa, wrapped in paper, for him. That was what he always liked to eat on the train. But I unwrapped the dosa and removed the potatoes, flinging them onto the rail tracks, because potatoes made him fart, and he didn’t like that. A servant gets to know his master’s intestinal tract from end to end—from lips to anus.

  The Mongoose told me, “Wait. I have instructions for you.”

  I squatted in a corner of the railway carriage.

  “Balram, you’re not in the Darkness any longer.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “There is a law in Delhi.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “You know those bronze statues of Gandhi and Nehru that are everywhere? The police have put cameras inside their eyes to watch for the cars. They see everything you do, understand that?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  Then he frowned, as if wondering what else to say. He said, “The air conditioner should be turned off when you are on your own.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Music should not be played when you are on your own.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “At the end of each day you must give us a reading of the meter to make sure you haven’t been driving the car on your own.”

  “Yes, sir.”

  The Mongoose turned to Mr. Ashok and touched him on the forearm. “Take some interest in this, Ashok Brother, you’ll have to check up on the driver when I’m gone.”

  But Mr. Ashok was playing with his cell phone. He put it down and said, “The driver’s honest. He’s from Laxmangarh. I saw his family when I went there.” Then he went back to his cell phone.

  “Don’t talk like that. Don’t make a joke of what I’m saying,” the Mongoose said.

  But he was paying no attention to his brother—he kept punching the buttons on his cell phone: “One minute, one minute, I’m talking to a friend in New York.”

  Drivers like to say that some men are first-gear types. Mr. Ashok was a classic first-gear man. He liked to start things, but nothing held his attention for long.

  Looking at him, I made two discoveries, almost simultaneously. Each filled me with a sense of wonder. Firstly, you could “talk” on a cell phone—to someone in New York—just by punching on its buttons. The wonders of modern science never cease to amaze me!

  Secondly, I realized that this tall, broad-shouldered, handsome, foreign-educated man, who would be my only master in a few minutes, when the long whistle blew and this train headed off toward Dhanbad, was weak, helpless, absentminded, and completely unprotected by the usual instincts that run in the blood of a landlord.

  If you were back in Laxmangarh, we would have called you the Lamb.

  “Why are you grinning like a donkey?” the Mongoose snapped at me, and I almost fell over apologizing to him.

  That evening, at eight o’clock, Mr. Ashok sent a message to me through another servant: “Be ready in half an hour, Balram. Pinky Madam and I will be going out.”

  And the two of them did come down, about two and three-quarters of an hour later.

  The moment the Mongoose left, I swear, the skirts became even shorter.

  When she sat in the back, I could see half her boobs hanging out of her clothes each time I had to look in the rearview mirror.

  This put me in a very bad situation, sir. For one thing, my beak was aroused, which is natural in a healthy young man like me. On the other hand, as you know, master and mistress are like father and mother to you, so how can you get excited by the mistress?

  I simply avoided looking at the rearview mirror. If there was a crash, it wouldn’t be my fault.

  Mr. Premier, maybe when you have been driving, in the thick traffic, you have stopped your car and lowered your window; and then you have felt the hot, panting breath of the exhaust pipe of a truck next to you. Now be aware, Mr. Premier, that there is a hot panting diesel engine just in front of your own nose.

  Me.

  Each time she came in with that low black dress, my beak got big. I hated her for wearing that dress; but I hated my beak even more for what it was doing.

  At the end of the month, I went up to the apartment. He was sitting there, alone, on the couch beneath the framed photo of the two Pomeranians.

  “Sir?”

  “Hm. What’s up, Balram?”

  “It’s been a month.”

  “So?”

  “Sir…my wages.”

  “Ah, yes. Three thousand, right?” He whipped out his wallet—it was fat with notes—and flicked out three notes onto the table. I picked them up and bowed. Something of what his brother had been saying must have got to him, because he said, “You’re sending some of it home, aren’t you?”

  “All of it, sir. Just what I need to eat and drink here—the rest goes home.”

  “Good, Balram. Good. Family is a good thing.”

  At ten o’clock that night I walked down to the market just around the corner from Buckingham Towers B Block. It was the last shop in the market; on a billboard above it, huge black letters in Hindi said:

  “ACTION” ENGLISH LIQUOR SHOP

  INDIAN-MADE FOREIGN LIQUOR SOLD HERE

  It was the usual civil war that you find in a liquor shop in the evenings: men pushing and straining at the counter with their hands outstretched and yelling at the top of their voices. The boys behind the counter couldn’t hear a word of what was being said in that din, and kept getting orders mixed up, and that led to more yelling and fighting. I pushed through the crowd—got to the counter, banged my fist, and yelled, “Whiskey! The cheapest kind! Immediate service—or someone will get hurt, I swear!”

  It took me fifteen minutes to get a bottle. I stuffed it down my trousers, for there was nowhere else to hide it, and went back to Buckingham.

  “Balram. You took your time.”

  “Forgive me, madam.”

  “You look ill, Balram. Are you all right?”

  “Yes, madam. I have a headache. I didn’t sleep well last night.”

  “Now make some tea. I hope you can cook better than you can drive?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “I hear you’re a Halwai, your family are cooks. Do you know some special traditional type of ginger tea?”

  “Yes, madam.”

  “Then make it.”

  I had no idea what Pinky Madam wanted, but at least her boobs were covered—that was a relief.

  I got the teakettle ready and began making tea. I had just got the water boiling when the kitchen filled up with perfume. She was watching from the threshold.

  My head was still spinning from last night’s whiskey. I had been chewing aniseed all morning so no one would notice the stench of booze on my breath, but I was still worried, so I turned away from her as I washed a chunk of ginger under the tap.

  “What are you doing?” she shouted.

  “Washing ginger, madam.”


  “That’s with your right hand. What’s your left hand doing?”

  “Madam?”

  I looked down.

  “Stop scratching your groin with your left hand!”

  “Don’t be angry, madam. I’ll stop.”

  But it was no use. She would not stop shouting:

  “You’re so filthy! Look at you, look at your teeth, look at your clothes! There’s red paan all over your teeth, and there are red spots on your shirt. It’s disgusting! Get out—clean up the mess you’ve made in the kitchen and get out.”

  I put the piece of ginger back in the fridge, turned off the boiling water, and went downstairs.

  I got in front of the common mirror and opened my mouth. The teeth were red, blackened, rotting from paan. I washed my mouth out, but the lips were still red.

  She was right. The paan—which I’d chewed for years, like my father and like Kishan and everyone else I knew—was discoloring my teeth and corroding my gums.

  The next evening, Mr. Ashok and Pinky Madam came down to the entranceway fighting, got into the car fighting, and kept fighting as I drove the Honda City from Buckingham Towers B Block onto the main road.

  “Going to the mall, sir?” I asked, the moment they were quiet.

  Pinky Madam let out a short, high laugh.

  I expected such things from her, but not from him—yet he joined in too.

  “It’s not maal, it’s a mall,” he said. “Say it again.”

  I kept saying “maal,” and they kept asking me to repeat it, and then giggled hysterically each time I did so. By the end they were holding hands again. So some good came out of my humiliation—I was glad for that, at least.

  They got out of the car, slammed the door, and went into the mall; a guard saluted as they came close, then the glass doors opened by themselves and swallowed the two of them in.

  I did not get out of the car: it helped me concentrate my mind better if I was here. I closed my eyes.

  Moool.

  No, that wasn’t it.

  Mowll.

  Malla.

  “Country-Mouse! Get out of the car and come here!”