The White Tiger: A Novel Read online

  But let us go on, we don’t have all night. I’d better explain this bit right now.

  Balram Halwai alias MUNNA…

  See, my first day in school, the teacher made all the boys line up and come to his desk so he could put our names down in his register. When I told him what my name was, he gaped at me:

  “Munna? That’s not a real name.”

  He was right: it just means “boy.”

  “That’s all I’ve got, sir,” I said.

  It was true. I’d never been given a name.

  “Didn’t your mother name you?”

  “She’s very ill, sir. She lies in bed and spews blood. She’s got no time to name me.”

  “And your father?”

  “He’s a rickshaw-puller, sir. He’s got no time to name me.”

  “Don’t you have a granny? Aunts? Uncles?”

  “They’ve got no time either.”

  The teacher turned aside and spat—a jet of red paan splashed the ground of the classroom. He licked his lips.

  “Well, it’s up to me, then, isn’t it?” He passed his hand through his hair and said, “We’ll call you…Ram. Wait—don’t we have a Ram in this class? I don’t want any confusion. It’ll be Balram. You know who Balram was, don’t you?”

  “No, sir.”

  “He was the sidekick of the god Krishna. Know what my name is?”

  “No, sir.”

  He laughed. “Krishna.”

  I came home that day and told my father that the schoolteacher had given me a new name. He shrugged. “If it’s what he wants, then we’ll call you that.”

  So I was Balram from then on. Later on, of course, I picked up a third name. But we’ll get to that.

  Now, what kind of place is it where people forget to name their children? Referring back to the poster:

  The suspect comes from the village of Laxmangarh, in the…

  Like all good Bangalore stories, mine begins far away from Bangalore. You see, I am in the Light now, but I was born and raised in Darkness.

  But this is not a time of day I talk about, Mr. Premier!

  I am talking of a place in India, at least a third of the country, a fertile place, full of rice fields and wheat fields and ponds in the middle of those fields choked with lotuses and water lilies, and water buffaloes wading through the ponds and chewing on the lotuses and lilies. Those who live in this place call it the Darkness. Please understand, Your Excellency, that India is two countries in one: an India of Light, and an India of Darkness. The ocean brings light to my country. Every place on the map of India near the ocean is well off. But the river brings darkness to India—the black river.

  Which black river am I talking of—which river of Death, whose banks are full of rich, dark, sticky mud whose grip traps everything that is planted in it, suffocating and choking and stunting it?

  Why, I am talking of Mother Ganga, daughter of the Vedas, river of illumination, protector of us all, breaker of the chain of birth and rebirth. Everywhere this river flows, that area is the Darkness.

  One fact about India is that you can take almost anything you hear about the country from the prime minister and turn it upside down and then you will have the truth about that thing. Now, you have heard the Ganga called the river of emancipation, and hundreds of American tourists come each year to take photographs of naked sadhus at Hardwar or Benaras, and our prime minister will no doubt describe it that way to you, and urge you to take a dip in it.

  No!—Mr. Jiabao, I urge you not to dip in the Ganga, unless you want your mouth full of feces, straw, soggy parts of human bodies, buffalo carrion, and seven different kinds of industrial acids.

  I know all about the Ganga, sir—when I was six or seven or eight years old (no one in my village knows his exact age), I went to the holiest spot on the banks of the Ganga—the city of Benaras. I remember going down the steps of a downhill road in the holy city of Benaras, at the rear of a funeral procession carrying my mother’s body to the Ganga.

  Kusum, my granny, was leading the procession. Sly old Kusum! She had this habit of rubbing her forearms hard when she felt happy, as if it were a piece of ginger she was grating to release grins from. Her teeth were all gone, but this only made her grin more cunning. She had grinned her way into control of the house; every son and daughter-in-law lived in fear of her.

  My father and Kishan, my brother, stood behind her, to bear the front end of the cane bed which bore the corpse; my uncles, who are Munnu, Jayram, Divyram, and Umesh, stood behind, holding up the other end. My mother’s body had been wrapped from head to toe in a saffron silk cloth, which was covered in rose petals and jasmine garlands. I don’t think she had ever had such a fine thing to wear in her life. (Her death was so grand that I knew, all at once, that her life must have been miserable. My family was guilty about something.) My aunts—Rabri, Shalini, Malini, Luttu, Jaydevi, and Ruchi—kept turning around and clapping their hands for me to catch up to them. I remember swinging my hands and singing, “Shiva’s name is the truth!”

  We walked past temple after temple, praying to god after god, and then went in a single file between a red temple devoted to Hanuman and an open gymnasium where three body builders heaved rusted weights over their heads. I smelled the river before I saw it: a stench of decaying flesh rising from my right. I sang louder: “…the only truth!”

  Then there was a gigantic noise: firewood being split. A wooden platform had been built by the edge of the ghat, just above the water; logs were piled up on the platform, and men with axes were smashing the logs. Chunks of wood were being built into funeral pyres on the steps of the ghat that went down into the water; four bodies were burning on the ghat steps when we got there. We waited our turn.

  In the distance, an island of white sand glistened in the sunlight, and boats full of people were heading to that island. I wondered if my mother’s soul had flown there, to that shining place in the river.

  I have mentioned that my mother’s body was wrapped in a silk cloth. This cloth was now pulled over her face; and logs of wood, as many as we could pay for, were piled on top of the body. Then the priest set my mother on fire.

  “She was a good, quiet girl the day she came to our home,” Kusum said, as she put a hand on my face. “I was not the one who wanted any fighting.”

  I shook her hand off my face. I watched my mother.

  As the fire ate away the silk, a pale foot jerked out, like a living thing; the toes, which were melting in the heat, began to curl up, offering resistance to what was being done to them. Kusum shoved the foot into the fire, but it would not burn. My heart began to race. My mother wasn’t going to let them destroy her.

  Underneath the platform with the piled-up fire logs, there was a giant oozing mound of black mud where the river washed into the shore. The mound was littered with ribbons of jasmine, rose petals, bits of satin, charred bones; a pale-skinned dog was crawling and sniffing through the petals and satin and charred bones.

  I looked at the ooze, and I looked at my mother’s flexed foot.

  This mud was holding her back: this big, swelling mound of black ooze. She was trying to fight the black mud; her toes were flexed and resisting; but the mud was sucking her in, sucking her in. It was so thick, and more of it was being created every moment as the river washed into the ghat. Soon she would become part of the black mound and the pale-skinned dog would start licking her.

  And then I understood: this was the real god of Benaras—this black mud of the Ganga into which everything died, and decomposed, and was reborn from, and died into again. The same would happen to me when I died and they brought me here. Nothing would get liberated here.

  I stopped breathing.

  This was the first time in my life I fainted.

  I haven’t been back to see the Ganga since then: I’m leaving that river for the American tourists!

  …comes from the village of Laxmangarh, in the district of Gaya.

  This is a famous district—world-famous. Your nat
ion’s history has been shaped by my district, Mr. Jiabao. Surely you’ve heard of Bodh Gaya—the town where the Lord Buddha sat under a tree and found his enlightenment and started Buddhism, which then spread to the whole world, including China—and where is it, but right here in my home district! Just a few miles from Laxmangarh!

  I wonder if the Buddha walked through Laxmangarh—some people say he did. My own feeling is that he ran through it—as fast as he could—and got to the other side—and never looked back!

  There is a small branch of the Ganga that flows just outside Laxmangarh; boats come down from the world outside, bringing supplies every Monday. There is one street in the village; a bright strip of sewage splits it into two. On either side of the ooze, a market: three more or less identical shops selling more or less identically adulterated and stale items of rice, cooking oil, kerosene, biscuits, cigarettes, and jaggery. At the end of the market is a tall, whitewashed, conelike tower, with black intertwining snakes painted on all its sides—the temple. Inside, you will find an image of a saffron-colored creature, half man half monkey: this is Hanuman, everyone’s favorite god in the Darkness. Do you know about Hanuman, sir? He was the faithful servant of the god Rama, and we worship him in our temples because he is a shining example of how to serve your masters with absolute fidelity, love, and devotion.

  These are the kinds of gods they have foisted on us, Mr. Jiabao. Understand, now, how hard it is for a man to win his freedom in India.

  So much for the place. Now for the people. Your Excellency, I am proud to inform you that Laxmangarh is your typical Indian village paradise, adequately supplied with electricity, running water, and working telephones; and that the children of my village, raised on a nutritious diet of meat, eggs, vegetables, and lentils, will be found, when examined with tape measure and scales, to match up to the minimum height and weight standards set by the United Nations and other organizations whose treaties our prime minister has signed and whose forums he so regularly and pompously attends.

  Ha!

  Electricity poles—defunct.

  Water tap—broken.

  Children—too lean and short for their age, and with oversized heads from which vivid eyes shine, like the guilty conscience of the government of India.

  Yes, a typical Indian village paradise, Mr. Jiabao. One day I’ll have to come to China and see if your village paradises are any better.

  Down the middle of the main road, families of hogs are sniffing through sewage—the upper body of each animal is dry, with long hairs that are matted together into spines; the lower half of the body is peat-black and glistening from sewage. Vivid red and brown flashes of feather—roosters fly up and down the roofs of the house. Past the hogs and roosters, you’ll get to my house—if it still exists.

  At the doorway to my house, you’ll see the most important member of my family.

  The water buffalo.

  She was the fattest thing in our family; this was true in every house in the village. All day long, the women fed her and fed her fresh grass; feeding her was the main thing in their lives. All their hopes were concentrated in her fatness, sir. If she gave enough milk, the women could sell some of it, and there might be a little more money at the end of the day. She was a fat, glossy-skinned creature, with a vein the size of a boy’s penis sticking out over her hairy snout, and long thick pearly spittle suspended from the edge of her mouth; she sat all day in her own stupendous crap. She was the dictator of our house!

  Once you walk into the house, you will see—if any of them are still living, after what I did—the women. Working in the courtyard. My aunts and cousins and Kusum, my granny. One of them preparing the meal for the buffalo; one winnowing rice; one squatting down, looking through the scalp of another woman, squeezing the ticks to death between her fingers. Every now and then they stop their work, because it is time to fight. This means throwing metal vessels at one another, or pulling each other’s hair, and then making up, by putting kisses on their palms and pressing them to the others’ cheeks. At night they sleep together, their legs falling one over the other, like one creature, a millipede.

  Men and boys sleep in another corner of the house.

  Early morning. The roosters are going mad throughout the village. A hand stirs me awake…I shake my brother Kishan’s legs off my tummy, move my cousin Pappu’s palm out of my hair, and extricate myself from the sleepers.

  “Come, Munna.”

  My father, calling for me from the door of the house.

  I run behind him. We go out of the house and untie the water buffalo from her post. We are taking her for her morning bath—all the way to the pond beneath the Black Fort.

  The Black Fort stands on the crest of a hill overlooking the village. People who have been to other countries have told me that this fort is as beautiful as anything seen in Europe. The Turks, or the Afghans, or the English, or whichever foreigners were then ruling India, must have built the fort centuries ago.

  (For this land, India, has never been free. First the Muslims, then the British bossed us around. In 1947 the British left, but only a moron would think that we became free then.)

  Now the foreigners have long abandoned the Black Fort, and a tribe of monkeys occupy it. No one else goes up, except for a goatherd taking his flock to graze there.

  At sunrise, the pond around the base of the fort glows. Boulders from the walls of the fort have rolled down the hill and tumbled into the pond, where they lie, moist and half submerged in the muddy water, like the snoozing hippopotamuses that I would see, many years later, at the National Zoo at New Delhi. Lotuses and lilies float all over the pond, the water sparkles like silver, and the water buffalo wades, chewing on the leaves of the lilies, and setting off ripples that spread in big V’s from her snout. The sun rises over the buffalo, and over my father, and over me, and over my world.

  Sometimes, would you believe, I almost miss that place.

  Now, back to the poster—

  The suspect was last seen wearing blue checkered polyester shirt, orange polyester trousers, maroon color sandals…

  “Maroon color” sandals—ugh. Only a policeman could have made up a detail like that. I flatly deny it.

  “Blue checkered polyester shirt, orange polyester trousers”…er, well, I’d like to deny those too, but unfortunately they’re correct. Those are the kinds of clothes, sir, that would appeal to a servant’s eye. And I was still a servant on the morning of the day this poster was made. (By the evening I was free—and wearing different clothes!)

  Now, there is one phrase in this poster that does annoy me—let me go back to it for a moment and fix it:

  …son of Vikram Halwai rickshaw-puller…

  Mr. Vikram Halwai, rickshaw-puller—thank you! My father was a poor man, but he was a man of honor and courage. I wouldn’t be here, under this chandelier, if not for his guidance.

  In the afternoons, I went from my school to the tea shop to see him. This tea shop was the central point of our village; the bus from Gaya stopped there at noon every day (never late by more than an hour or two) and the policemen would park their jeep here when they came to bugger someone in the village. A little before sunset, a man circled around the tea shop three times, ringing his bell loudly. A stiff cardboard-backed poster for a pornographic film was tied to the back of his cycle—what traditional Indian village is complete without its blue-movie theater, sir? A cinema across the river showed such films every night; two-and-a-half-hour fantasias with names like He Was a True Man, or We Opened Her Diary, or The Uncle Did It, featuring golden-haired women from America or lonely ladies from Hong Kong—or so I’m guessing, Mr. Premier, since it’s not like I ever joined the other young men and went to see one of these films!

  The rickshaw-pullers parked their vehicles in a line outside the tea shop, waiting for the bus to disgorge its passengers.

  They were not allowed to sit on the plastic chairs put out for the customers; they had to crouch near the back, in that hunched-over, squatting p
osture common to servants in every part of India. My father never crouched—I remember that. He preferred to stand, no matter how long he had to wait and how uncomfortable it got for him. I would find him shirtless, usually alone, drinking tea and thinking.

  Then there would be the honk of a car.

  The hogs and stray dogs near the tea shop would scatter, and the smell of dust, and sand, and hog shit would blow into the shop. A white Ambassador car had stopped outside. My father put down his teacup and went out.

  The door of the Ambassador opened: a man got out with a notebook. The regular customers of the tea shop could go on eating, but my father and the others gathered in a line.

  The man with the notebook was not the Buffalo; he was the assistant.

  There was another fellow inside the Ambassador; a stout one with a bald, brown, dimpled head, a serene expression on his face, and a shotgun on his lap.

  He was the Buffalo.

  The Buffalo was one of the landlords in Laxmangarh. There were three others, and each had got his name from the peculiarities of appetite that had been detected in him.

  The Stork was a fat man with a fat mustache, thick and curved and pointy at the tips. He owned the river that flowed outside the village, and he took a cut of every catch of fish caught by every fisherman in the river, and a toll from every boatman who crossed the river to come to our village.

  His brother was called the Wild Boar. This fellow owned all the good agricultural land around Laxmangarh. If you wanted to work on those lands, you had to bow down to his feet, and touch the dust under his slippers, and agree to swallow his day wages. When he passed by women, his car would stop; the windows would roll down to reveal his grin; two of his teeth, on either side of his nose, were long and curved, like little tusks.

  The Raven owned the worst land, which was the dry, rocky hillside around the fort, and took a cut from the goatherds who went up there to graze with their flocks. If they didn’t have their money, he liked to dip his beak into their backsides, so they called him the Raven.